Just as people can be quite bad at cross-sex mind reading, polyamorous and monogamous people often fail to understand each other. On more than one occasion I’ve dated someone monogamous, them imagining that when things got serious I would forego my other lovers and settle down with them, me imagining that after a few months they would realise how great polyamory was. Having said that, it does occasionally work - I have successfully initiated at least a couple of people into polyamory.

A lot of my social circle are poly, and my observation is that hierarchical polyamory works best for the majority of people. That is, to have a primary partner (or two, if you’re lucky enough to find that throuple!) who you are uniquely committed to; perhaps owning a house together, having children together. Even among people who are highly sociosexual, pair-bonding is the norm, and especially where kids are involved, it makes sense to prioritise a stable, long-term relationship.

It has always seemed profoundly romantic to me to know that my primary partner does not begrudge me romance and intimacy with other people, that we actually enjoy one another’s happiness, even when it involves another person. It makes me feel secure to know that my partner connecting with someone else does not diminish their love for me, and vice versa. This has always seemed entirely natural to me.

I’m not totally immune to jealousy, I know what it feels like! But I only experience jealousy about things I don’t have - for example, I could feel jealous if someone I wanted to date didn’t feel the same way, but was seeing someone else. If I’m getting what I need from a relationship, I won’t feel possessive. Possibly one reason I’m suited to polyamory is that I am very emotionally self-sufficient, so my relationship needs are easy to meet.

Not all polyamorous people feel the way I do. For example, some people regularly experience jealousy, but see that as a price they are willing to pay for the benefits of the lifestyle. People choose polyamory at different stages of life, for different reasons, and other than being high in openness, I don’t think that there is a distinctive polyamorous personality profile. I don’t pretend my account is representative of polyamory as a whole, just the experience of one person for whom polyamory has always made sense.

What does it mean to love freely? And why is this a feminist concern? Today “free love” is mostly used as a euphemism for promiscuity, but the core idea of applying principles of liberty and autonomy to our sexual and romantic lives has been an important thread in Western cultural evolution over the last few centuries. Reforms to marriage and divorce, women’s civil and economic emancipation, gay rights, and the availability of reproductive technologies are all advances that owe to this tradition of thought. We are seeing some significant cultural pushback to sexual liberalism today, motivated partly by concerns about declining fertility, partly disquiet about the rise in transgenderism. There is a strand of conservative feminist thought that defends marriage and monogamy as institutions that protect women from male libidinousness, and sees women as harmed by permissive modern attitudes towards sex. This is what first got me interested in historical biographies of women who saw free love as a feminist issue and went to great lengths to live by and promote its ideals. What kept me interested is that, as Oscar Wilde wrote, history is merely gossip1, and these stories contain some great gossip.

I couldn’t possibly condense all my favourite free loving women into a single article, so this will be part one of several.

Part One: Women’s suffrage and Mrs Satan

The phrase “free love” was probably first coined in 1846 by a preacher called John Humphrey Noyes, and his conception of it was pretty radical even by today’s norms. Noyes and his wife moved in with another couple and lived as a foursome in what they referred to both as a “complex marriage” and a system of “free love”. They went on to found the Oneida Community, a utopian experiment combining communist and Darwinist ideas, where property was communal and so was sex. At Oneida, sex was to be freely enjoyed but pregnancies carefully planned, with parents chosen for their apparent genetic compatibility rather than any romantic ties. Noyes called this approach to reproduction “stirpiculture” - a clunky term that predated Francis Galton’s “eugenics”2. Advocacy of free love and advocacy of eugenics often coincided over the next century, although the link between the two varied in flavour. Some, like the Oneidans and later, the birth-control advocates, made eugenic arguments for the decoupling of sex and reproduction. On the other hand, some believed that freely following sexual instincts would produce the best offspring; for example, the well-known anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews suggested in 1886 that “woman, when free, should exhibit an inherent God-given tendency to accept only the noblest and most highly endowed of the opposite sex to be the recipients of her choicest favors, and the sires of her offspring”3.

As the free love label was adopted more widely, it didn’t remain synonymous with what we today might call polyamory. Its popular meaning was much more broad and literal - that everyone should be free, both socially and legally, to love as they choose. Free lovers argued both for the minimisation of the state’s role in romantic unions, and for broad social acceptance of a variety of romantic and sexual predilections (among heterosexuals: in the mid to late 1800s the discourse was more or less exclusively about relations between men and women and it took several more decades before the obvious extension of this principle to same-sex attractions was defended). Within the free love movement there were significant disagreements: some wanted to abolish marriage entirely, others simply to reform divorce. Some only argued for freedom to enter and exit exclusive relationships and criticised promiscuity, others argued that non-monogamy was permissible or even optimal.

A summary of the latter dispute can be found in the 1857 book “Free Love: Or, a Philosophical Demonstration of the Non-exclusive Nature of Connubial Love” by Austin Kent:

“We all teach that the laws of mind are our guide; and that these laws must be absolutely Free. In this sense, we all contend alike for Free Love. We agree that healthy affinities and attractions must reign supreme. But Mr. Wright, and some others, tell us that this healthy attraction will, and must, in its nature, be always exclusive. I hear some, on the other hand, say to Mr. Wright and his friends,— "Hands and opinions off! Allow us the freedom to settle the nature of our own attractions. Admitting you may know what is most healthy, elevating, and pure for yourself—do not measure all men and all women by your own affectional stature!"

Kent himself argued that truly exclusive romantic love was unheard of: “none, in entire freedom, and uninfluenced in the past and present by other minds or institutions in the bondage of the past or present,—would ever be absolutely exclusive in any of the manifestations of connubial love.” But he also defended the diversity of human tastes, saying that “different minds differ as to their leanings towards entire exclusiveness, or its opposite—absolute promiscuity.”4

Criticism of the institution of marriage from a feminist perspective had been around for much longer. In her 1792 pamphlet, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft characterised marriage as “legal prostitution”. She went on to write a didactic novel called, riffing on the title of her previous work, The Wrongs of Woman, featuring parallel stories about a working class woman cast out of her master’s house after becoming pregnant through rape and an upper class woman who flees her abusive marriage after also becoming pregnant through marital rape. She advocated for women to be educated and have opportunities to live by their own means, to have “power… over themselves”. Praising chastity as a virtue and criticising “libertines”, Wollstonecraft’s attitude to sex was prudish by modern standards, but at the time she lived she was a sex radical, pilloried for having a child out of wedlock and entering into two “free unions” - non-marital sexual relationships. Almost a century later, suffragist and US presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull echoed Wollstonecraft’s ideas in her 1873 speech The Scarecrows of Sexual Slavery, comparing marriage to prostitution and condemning marital rape. Woodhull, not shy of controversy, put it with characteristic flair: “They say I have come to break up the family; I say amen to that with all my heart. I hope I may break up every family in the world that exists by virtue of sexual slavery.”5

In the late 1800s, Victoria Woodhull’s name was synonymous with the free love cause. She was influenced both by feminists, and by anarchists and sex radicals including Stephen Pearl Andrews, who had become her intellectual mentor. Woodhull is an absolutely fascinating character: born poor, she came up through the American spiritualist movement, which allowed women to command large audiences as celebrity mediums. After making names for themselves as clairvoyants, she and her sister Tennessee Claflin founded the first female-run stock brokerage on Wall Street and used the money they made to start a radical newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin Weekly. Edited by Woodhull’s second husband Colonel James Blood, the Weekly published a range of radical thinkers: Marxists, suffragists, anarchists, and plenty of free lovers.

Both sisters were determined to defy the limits placed on women and delighted in scandalising people. For several years at the height of their notoriety, Woodhull and Claflin were the most frequently depicted characters in New York’s illustrated tabloids6. They cut their hair short and dressed like men, lived communally in a house their mother called “the worst gang of free lovers… that ever lived”7, and hosted salons that Pearl Andrews compared to those of French revolutionary Madame Roland. Between the two of them they racked up a number of firsts for women: first female stock-brokers, first woman to address the House Judiciary Committee (Woodhull, on the subject of women’s suffrage), first female Colonel (Claflin, 85th regiment of the New York national guard), first woman to run for president (Woodhull, as nominee of the newly founded Equal Rights Party). They were women of action. As Victoria put it in a letter to the New York Herald announcing her presidential candidacy: “while others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others argued the equality of woman with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business.”8

Woodhull was an incredible orator and drew large crowds to her speeches, probably ghost-written by Pearl Andrews. These included impassioned criticisms of the “sexual slavery” of marriage, defences of non-monogamy, and eugenic arguments for women’s reproductive freedom. The latter was a personal issue for her after having a cognitively disabled child by her abusive first husband at the age of 15. She attributed her son’s disability to his father’s alcoholism, and this motivated her activism: “Do you think my mother’s heart does not yearn for the love of my boy?… Do you think I would not willingly give my life fto make him what he has a right to be?… Do you think I can ever hesitate to warn the young maidens against my fate, or to advise them never to surrender the control of their maternal functions to any man!”9.

While openly praising the Oneida community and defending the right to promiscuity, Woodhull was somewhat evasive about her own love-life. But, as she argued, her own preferences were not the point: she was defending “sexual freedom for all people - freedom for the monogamist to practice monogamy, for the varietist to be a varietist still, for the promiscuous to remain promiscuous.”10 On her support for individual sovereignty, she was never evasive: “Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”11

The most direct evidence of Woodhull practising what she preached is the account of Benjamin Tucker, a young anarchist who worked with Victoria during her years in New York and described losing his virginity to her at the age of 19. He describes himself as “bashful, shy, timid” and with “sexual instincts not yet awakened”, although he sympathised intellectually with “the struggle for sexual freedom”. He was introduced to Woodhull by her second husband and close collaborator Colonel James Blood, and she soon made a move on him, saying “do you know, I should dearly love to sleep with you?” Tucker paints a picture of casual, open polyamory. After Victoria seduced him, Tucker reports that he asked her “what will Col. Blood think of this?’. “‘Oh, that will be all right,’ she replied, ‘and, besides, he cannot deny that it’s largely his own fault. Why, only the other day he wrote to me of you in glowing terms, declaring, “I know very well what I would do, were he a girl.”12

Woodhull’s determined advocacy of free love made her something of a political liability for her suffragist peers. In 1972 Harper’s Weekly published an article calling her ideas “Satanic”, with an accompanying illustration by the famous political cartoonist Thomas Nast depicting Woodhull as “Mrs Satan”13. Although the article is condemnatory, Nast’s cartoon retains a certain ambiguity: in it, a woman carrying a drunk husband and screaming children on her back rejects the devil Woodhull and her message. But if some were sympathetic to her cause, on the whole it was not a popular one. Associating women’s civil rights with free love risked delegitimising the former, but Woodhull was adamant that “suffrage is only one phase of the larger question of women’s emancipation”14. Meanwhile, suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony allegedly wrote in private that Woodhull was “the first woman man had succeeded in fashioning to his own ideal - so that she theoretically accepted man’s practical theory of promiscuity”15. And when Anthony and others published the three volume book History of Women Suffrage, Woodhull’s contributions were mostly relegated to footnotes.

In 1872, the year Woodhull ran for president, Woodhull, Claflin and Bood were set up by self-appointed enemy of vice Antony Comstock. Woodhull & Claflin Weekly had published a lurid expose of the extra-marital affair of a famous preacher (possibly after a failed attempt to blackmail said preacher into endorsing Woodhull for president). Comstock ordered a copy of the paper, and then had the three arrested and charged under an 1865 law against sending obscene material through the post. Even Woodhull’s detractors were outraged by this, and many articles were written in support of the defendants’ rights to free speech. In the year of her candidacy Woodhull spent the presidential election in jail, but after finally being acquitted on a technicality (that newspapers were exempt from this law), her profile was higher than ever. Although her presidential campaign was over, she cashed in on her fame, lecturing to large audiences around the country. Comstock, meanwhile, went on to tighten federal anti-obscenity laws with the Comstock Act of 1873, which would be used extensively in the coming decades to obstruct the work of birth control campaigners.

It is hard to get the measure of Victoria Woodhull as a person. She was at various times a stockbroker, a communist, a clairvoyant, a presidential candidate, a blackmailer, a free-speech martyr, the most famous suffragist in America, and written out of feminist history by her contemporaries. And, after a decade making her name synonymous with free love, in 1876 she completely reinvented herself. She ended her 10 year marriage to Blood for reasons that aren’t clear, and moved to England with her two children and sister Tennessee. Woodhull then embarked on an aggressive image laundering process, distancing herself from the free love movement and limiting the focus of her lectures to eugenics and more respectable aspects of women’s rights. Although she was still advocating for women’s sexual freedom, now predominantly under the auspices of eugenic feminism, she denounced the free love label, a term she once said she was willing to “live or die by”16. After successfully rehabilitating her public image she married a wealthy banker and spent her last decades enjoying life among the British elite. And it wasn’t just Victoria who completed an incredible rags to riches journey by marrying into a wealthy upper-class British family. Tennessee, born dirt poor in rural Ohio, spent the second half of her life as Lady Francis Cook, Viscountess of Montserrat.

If there’s one thing that can be said for both Tennessee Claflin and Victoria Woodhull it’s that they demonstrated incredible self-belief, coupled with a life-long refusal to be constrained by either gender or conditions of birth. Never one to undersell herself, Woodhull’s own assessment of her political career is a perfect demonstration of her character:

“To be perfectly frank, I hardly expected to be elected. The truth is I am too many years ahead of this age, and the exalted views and objects of humanitarianism can scarcely be grasped as yet by the unenlightened mind of the average man”. - Victoria Woodhull, 1892.17

Alongside the groundbreaking scientific developments, this period saw the publication of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. Visions of a more just and equal world were really coming into focus. In 1887, Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backward, a best-selling sci-fi novel about the year 2000. In the book, technology and social revolution have brought about a communist utopia. People work less, and work is less menial due to increased automation. Citizens get some kind of universal basic income and pay for goods using debit cards instead of cash. Music is available in every home via telephone cables. The high living standards have obviated economic motives for crime, and criminality is now treated as a mental health issue. 

Intentional communities were founded across the US, probably the most famous being the Oneida Community. Oneida was started in 1848 by a preacher called John Humphrey Noyes. Communism and Darwinism were major influences on their philosophy, as well as the Christian perfectionist doctrine that humans can live free from sin. Property was communal, and so was sex; Noyes probably coined the term “free love”. Sex was not sinful, but spiritual, with an emphasis on female pleasure and mutual consent. Reproduction was not simply a by-product of sex, but a carefully managed project for the good of society: parents were chosen by the community for their desirable traits and children were raised collectively. Men had to practise “sexual continence” (avoid ejaculation) to avoid accidental pregnancy. This proto-eugenic experiment was referred to as “stirpiculture”.

Although Oneida-style free love was pretty controversial, an increasingly scientific approach to sexuality and reproduction was gaining widespread traction. Following German and French thinkers, the British sexologist Havelock Ellis popularised the idea that homosexuality was an innate disposition and not a pathology. His own wife, Edith Lees, was a lesbian who had multiple relationships with women, her marriage to Ellis more of a “comradeship”. Ellis was also very enthusiastic about the potential for the new science of eugenics to improve the world. Pushing back against those who argued for state-mandated sterilisations, he was convinced that we could realise the benefits of Darwin’s revolutionary discovery without any coercive measures but through giving people greater control over their own reproduction, as he lays out in his book The Task of Social Hygiene:

Domestic animals may be highly bred from outside, compulsorily. Man can only be bred upwards from within through the medium of his intelligence and will, working together under the control of a high sense of responsibility.

In 1900 Ellis published a book called The Nineteenth Century: A Dialogue in Utopia. In it, he imagines a dialogue happening in a utopian future of an unspecified date, looking back at the 19th century and examining the roots of progress laid in that time. One speaker asks the other how he can talk about it as a time of civilisation and advancement, when there was still so much ignorance, inequality and suffering. His conversational partner replies:

What are disease and misery and death to him who soars on imaginary wings to a vast invisible goal? That was the spirit in which the men of those days lived; it was the secret of their insane activities, their colossal conceptions, their gigantic ambitions, even some of their most practical and prosaic inventions, the whole of the picturesque and fantastic confusion in which they lived.

After such high hopes, it’s not hard to see how the spirit of utopian thinking dwindled in the twentieth century. So many of the exciting advances of the previous decades - universal suffrage, Darwinism, technological progress, socialism - not only failed to bring about utopia, but arguably made the world worse. The Nazis rose to power as a democratically elected party, unspeakable horrors were committed in the name of eugenics, communism placed millions at the mercy of ruthless despots, and the spectre of nuclear war made human extinction a serious prospect.

Bertrand Russell wrote his utopian flavoured essay In Praise of Idleness in 1932, arguing that “modern technic” meant that a four hour working day would be more than enough to allow everyone to live in comfort. He suggested that this would eliminate unemployment, reduce inequality, increase leisure time and that subsequently "taste for war will die out”. Approximately twenty years later, after the Second World War, he wrote The Future of Mankind. This essay shows the turn in mood:

Before the end of the present century, unless something quite unforeseeable occurs, one of three possibilities will have been realised. These three are: —

1. The end of human life, perhaps of all life on our planet.

2. A reversion to barbarism after a catastrophic diminution of the population of the globe.

3. A unification of the world under a single government, possessing a monopoly of all the major weapons of war.

If utopianism was the spirit of the nineteenth century, doomerism was the spirit of the twentieth. The atomic bomb was a dominant concern, but it wasn’t the only one - by the sixties, environmentalists were raising various alarms. In 1968 Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, predicting catastrophic consequences of population growth. And by the eighties, the dangers of man-made climate change were widely accepted. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Nick Bostrom published his paper Existential Risks: Analysing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards, arguing that humanity could be entering a particularly risky time due to rapid technological progress.

While existential risk became a pressing concern, pockets of utopian thought persisted through the 1900s. In the sixties, Martin Luther King popularised the mid-nineteenth century idea that the “arc of the moral universe… bends towards justice”. Feminist groups engaged in political consciousness raising activities and psychedelic drug enthusiasts thought they could “turn on” the world with LSD. In his book Tripping on Utopia, Benjamin Breen situates the psychonauts as part of the broader movement to raise global consciousness using both science and culture. He centres this history around anthropologist Margaret Mead, a closeted bisexual whose work tried to normalise the variety of human behaviour, especially sexual behaviour. Mead was an active member of the Macy group in the ‘40s and ‘50s, a collective of scientists hoping to improve the world through a new interdisciplinary understanding of consciousness. By the end of the ‘60s though, psychedelics seemed to be a dead end, with high profile proponents like Timothy Leary and John Lilly turning out to be little more than hucksters.

Right now, like many people, I find myself in a mood of pessimism about the future. I doubt whether the moral arc of the universe must bend towards justice. I worry that we are living in a vulnerable world, in which our technological capacity outstrips our ability to wield it safely. On the other hand, those of us with the enormous privilege of living in the West today have seen some incredibly utopian ideas come to pass. Bellamy might be surprised to find that capitalism, not communism, has delivered many aspects of the future he imagined: we’ve dramatically improved life expectancy and driven down child mortality; menial work is increasingly automated, and very few people have to do work that is actually dangerous; the internet means we do have music in every home, and far more besides. Mead, who lived her whole life in fear of her sexuality being public knowledge, would find that all kinds of human diversity are not only accepted today but positively celebrated. And Ellis would be amazed to see the advances in genetic medicine and the level of control we have over our reproductive lives.

Who are our contemporary utopians? Advances in artificial intelligence are now a prominent theme of both utopian and doomerist thinking. Nick Bostrom, one of the foremost voices warning about AI risks, has just published Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World. The book explores meaning in a post-AI world, where human nature is fully malleable and human labour obsolete. Bostrom is the latest in a very long line to predict “technological unemployment”, which has been viewed as both a promise (as in Russell’s essay referenced above) and a threat (by Marx and others), depending on the scope and context of the unemployment. So far, predictions of mass unemployment have failed to materialise, but it would be flawed inductive reasoning to suppose they never will. Lots of jobs have been made obsolete by technology, it’s just that we’ve found continuing ways for humans to add value. If we really build machines that can do all the things our bodies and brains can do, more cheaply than us, then we might finally enter what Bostrom calls a post-instrumental age. Whether or not that will be a utopia is far from clear. Indeed, is utopia even a philosophically coherent idea? Deep Utopia is a careful exploration of these questions.

Havelock Ellis implied that naivety was essential for utopian thinking, saying that “ignorance possesses a magnificent audacity”. In a similar vein, Bostrom suggests that some past successes might have been the product of a reckless but lucky civilisation that vaulted “prudential barriers” without an appreciation of the risks. Optimistically, perhaps we are a little less ignorant today, a little less naive about the ways that political and technological projects can go terribly wrong, and with better epistemic standards than ever before. But our models of the world need to keep pace with the changes we’re making to it. Hopefully, in the 21st century, while we make sense of the challenges we’re facing, we can keep our eyes on the prize of a radically better world. 

Both versions of the claim seem incredible at first glance, so I wanted to check whether either of them could be true. This turns out to be a rather complicated and interesting question!

Although the two versions look related, it is possible that one could be true and the other false, since the rate of single motherhood is a function of multiple factors, of which the unintended pregnancy rate is only one. I’ll discuss each in turn.

The pill caused an increase in unwanted pregnancy: false

Harrington’s assertion is that uptake of the pill increased sexual activity to the extent of driving up unwanted pregnancy. One natural reason to doubt this is that global fertility rates have been on the decline since the 60s (when the pill first became available). It would be a bit odd if rates of unintended pregnancies had nevertheless risen during the same period (though not impossible - maybe the rate of abortion simply rose faster, for example). 

And although the post-60s drop in fertility coincides with the pill’s introduction, correlation isn’t causation. It’s interesting to look further back and see that in the US, there’s actually been a steady decline in fertility for much longer; the 1930 - 1970 period was actually kind of anomalous. Clearly fertility has many determinants!

Ok, so overall fertility has declined since the 60s, but what about unintended pregnancy? Directly measuring unintended pregnancy is actually quite hard. Even the definition is a bit unclear: interestingly, much lower contraceptive failure rates (less than 1% for the pill!) have been documented when women are on teratogenic medications, suggesting that some apparent contraceptive failures are really a function of ambivalence about pregnancy. Surveys that ask people whether births were wanted are vulnerable to response and recall bias, plus there just aren’t very many of these. In settings where abortion is readily available, abortion rates are a reasonable proxy though. The data shows that in some countries abortion rates have risen alongside contraceptive prevalence, while in others they have fallen. 

Consider your risk of contraceptive failure in a year. This is a measure called the Pearl Index (PI), and is how birth control efficacy is usually reported. It varies between clinical trials and out in the real world, so I’ll stick to real world or “typical use” PI values. The PI of condoms is 0.13 and the PI of the withdrawal method is 0.2. For the pill it is 0.07. That means that if you switch from condoms to the pill, you could have sex for almost twice as many years without exposing yourself to a higher risk of pregnancy. At the population level, if women spent roughly the same number of years trying to avoid pregnancy, but they all switched to a contraceptive that was twice as effective, rates of accidental pregnancy would be halved. If, however, the number of years spent trying to avoid pregnancy doubled, that would totally offset the improvement in contraceptive efficacy. 

People in most countries want fewer children today than they did 50 years ago. This means they spend more time avoiding pregnancy. A model that incorporates this can explain the differences between countries. When desired family size remains constant, abortion rates decline as prevalence and efficacy of contraception increase, but if desired family size decreases, uptake of both contraception and abortion can rise simultaneously, depending on the gradients of each trend. This is very different from saying that the use of contraception is itself the cause of the increase in abortion!

The state by state rollout of the pill in the US provides a convenient natural experiment to look at its effect there. A plethora of studies exploit the differences in policy timing between states to show that legalising the pill caused fertility rates to decline faster, marriage to be delayed, and women’s education and wages to increase. When women become more educated and economically empowered, the opportunity cost of having a child gets higher and ideal family size gets smaller. Given the model described above, it is conceivable that such a decrease in desired family size could have caused an increase in unwanted pregnancies (but only in pregnancies that are unwanted relative to this new standard).

In the US, we’re talking about a relatively modest change in desired family size - between 1930 and 2013, Americans’ ideal number of children decreased from 3.5 to 2.5. That adds maybe 3 extra years spent avoiding pregnancy per woman. As already noted, the pill is about twice as effective as condoms, and 3 times as effective as withdrawal. Seems unlikely that with such high efficacy, these few extra years of risk would be enough to increase unwanted pregnancy overall. 

Here’s a very rough model. Holding the length of a woman’s reproductive life fixed, suppose the average annual risk of contraceptive failure drops just a few percentage points, while the number of desired children reduces from 3.5 to 2.5. Accidental pregnancies go down in almost all cases. It’s only if you see a much more dramatic shift in desired family size, or if the contraceptive failure rates remain pretty high, that the rate of accidental pregnancy can go up (and these women will still be having fewer pregnancies overall).

For a much more precise model of the relationship between contraception, desired family size, and unwanted pregnancy, check out Bongaarts and Westoff, 2000, The potential role of contraception in reducing abortion.

I’m assuming here that the introduction of the pill meant a decrease in the average annual risk of unwanted pregnancy, but Harrington is perhaps implying that such large numbers of women went from being abstinent to using the pill that the average annual risk of unwanted pregnancy actually rose. I’ll just note how implausible this is: in 1960, before the introduction of the pill, 70% of all American adults were married. The median age at first marriage was just 20. One of the most reliably documented social effects of the pill is an increase in the age at first marriage, and even though fewer single people are abstinent today (10% of US women wait for marriage vs 50% in 1960), single people still have less sex than coupled people. As marriage rates have declined, overall rates of sexual activity have declined also. 

In the US natural experiment, states that introduced the pill sooner saw lower rates of unwanted and mis-timed pregnancy. In fact, perhaps as much as 40% of the decline in marital fertility between 1955 and 1965 was due to the pill averting unwanted pregnancy (married women had earlier access than single women). 

It seems like a win for common sense - the introduction of the pill did not cause an increase in the rate of unintended pregnancy.

The pill caused an increase in single motherhood: maybe

I’m going to keep focusing on the US, since most of the best data is here. In this case the trend does at least go in the right direction: the percentage of families headed by single parents has grown since the 60s. 

There are two primary ways people become single parents. The first is that a single woman becomes pregnant. Even if unintended pregnancy rates have gone down, if more women are single and sexually active for longer, a higher proportion of contraceptive failures will occur outside of relationships. And since it is the case that age at first marriage has increased and overall marriage rates have declined, women are single and sexually active for longer these days. As mentioned above, the pill does seem to have had a direct causal effect here. The proposed mechanism is that when women have control over their fertility, it becomes possible for them to invest in longer programs of higher education and careers, deferring or even forgoing marriage. 

One thing that counts against this narrative is that the majority of the rise in single motherhood within the US is accounted for by trends among women who spend less time in higher education. For example, a 2004 study finds that education is strongly anticorrelated with single motherhood, and that “less than 5% of all unmarried births are to college-educated women”.

When you disaggregate the data on single motherhood by educational level, it’s really striking: the increase after 1970 is driven exclusively by those in the bottom 3 quartiles. These are the women who are least likely to be using hormonal contraception.

Percentage of mothers who are single

It’s also unclear what proportion of births to single mothers are actually the result of contraceptive failure; another way single motherhood would increase is if more single women actually want to get pregnant these days (e.g. because welfare provisions for single parents have improved and social sanctions lessened). Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage is an absolutely fascinating read. Very young poor women, teenagers many of them, are having babies because they want to. With few educational or career aspirations, the romance of a baby is very alluring. These girls have knowledge of and access to contraception, but they choose not to use it, or to use it irregularly. “Children offer a tangible source of meaning, while other avenues for gaining social esteem and personal satisfaction appear vague and tenuous”. Meanwhile, many of the poor young men fathering children are not good marriage prospects: criminality, incarceration, intimate partner violence, infidelity, and addiction are common. There just aren’t any powerful social or financial reasons for these couples to stay together.

Marriage rates are actually the lowest among lower socioeconomic classes. These groups are also the least likely to be using contraception, so it doesn’t look like the pill is having a direct effect here. But it is possible that it has had a more diffuse effect, by changing social norms around sex and marriage for everyone. It’s absolutely true that marriage rates have declined for all groups, and that as a result, unmarried mothers are more common, even though everyone is having fewer babies.

The other primary way that people become single parents is through relationship breakdown. In 1969, the first no fault divorce law was passed in the US. As state divorce laws liberalised, rates spiked, and remain higher among less educated women, consistent with the differences in rates of single motherhood. In America today, married people with Bachelor’s degrees have about a 30% chance of getting divorced, but high-school graduates have a 50% chance, and those who didn’t graduate high school have a 60% chance. So divorce seems like part of the picture as well.

Percentage of marriages ending in divorce within 10 years

It is hard to get good data on what proportion of single mothers are single due to relationship breakdown, as opposed to falling pregnant outside of a relationship. One suggestive dataset is from the General Social Survey (GSS), which asks 16 year olds not living with both parents why they are not living with both parents. This isn’t perfect as it includes children living with two parents where one is a step-parent, and it doesn’t explicitly ask about being born to a single mother. But it looks as though both parental separation and “other reasons” for not living with two biological parents are more common today than they were in 1970, with the latter increasing at a slightly higher rate.

There is no simple story that can explain the rise in single parenthood. Economists and sociologists have suggested a whole host of factors, including welfare policies, female wages and employment rates, male wages and employment rates, sex ratios, divorce rates, marriage trends, religiosity, and a range of other social norms. Is modern contraception one of these factors? Insofar as it has shifted cultural norms around marriage, sex, and gender roles, it seems likely. But pinning down the exact mechanism and magnitude of its effect is hard.

Women in the US have always been on the front lines of the fight for reproductive freedom: in the early 1900s, when the first birth control clinics were being opened in Europe, the US was imprisoning people who sent birth control literature through the post. While a wave of Latin American countries have liberalised their abortion laws in the last 5 years, 14 US states have made abortion completely illegal following the overturning of Roe vs Wade in 2022. And reproductive control does not just mean family limitation: today, IVF has brought millions of much wanted children into the world. Last week, in Alabama, IVF services were suspended after courts ruled that frozen embryos were legal people (accidental embryo loss, or the destruction of unused embryos could now subject a clinic to murder charges). It is shocking to many of us in the post-enlightenment world to see written in a legal ruling that “even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory."

But recent attacks on reproductive technologies are not just coming from the evangelical right. So-called feminists, spearheaded by self-styled “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington, have been adding fuel to the fire. Their arguments that liberalised sexual norms and modern reproductive technologies are bad for women are hugely dishonest. Of course people who want to can abstain from using contraception, have sex only within a monogamous marriage, or rule out abortion as an option for themselves. But to universalise these values as a prescription for women’s best interests relies on willful misrepresentation of the facts. This should be obvious, but access to contraception is good for women. Access to safe and legal abortion is good for women. The sexual revolution has been, on net, good for women. 

Take Harrington’s claim, in her book Feminism Against Progress, that the development of the contraceptive pill led to an increase in accidental pregnancy because of increased sexual activity. She doesn’t offer a reference, so it’s hard to know how she reached this conclusion, but it's totally wrong. Firstly, condoms, spermicidal pessaries, the withdrawal method, and the rhythm method were all in use well before the sixties. A large reduction in the numbers of children being born outside of marriage in late 19th/early 20th century Europe is attributed to increasing availability of contraceptives and education in this period. And in recent decades, rates of unintended pregnancy (that’s the number of unintended pregnancies per woman) have fallen everywhere in the world, and by almost 50% in Europe. While the causes of trends like this are obviously complex, studies show a clear link between use of contraception and a decline in unwanted pregnancy. Even if people are having more casual sex, this is resulting in fewer pregnancies.

Another conservative feminist voice is Louise Perry. She sensibly concedes that contraception has been good for female welfare, but in The Case Against The Sexual Revolution argues that permissive attitudes towards casual sex nevertheless harm women. Her argument that women face pressure to engage in “hook-up” culture is very similar to Harrington’s assertion that women suffer from “lack of a reason to say no”. In both instances, the implicit claim is that prior to the sexual revolution, women were having less unwanted sex. This seems unlikely. Somewhat ironically, a culture that prizes chastity makes it much harder to identify and sanction coercive sex, since there is social pressure for all women to present themselves as reluctant participants. Marital rape wasn’t even enshrined in law in the US or UK until the late 20th century. And sexual violence against poor women was particularly prevalent in the past. There are plenty of historic accounts of enslaved or servant women being “seduced” by their masters, where “seduction” should be read as “a sexual event that, in present times, could fall anywhere on the scale of sexual consent.” Rates of prostitution in the 1800s were staggeringly high: perhaps 1 in 10 women in London were selling sex. 1 in 10 children born at that time were abandoned. This was a “chaste”, pre-contraception society.

The fight for birth control is intimately related to issues of class. Harrington and Perry both try to paint liberal feminism as a bourgeois movement that fails to consider the needs of poorer and working class women, with Perry offering the truism that “it is the poor women who fare worst in the post-sexual revolution era.” Of course poor women fare worse than richer women today, as ever, but this difference was far more pronounced a hundred years ago. The truth is that, far from being elitist, technological and social sexual revolution has disproportionately benefited poor women, who have always had higher rates of fertility (due to less education and access to contraceptive methods), less protection from sexual violence, and less insulation from the consequences of unwanted pregnancy. 

Margaret Sanger, who coined the term “birth control” and founded Planned Parenthood, saw her mission quite explicitly as the liberation of working class women. Sanger came from a working class background herself and was radicalised to her cause from the outset: she felt her mother’s death at 48 was partly attributable to her 18 pregnancies, resulting in 11 live births. Her criticisms of middle-class feminists in the suffrage movement were scathing: “let any Woman who labors for her bread enter any of these meetings and see what there is in the movement for her benefit, and she will be made to realize that there is no more for her in political freedom alone than there has been for her brother who has had his political rights for some time”. Sanger wanted attention paid to the material conditions of women’s lives, writing in her autobiography that “it seemed unbelievable that [feminists] could be serious in occupying themselves with what I regarded as trivialities when mothers within a stone’s throw of their meetings were dying shocking deaths.” Across the pond, when Marie Stopes pitched birth control as a technology for respectable middle-class wives Sanger criticised her for, among other things, being “anti-labor”.

Class isn’t the only progressive talking point co-opted by conservatives to attack sexual freedom. In 2015, a group of Republicans wrote an open letter to the Smithsonian demanding the removal of a bust of Margaret Sanger, on grounds that she was a racist who stood for the “extermination” of minorities. The first signatory was Ted Cruz, known for his opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. In 2020, Planned Parenthood bowed to “relentless attacks” from the anti-choice right and removed Sanger’s name from their New York clinic. This was reported on by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, a conservative anti-abortion organisation, with the headline: “Planned Parenthood removes racist founder Margaret Sanger’s name from Manhattan clinic” (ironically, given how hated she is by opponents of abortion, one of the arguments Sanger frequently made for birth control was that it would reduce abortions). Soon after, the head of Planned Parenthood wrote a grovelling article for the New York Times, stopping short of actually calling Sanger racist (since, as they well know, she was not) but saying that they had behaved like an “organisational Karen”, whatever that might mean, and that a failure to denounce her “contributed to America harming Black women and other women of color”. 

The truth is that to the extent to which the American Birth Control Federation (which later became Planned Parenthood) was criticised by civil rights activists at the time, it was for not doing enough to reach out to black communities. Segregation in the South meant that clinics opened there were not accessible to black women, which is why Sanger initiated the Federation’s Negro Project, managed by a board of eminent African American leaders and intellectuals, including W.E.B. Dubois and Mary McLeod Bethune.

Far from being hostile to minorities, Margaret Sanger was an active anti-racist who was praised by Martin Luther King. In 1966, Dr King accepted the Margaret Sanger award for human rights, saying: “There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist - a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions.”

Dr King, like Margaret Sanger, recognised that birth control was a class issue and, by proxy, a race issue. In the same speech he says “Like all poor, Negro and white, [African Americans] have many unwanted children… There is scarcely anything more tragic in human life than a child who is not wanted. That which should be a blessing becomes a curse for parent and child. There is nothing inherent in the Negro mentality which creates this condition. Their poverty causes it.”

It is understandable that Planned Parenthood have distanced themselves from Sanger’s name; the dishonest, revisionist history that conservative activists have cynically spun has no merit, but it is a distraction from their mission and could deter minority women from seeking their services. But it is disappointing that they have legitimised the false association of birth control with racism, since it is black and other minority women who stand to benefit the most from access to family planning. African American women seek abortions at 5 times the rate of white American women, and mortality rates for black mothers are considerably higher than those for whites. In a comprehensive debunking of false narratives about Sanger and race, lawyer and women's rights activist Imani Gandy concludes that “Black women’s reproductive liberation has been weaponized by an anti-choice movement”. At least the outright moralism of Alabaman Justice Tom Baker is honest. Attempts to paint reproductive technologies as somehow ant-feminist, racist or classist are nothing more than cynical co-opting of progressive language to push a regressive agenda. Liberals must not fall for this nonsense.

Freedom from unwanted motherhood is absolutely fundamental to women’s emancipation. The other side of the coin is the ability to become a mother if one wishes. There are already significant financial barriers to accessing fertility treatment in the US, and for Alabamans this just became more pronounced. Those with means will of course travel to other states to seek IVF. Sanger says in her autobiography that she favoured the term “birth control” over “birth limitation”, because she had no wish to impose limits on fertility, just to put control into the hands of women. The fight for control over our sexual and reproductive lives continues, it remains an issue of racial and class justice and, of course, a feminist issue. Indeed, perhaps the most foundational feminist issue there is. As Sanger put it:  “the basis of Feminism might be the right to be a mother regardless of church or state.”

I hesitated to write this because of the extent to which Bryan Caplan is talking past feminist concerns with his essay Don’t Be A Feminist. It's pretty cheeky of him to write a supposed rejoinder to feminists without citing any actual feminist work, and it makes it a little hard to respond, since he's arguing against an imagined position.

Here’s the really fundamental problem with this essay: Caplan wants the question of whether one ought to be a feminist to be empirically decidable. Now, no doubt, political beliefs involve factual beliefs as well as value judgements, but the latter can never be strictly reducible to the former (this is a version of the “is-ought” problem, as first articulated by Hume). Being clear on the epistemological distinction between facts and values is vital for accurately understanding political disagreements. What this essay does (and what feminists have argued that classical economics does more broadly) is smuggle its normative commitments rather than making them explicit.

Most people will notice right away that Caplan is using an unusual definition of feminism: “the view that society generally treats men more fairly than women”. His argument is that regardless of how people define the term “feminism”, this view accurately distinguishes feminists from non-feminists. This not being a generally accepted definition, some people will dismiss the rest of the essay out of hand. But I’m more sympathetic; I think what Caplan is trying to do here is identify the crux of the disagreement between feminists and non-feminists, and I do think crux-seeking is useful for understanding political disagreements! And here’s where I’m not so sympathetic: to accurately identify such a crux, he should have read some actual feminist literature.

It is impossible to empirically determine whether or not a situation is fair without first defining the concept, and fairness is a notoriously difficult idea to pin down. In fact, disputes over what constitutes fairness are at the heart of just about all political philosophy.₁ John Rawls conceives of fairness as comprising several things in order of priority: universal basic rights, effective equality of opportunity, and the acceptance of inequalities only insofar as they benefit the worst off. Robert Nozick argues that fairness has nothing to do with outcomes at all - inequality is perfectly fine as long as it has come about through voluntary exchange and other legitimate processes. 

Bryan Caplan is a self-described libertarian, so I presume he leans towards something like Nozick’s theory of fairness. He hints at this by saying “there is a world of difference between unfairness and inequality.” He is also an economist, and clearly holds to a belief in rational choice theory (RCT) - the idea that people act in their own rational self-interest. This is central to his specific arguments about why women’s relative economic and political disempowerment is not “unfair”. He argues, for example, that the gender pay gap is fine because women prefer domestic work and caring professions and this work just happens to be less well paid (or not paid at all). It is unacceptable, I think, to make this argument and not reference a single feminist economist who disagrees. There is an entire tradition arguing that in fact, work “preferred" by women is systematically undervalued in our society. There is also a rich body of feminist literature arguing against preferentism altogether (the extremely influential Capability Approach was born out of a critique of adaptive preferences). Caplan’s commitment to RCT, belief in the justice of the free market, and lack of concern for outcomes put him at odds with most feminists; if it's a crux he's after, he should seek to understand these foundational disagreements.₂ 

On the actual empirical content of the essay, while I can infer roughly what Caplan means by "fair", I was left in the dark about how he means to quantify it. What does it mean to say one group's treatment is "more fair" than another's? More domains in which unfairness manifests? Higher number of preferences thwarted? Greater magnitude of the consequences of said unfairness? The section of the essay tantalisingly entitled "Aggregating unfairness" makes no effort to spell this out, and indeed is so vague that I can't even speculate as to what he has in mind. He thinks the most salient issues are violent crime and war (affects mostly men) and burden of childcare (affects mostly women), but offers no quantitative or qualitative way of comparing these. It’s also curious that he doesn’t mention abortion rights at all; surely one of the most pressing concerns of feminists in the US, and one that I would expect libertarians to also be exercised by! 

I’ll give Bryan Caplan one thing - I think he's right that feminism is at odds with libertarianism. But, like most self-described feminists, I am not a libertarian. I think that outcomes as well as processes matter, that freedoms in the sense of meaningful capabilities are more important than freedoms in the sense of immediate preference fulfilment, and that preferentism is hopelessly status quo biased. I call myself a feminist because I think that women’s relative political and economic disempowerment points to there being ways in which our institutions and norms disadvantage women. Because I think that reproductive rights and the disproportionate burden of childcare are pressing issues that deserve our political attention (which is not to say that I don’t think there are pressing issues that disproportionately affect men; I don't see it as an adversarial position or a zero-sum game). And because I care deeply about the rights and welfare of women worldwide.₃

Notes

1. The idea alluded to by Caplan in his Aporia podcast that there is a shared folk notion of "fair" is also clearly false. At the very least, people on the left/right side of the political spectrum will often disagree about what is fair, even if they agree about the facts.

2. Some starting points:

   • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory#Criticism

   • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_economics

   • https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/capability-approach/

3. I was surprised by the idea that you ought only claim a feminist identity if there are pressing feminist issues in your own country. Feminism is usually understood as a universal creed, not just a concern for the rights of women domestically. Based on Caplan’s advocacy of open borders I expected a more global, universalist perspective. 

“False consciousness” is a Marxist concept, describing the state of oppressed people who don’t know that they’re oppressed. Second-wave feminists in the 60s popularised “consciousness raising” groups as a wellspring of political activism (note that “woke” and, on the other side of the political spectrum, “red-pilled” are also variations on this metaphor). The idea behind these groups was that when women get together to share their experiences they develop “the idea of doing something politically about aspects of our lives as women that we never thought could be dealt with politically, that we thought we would just have to work out as best we could alone.”₃  A key feminist slogan of the same era was “the personal is political”, and this informed the approach:  “We assume that our feelings are telling us something from which we can learn… that our feelings are saying something political…”₃

Second-wave feminism was hugely productive, securing numerous legal victories (on equal pay, anti-discrimination, divorce law, abortion law, etc.), opening the first rape and domestic violence services, and overhauling social attitudes towards women.₄ Frankly, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit. If you got a group of women together in the 60s to analyse their lives, you would quickly converge on some really significant sex-based injustices. At that point in history, consciousness raising helped women to identify and thereby organise against their systemic oppression and disenfranchisement. 

Another illustration of consciousness raising, from Martha Nussbaum: “In the semi-arid area outside Mahabubnagar, Andhra Pradesh, I talked with women who were severely malnourished, and whose village had no reliable clean water supply. Before the arrival of a government consciousness-raising program, these women apparently had no feeling of anger or protest about their physical situation. They knew no other way. They did not consider their conditions unhealthy or unsanitary, and they did not consider themselves to be malnourished. Now their level of discontent has gone way up: they protest to the local government, asking for clean water, for electricity, for a health visitor.”₅

Is consciousness raising “reverse CBT”? The premise of CBT, which has its origins in Stoic philosophy, is that we can interrogate feelings using reason and evidence. CBT teaches people to recognise common cognitive distortions that worsen mental health, while consciousness raising teaches people to recognise structural features of society that impact their lives. In a way, they have a lot in common: both encourage the adoption of a more accurate worldview and resultant attitudinal tuning. The apparent tension arises because the latter tends to address magnification (the exaggeration of negatives), the former minimisation. The risk in both cases is that you overcorrect.₆

To say that contemporary Western progressives are overcorrecting is of course to beg the question to some degree. But it is telling that so much discourse revolves around microaggressions: by definition, very minor harms. The personal can be political, but this is not to say that we ought to politicise (and problematise) every interaction that we have. The teachings of second-wave feminists (and other radical civil rights activists of that era) have been fully assimilated into progressive thought without appreciation of the changing context. All the gains of the last 50 years were for nothing if women today feel just as oppressed as they ever were; clearly, that isn’t the case.

Beverly Jones wrote in 1968 that “[y]ou don’t get radicalised fighting other people’s battles''.₇ Movement building was based on encouraging all women to see themselves as victims of sex-based oppression. It’s easy to see how these exhortations have influenced the tendencies in social justice culture to “take things extremely personally”: if we agree with Beverly Jones, our only options are to leave the most marginalised groups to fight their own battles, or persuade more people to see themselves as victims.₈ But manufacturing victimisation where there is none does damage not only to individual mental health but also to political thought; far better to appreciate your own agency and put it to use on the most pressing causes.

1. Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest

2. Clementine Morrigan on Instagram

3. Kathie Sarachild in Feminist Revolution

4. 1970s Feminism Timeline

5. Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Options

6. There is a misperception that the Stoic locus of change is always internal, but in fact Stoics have always taken a view on politics. See, e.g, The Ideal Polity of the Early Stoics 

7. Towards a Female Liberation Movement

8. I find it a little ironic that so many radical thinkers, typically opposed to capitalism, endorse a version of the economists’ creed that people act in their own self-interest.

Maternal morbidity, defined by the WHO as "any health condition attributed to and/or aggravated by pregnancy and childbirth that has a negative impact on the woman’s wellbeing", is a leading cause of DALYs worldwide, and although progress has been made on the contribution of mortality to this total, the same progress has not been seen on morbidity. That is, years of life lost are decreasing, but years lived with disabilities are plateauing or increasing.

I was pleased to receive an honorable mention and small cash prize for my submission on this topic. My full essay is available here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pxrN28gfn26Z7dzch/new-cause-area-maternal-morbidity