(1958)
GOD BLESS THE PILL
In 1958, the contraceptive diaphragm became the center of a religious controversy after New York City public hospitals refused to provide birth control to a patient. Perhaps surprisingly, Protestant and Jewish clergy joined physicians and activists in a public campaign for contraceptive access. Samira K. Mehta uses the "Diaphragm Debates” to recover a forgotten moment in the history of religious freedom and family life during the decade before Griswold v. Connecticut.
On July 16, 1958, Dr. Louis Hellman, a Jewish physician at Kings County Hospital in New York City, wanted to fit his Protestant patient, an unnamed woman who was married, diabetic, and the mother of three, for a diaphragm. There had long been an unwritten policy that the city’s public hospitals did not prescribe or stock contraception, for fear of angering the city’s prominent Catholic leaders because the Catholic Church was morally opposed to birth control. But in the late 1950s, public opinion about the issue was shifting.
Hospital commissioner Morris Jacobs had previously appeared willing to consider letting doctors at least mention birth control, but his willingness was soon tested and shown lacking. Dr. Hellman had tried to do everything the hospital asked, but he was still denied permission to treat his patient. So Hellman called The New York Times, and the story escalated the months-long media phenomenon that I have chosen to call the New York City Diaphragm Debates.
If his patient could not receive a “contraceptive device,” said Dr. Hellman, he would need to sterilize her, as “another pregnancy would endanger her life and the life of the child.” But Hellman’s patient did not want to be sterilized because she held out hope that improvements in the treatment of diabetes might eventually make it possible for her to have a fourth child. Hellman and his patient became a test case that sparked a new campaign to make diaphragms available in the public hospitals that served the city’s low-income women. And religion was at the spearhead of that campaign.
We tend to assume that religious people are opposed to contraception. In July 2020, the Supreme Court, in the Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania, decided that employers with “sincerely held religious or moral objections” to birth control are not obligated to cover it for employees. This and other rulings have come to represent what the larger Christian community might seem to want in general: to ban contraception, outright, for everyone. Yet history tells us that religious voices have often championed birth control.
Take the landmark 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court verdict, which granted married couples the constitutional right to use contraception. In the majority opinion, the court wrote, “Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.” Not only was marriage intimate to the degree of being sacred, it was so private that it was beyond the reach of the Court, “heterosexual act of intercourse in marital bedrooms as protected by a zone of privacy into which courts must not peer and with which they must not interfere,” which was to say that the court could not forbid the use of birth control. Because marriage was private, it was sacred; and because marriage was sacred, married people should be able to use birth control. Griswold capped a decade-long fight for legalization of birth control from 1956 to 1966 in which religious people—clergy and laity, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—reshaped American debates about contraception.
This fight happened at a time when Americans were developing new ways of thinking about these three American religious traditions and the relationships among them. For instance, although the term “Judeo-Christian” had first appeared in the 1890s, it was in the middle of the century that the term began to be widely used. The concept of “Judeo-Christian” values gained prominence in the 1930s and 1940s when the US government asked the National Council of Christians and Jews to run educational campaigns promoting them to the nation. By emphasizing the shared scriptures and theoretically shared values among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, governmental and religious leaders hoped to provide the country with a unifying moral framework that would withstand challenges from both fascism and communism.
Today, the term Judeo-Christan is out of favor because knowledgeable Christians and Jews argue that it collapses two very different collections of religions into one. But at the time, it held great promise. During World War II, American leaders emphasized democratic values in contrast with those of our fascist enemies; and those values included tolerance of religious difference. In this way the war changed the status of Jews and Catholics in American society. Rather than being seen as immigrant religions, they came to be seen as “valid” American religions, a change that Jewish sociologist Will Herberg both documented and celebrated in his 1955 book Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Ever since Europeans had arrived in the Americas centuries earlier, Jews and Catholics had navigated their positions vis-à-vis Protestants. People experimented with what it meant to be part of a “Judeo-Christian” nation, which positioned Judaism and Catholicism as valid American religions with equal voices in the debate.
“Intercourse in marital bedrooms [is] protected by
a zone of privacy into which courts must not peer and with which they must not interfere.”
As both Jews and Catholics learned, however, that equality often required seamlessly blending into an American culture that remained dominated by Protestants. To do so, they had to downplay their particular moral viewpoints. Where birth control was concerned, that was easier for Jews than it was for Catholics.
In July 1958, Jewish medical authorities were quick to weigh in on the New York City Diaphragm Debate. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, chairman of the medical committee of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told the Times that he was “shocked and disgusted” by Commissioner Jacobs’s refusal to authorize the diaphragm because it “dooms patients at the city hospitals to inferior… preventative medicine.”
Jewish religious authorities also joined the public debate. The Orthodox Rabbinical Alliance explained to the press that Judaism permitted contraception only when it was practiced by a married woman, for health reasons, and after consultation with both medical and religious authorities. On August 23, 1958, Rabbi Edward F. Klein of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue told the New York Herald Tribune that Dr. Jacobs’s ban was “an infringement on Civil Rights—the civil rights of the patient, the civil rights of the Protestant and Jewish communities.” The fact that Jewish law explicitly permitted forms of contraception meant that a policy that was (or was perceived to be) rooted in Catholic teaching explicitly favored one religion over another. It was particularly worrisome to feel that the tenets of one faith would drive public policy, even if that other faith was Catholicism, which was also a minority tradition.
“Nice weasling on the pill!”
signed by Micha Richter
courtesy of the Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division
Carolyn and Erwin Swann Collection (SWANN no. 642)
Years later, Guttmacher would write that American Jews had long supported and approved of contraception, and had done so based on the body of Jewish law known as the Talmud. In a 1967 issue of Judaism magazine, he argued that even the most Orthodox of Jews find birth control acceptable in certain situations. For example, Guttmacher argued that celibacy was considered unacceptable in Jewish marriage, which meant that contraception was sometimes necessary, such as when childbirth could damage a woman’s health, or when she was nursing and pregnancy could damage her milk supply.
Guttmacher felt the Talmud was still relevant in the present. When he was practicing medicine in Baltimore, one of his patients was married to a prominent Orthodox rabbi and had five children. Because of a medical condition, an additional pregnancy would risk her life, so they were able to gain permission from other Orthodox rabbis for her to use contraception. In this way even the most traditional forms of Judaism countenanced using birth control to aid in maternal health. A year later, Rabbi David Feldman published Birth Control in Jewish Law: Marital Relations, Contraception and Abortion as Set Forth in the Classic Texts of Jewish Law, which claimed that Judaism in general sees marital sex as good, some forms of birth control and abortion are acceptable in Jewish law, and Jewish teaching is relevant to modern life. Indeed, such teaching might be more in line with the late-1960s zeitgeist than was Christianity.
Back in 1958, during the NYC Diaphragm Debates, Jewish leaders opposed restrictions on birth control, which they saw as rooted in Catholicism. But they did not base these arguments on the Talmud. Judaism was a minority religion, and Jews did not think that the broader community would, or should, shape their decisions based on the teachings of Judaism. Instead, they argued that in a nation with the separation of church and state, no one religion had the right to deny US citizens cutting-edge medical care. During the Diaphragm Debates, Protestant leaders also supported access to birth control. As the majority faith, however, they were unafraid to do so on moral terms. Indeed, they worked to shift the national conversation to a moral one.
Cover of Christians and the Crisis in Sex Morality
Elizabeth and William Genne
Courtesy of the National Board of the YMCA
Soon after Dr. Hellman’s test case, the chairman of the Department of Christian Social Relations for the Protestant Council of the City of New York telegraphed hospital commissioner Jacobs requesting an immediate meeting to express his disapproval. Jacobs declined. That Sunday, the Reverend Dr. Hampton Adams of the Park Avenue Christian Church used his sermon to declare that “the health, economic stability, morality, and intelligence of future generations of mankind require that methods of birth control be known and the practice sanctioned.”
This was not a new idea for Protestants. Back in 1931, the United States Federal Council of Churches declared “the careful and restrained use of contraceptives by married people” to be “valid and moral” if used to “safeguard the health of the mother and child” and protect “the livelihood and stability of the family.” The same year, the Congregational Christian General Council announced its support of “voluntary child bearing” to “safeguard the well-being of family and society.” In 1954 the Augustana Evangelical Lutheran Churches in America joined this endorsement. At that year’s Planned Parenthood Association annual meeting, Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the era’s most prominent Protestant voices, framed overpopulation as one of the world’s “basic problems,” and the promise of the birth control pill as the best solution. Fosdick told the assembled that “the liberty to use contraceptive control [to build] thoughtfully planned, wisely planned homes” was essential to proper family life.
By the time the pill emerged on the market in the 1960s, liberal Protestant leaders were among the most stalwart advocates of birth control. In 1960, Richard Fagley, representative of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs at the United Nations, wrote The Population Explosion and Christian Responsibility. Fagley argued that science was “to be used to the glory of God, in accordance with his will for men.” Since it “affects deeply the size of the family and the rate of population growth, it has therefore created a new area for responsible decisions.”
The National Council of Churches (NCC) warned that increased life expectancy and lower child mortality would strain the planet’s resources, citing both scripture and the teachings of member denominations to point to birth control as an excellent way for Christians to strike an appropriate balance among sexual desire, the desire for children, and a vocation to society. The NCC’s director of family ministries, William Genné, and his wife Elizabeth, even ran programming and published manuals helping Christian communities conduct birth control education.
It was in Protestant circles that birth control was rebranded as “family planning” and given a theological underpinning: “responsible parenthood,” which the NCC formalized with a two-page statement in 1961. These denominations connected the freedom to make reproductive decisions with the responsibility to create and maintain a healthy family. Mainline Protestants understood contraception use in marriage as a potential moral good; they valued the idea that a couple would prayerfully decide when to become parents and to how many children. In this scenario, birth control proved liberating for married couples. At the same time, with that freedom came a host of obligations and moral considerations about vocation and responsibility to society.
In responsible parenthood, contraception shored up a particular form of (Protestant) Christian values. Responsible parenthood was meant for couples in stable marriages with fulfilling sex lives to control the number of children that they had, preserve infant and maternal health, allow the couple to care for the children emotionally and financially, and serve their vocations in the world—vocations which denominations understood might go beyond raising children. The state, they argued, had no right to intervene.
Although civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and E. Franklin Frazier hoped that Black communities would also be able to use birth control to combat poverty, the NCC’s definitions of “healthy families,” largely scripted by and intended for their white, middle- and upper-class members, were rife with class and racial biases. The NCC’s moral language would echo through future decades of racially structured debates on contraception, welfare, and public health in ways that limited reproductive options for poor women and women of color.
What’s more, none of the articulated logic aimed to free women to pursue careers outside of the home, with their attendant potential for personal fulfillment and economic equality. The NCC did not advocate for women’s reproductive freedom or for reproductive justice. Rather, they sought to limit the population, to protect the planet and set up women for success as mothers. Family planning was central to the conversation, but women’s liberation was not.
Protestant clergy from lower-income congregations, which were often also non-white congregations, understood what was at stake in conflicts like the 1958 NYC Diaphragm Debates. Their members depended on public hospitals for medical care. Clergy marshalled moral language criticizing the city for denying accepted medical therapy to their parishioners. For example, according to The New York Times on August 12th, the Harlem Pastors’ Association pointed out that East Harlem residents could only afford city hospitals, meaning that the municipal hospital ban barred them from access entirely.
The Interdenominational Minister’s Alliance in Brooklyn endorsed birth control for its parishioners: “The use of medically approved contraceptive devices, practiced in Christian conscience, fulfills rather than violates the will of God.” But many of their parishioners would not get the chance: the unwritten ban of contraception in public hospitals created an equity issue, limiting the ability of low-income Christians to make Godly choices.
"The Pill is a No-No"
courtesy of the Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division
LC-USZC4-3846
A large proportion of the city’s taxpayers, and thus a large proportion of public-hospital patients in 1958, were Catholic. The objections of the Catholic Church to birth control in general, and to city-funded birth control in particular, were clear and well-known. Msgr. Thomas Flynn, a New York Catholic leader, told the Times that “the Catholic Church holds that ‘any unnatural or artificial method of birth prevention is an immoral practice.’” The Church “would consider it immoral if the city embarked upon a birth control program,” and if they did, “we would certainly be entitled to voice our objections.”
But what the 48% of New York City taxpayers who were Catholic thought individually about taxpayer-funded birth control in public hospitals is less clear. Within a decade, scholars note that approximately half of all married Catholics would be using contraception, suggesting that even in the late 1950s, the Catholic tax base did not speak with one voice. Indeed, during the Diaphragm Debates, some Catholics—like “bachelor girl” Terry Edwards, a legal secretary and secretary of the Writer’s Guild—publicly voiced her support, telling the New York Amsterdam News: “I am against all birth control, as I agree with the Roman Catholic Church groups who find use of artificial contraception immoral. But, since the State of New York has authorized physicians to prescribe and advise contraception, I must disagree with Dr. Jacobs as I feel that this should pertain not only to private agencies, but to city hospitals as well.”
Two years later, in 1960, FDA approval of the birth control pill stoked the birth-control conversation among Catholics. John Rock of Harvard Medical School, one of the key researchers in developing the birth control pill, was Catholic, and he thought that the pill would be acceptable according to Catholic theology. The 1930 papal encyclical Casti Connubii: On Christian Marriage forbade “unnatural” methods of birth control, such as condoms or diaphragms, which placed a barrier between the sperm and the egg. But it left the door open for the rhythm method, in which women kept track of menstrual cycles to time sex when they were less likely to be ovulating. The birth control pill induces a naturally occurring state in which a woman does not ovulate and therefore cannot get pregnant. In this way Rock saw it as an improvement of the rhythm method. At the 1954 annual meeting of the Planned Parenthood Association, he called the pill, then in development, “the greatest aid ever discovered to the happiness and security of individual families . . . help[ing] to avert man’s self-destruction through starvation and war.”
Three years after the approval of the pill, when the Catholic Church was in the midst of a period of reform, the Vatican also created a Papal Commission on Birth Control to debate the question. This commission included Pat and Patty Crowley, the married American co-presidents of the Christian Family Movement, a lay organization in which couples worked to infuse their marriages and families with their Catholicism. Out of 72 delegates, Patty was one of only four married women. They used their network to survey over 3000 Catholic couples, primarily (though not exclusively) in the United States, about birth control.
The surveys again revealed a diversity in the views of deeply committed Catholics. But the majority of the respondents wrote in to urge Church approval of the birth control pill, if not of all forms of birth control. They noted how the rhythm method strained marriages and overly burdened women, spoke to fear of pregnancy and struggling to provide for large families, and noted how, because some priests were more lenient than others, it was unfair that some Catholics were barred from contraception by their Catholicism while others were not. Some even maintained that if the pill was acceptable, and even good, then all contraception should be seen as good. In 1966, a leaked report revealed that approximately 80% of the Papal Commission supported the Vatican allowing use of the pill. But in 1968, the Vatican released the encyclical Humanae Vitae, reiterating the Church’s ban on all forms of birth control.
“the greatest aid ever discovered to the happiness and security of individual families . . . help[ing] to avert man’s self-destruction through starvation and war.”
The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) had demonstrated that the Church could change its position on any number of important theological points. So its unwillingness to do so with birth control—despite many Catholic faithful wishing they would—caused a number of Catholics to simply stop listening. Sociologist and Catholic priest Andrew Greeley later pointed to this as the moment when the Catholic Church forfeited its moral authority over the sexual lives of American Catholics.
Although Catholic clergy and laity were in fact deeply divided on birth control, the 1958 New York City Diaphragm Debates treated Catholic New York taxpayers as a monolithic anti-birth control contingent. Protestants were the religious majority in the United States, and they believed that they could change the nation’s understanding of sexual morality, making birth control an arena of Christian moral agency. Assuming that the doctor and patient shared a religious tradition allowed the doctor and his moral code to serve as a gatekeeper for his patient. Rarely, in the case of the public hospital, was the answer that the woman whose body would bear the consequences of its use, misuse, or absence should be in control of how she squared the teachings of her traditions with her use of contraception.
American Jews, acutely aware of themselves as a religious minority in New York City and the country more broadly, knew that most Americans would not be swayed by Jewish religious teachings. So Jewish leaders, ranging from the very liberal to the Orthodox, argued for birth control in terms of religious freedom. They objected to Jacobs’s compromise because they saw it as setting the hospital’s policy in accordance with the tenets of one faith, Catholicism, and jeopardizing divisions between church and state.
Ultimately, on September 17, 1958, after an unremitting campaign by New York clergy, women’s groups, and various medical associations, the Board of Hospitals reversed its position and allowed the therapeutic prescription of contraception in public hospitals.
There were still caveats. Like Hellman’s test case, women seeking contraception needed a medical reason for doing so, requiring two separate doctors to validate that medical reason. And because the decision to use birth control was still considered a moral decision, the hospital would offer all women going through it an opportunity to meet with a clergyman of their choice.
The Protestant and Jewish clergy who had fought for contraceptive access for the last two months wanted more: they wanted women to be able to use birth control to support “voluntary motherhood”—having the right number of children for their families at a time when they were financially stable, well-educated, and middle class.
Nevertheless, the new policy was such a vast improvement over the old policies that it was celebrated by those who had fought for it as a win. Diaphragms were available in New York City public hospitals, and clergy proved central in making it so.
SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS
For further information on religion and birth control in the twentieth century, you can read my book, God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion (The University of North Carolina Press, 2026). To look explicitly at the role that Jewish women played in birth control movements in the first part of the century, see Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace (NYU Press, 2013) by Melissa Klapper. To further explore the relationship between contraception and the Catholic Church, see Catholics and Contraception (Cornell University Press, 2009) by Leslie Woodcock Tentler. If you do not want a full book, you can check my article in The Conversation, “Protestants and the pill: How US Christians helped make birth control mainstream” (2022) or my sermon, “The Jewish Heritage of Reproductive Justice” (2026), available on YouTube, that thinks about Jewish reproductive health activism. You can also find some useful information at the Jewish Women’s Archive, such as “American Birth Control Movement” (2022) by Rebecca L. Davis, updated by Hannah Zaves-Greene, and “Birth Control Movement in the United States: 1912–1960” (2009) by Ellen Chesler, or on Jewish Currents, “October 16: Birth Control, in Yiddish” (October 16, 2011) by lawrencebush. PBS has some helpful information on John Rock in “Dr. John Rock (1890–1984),” as does NYU in their The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, “John Rock’s Catholic Faith: Sanger’s Hard Pill to Swallow.” Catholics for Choice shares information on the Papal Commission on Birth Control, “The Birth Control Commission,” PBS covers Humanae Vitae in “The Pope Issues Humanae Vitae,” and Mary Henold writes about Catholic women’s responses in The Conversation, “How Catholic women fought against Vatican’s prohibition on contraceptives” (2018). AUTHOR PHOTO CREDIT: Lauren Little
Samira K. Mehta
is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she currently serves as the Director of Jewish Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. She has also published a book of personal essays called The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023), which appeared on Oprah’s “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023,” where it was called “the epitome of a book meeting a moment.” God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the 1990s. She is also beginning a project for Princeton University Press called A Mixed Multitude: Jews of Color in the United States. Mehta is the primary investigator for a Henry Luce Foundation funded project called Jews of Color: Histories and Futures. She also serves as a series editor for the North American Religion series at NYU Press.
