Mother’s Day in the Post-Pill Paradise

The annual rite of maternal flowers and phone calls coincides with the 50th birthday of an oral contraceptive to make motherhood optional for sexually active women.

“Welcome to the post-pill paradise,” exulted a suburban wife to her lover in John Updike’s 1968 novel, “Couples,” celebrating the uncoupling of human lust from procreation.

But some things happened along the way to sexual Nirvana. AIDS, for one. And then a 21st century social conservatism that reached its peak with the Bush Administration’s policy of promoting abstinence as the only answer in sex education.

“And we lived happily ever after,” says Gail Collins ruefully about the Pill’s arrival half a century ago. “Except that over the last 20 years, protests from the social right have made politicians frightened of mentioning birth control and school boards frightened of including it in the curriculum.”

So, as on other issues in today’s American dialogue of the deaf, politics and real life diverge.

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