"Yet for all this, as May demonstrates, the pill has been a tremendous boon for women, transforming sex and reproduction so thoroughly that it's hard for many to imagine what life was like before it. In the 1960s and 1970s, Black Power leaders denounced the pill as a tool of black genocide--rhetoric often echoed by today's anti-abortion movement. But female civil-rights activists saw things very differently. 'Although they were aware that some white proponents of the birth control pill and other forms of contraception hoped to reduce the numbers of black babies, they wanted the pill and saw it as essential to their reproductive freedom,' May writes. For most women, the intentions behind the pill matter much less than its practical effectiveness."
Michelle Goldberg in The American Prospect reviews Elaine Tyler May's America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation.
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