Reflections on the death of Mary ‘May’ McGee

Mary ‘May’ McGee died last week at the age of 81. She earned a significant place in Irish social and legal history in 1973 when the Supreme Court ruled that the decision whether or not to use contraception was a private matter between husband and wife and the State had no right to interfere with it. This was regarded then and ever since as a landmark case on the road to making Ireland a more liberal place.

Upon the death of Mary McGee many pieces appeared in the papers celebrating her life. Her case arose because McGee and her husband, Seamus – they married in 1968 – already had two children by January 1970 and then became pregnant with twins who she gave birth to at the end of that year. Doctors warned her against becoming pregnant again because her pregnancies had been so difficult and posed risks to her life and health.

Therefore, she and her husband, Seamus, were advised to use a spermicidal jelly to prevent another pregnancy. The spermicide had to be imported, but under Irish law, this was not allowed and therefore was seized by customs.

Change

This came at a time when there was growing public pressure to allow contraception. A law had been passed in 1937 which did not forbid people from using contraceptives as such, but did ban their importation, manufacture or sale. A high-profile campaign was raging to have this law lifted led by people as such journalist Mary Kenny, who, of course, has a long-running column in this newspaper.

After the spermicide was seized by customs, the McGees took a case, lost in the High Court, but then won in the Supreme Court.

The couple actually had two more children following the case anyway, a boy in 1980 and a girl in 1981. Seamus then had a vasectomy to ensure May did not become pregnant again.

Upon Mrs McGee’s death, people were reminded of the sort of place we once were, namely one in which the Catholic Church dominated many areas of our lives, including even the bedroom.

As Olivia O’Leary, a young woman at the time of the 1973 Supreme Court ruling wrote in The Irish Times last week, the decision “struck a massive blow in the long struggle to release Irish women’s health from the stranglehold of Roman Catholic Church teaching.”

Bit by bit the law around contraception became more liberal. At first only married couples were allowed to buy contraception, but by 1985 anyone could.

A world that banned contraception is now utterly unimaginable to anyone under a certain age. Why would any country ban contraception and were such bans peculiar to the Catholic Church and to Catholic countries?

This helped to inspire the McGee case here a few years later, and the Connecticut ruling, having created a right to privacy, was then used by the US Supreme Court in 1973”

No, such bans were not peculiar to Catholic countries. For instance, proudly secular France, which went out of its way to minimise the influence of the Church over public life, did not legalise contraception until 1967, only a few years before the McGee case.

France had banned contraception in 1920. Why would it do this when there was no religious motivation? A big part of the answer lies in what had ended two years before, namely World War One. In that war, 1.4 million French, almost all of them young men, had died fighting in the trenches.

Even before the war, France had a low birth rate by the standards of the time, and the German population had grown much faster. Therefore, France wanted French couples to have more babies.

Across America, various states banned contraception, whether they had large Catholic populations or not. These bans really only began to be lifted in the 1960s and the last of them went only in 1972.

A case before the US Supreme Court in 1965 saw the ban on contraception lifted in Connecticut on the grounds that married couples had a right to privacy. This helped to inspire the McGee case here a few years later, and the Connecticut ruling, having created a right to privacy, was then used by the US Supreme Court in 1973 to create a right to abortion.

This is what partly prompted the move to insert the 8th amendment into our Constitution. The concern was that the right to privacy created by the McGee case could be used to legalise abortion here as well.

Concerns

But the point is that laws against contraceptives were not unique to Catholic countries. As mentioned, secular France banned them and so did many Protestant countries. Until about the 1930s, Catholic and Protestants were agreed that artificial contraception was wrong because the purpose of sex was to unite a couple but also to be open to the possibility of having children. Couples were expected to abstain when a woman was ovulating if they wanted to avoid pregnancy, although as a form of birth control that is only about as effective as the condom.

They say this mentality creates a world in which sexual morality plays into men’s hands more than women’s”

There was also a fear that legalising contraception would effectively license sex outside marriage, which is obviously what happened. Not only was sex separated from marriage, it was also separated from love or any form of commitment. Now, sex-within-marriage-only, was replaced by anything-goes-between-consenting-adults. The consenting adults could be total strangers to each other.

High profile modern-day British writers like Louise Perry and Mary Harrington criticise what was once called ‘the contraceptive mentality’ from a secular perspective. They say this mentality creates a world in which sexual morality plays into men’s hands more than women’s. The long complaint about men is that they are often more interested in sex than commitment, and it has now become much harder for women to demand commitment from men (never mind marriage) in return for sex. The old fear of becoming pregnant meant women could demand commitment first.

Perry and Harrington admit this is liberating for women at a certain level, and they do not want to see contraception banned again, but they point out that sexual morality today does impose certain emotional costs on many women.

Impact

The irony is that the (literally) free availability of contraception has not reduced the abortion rate. Last year, almost 11,000 abortions took place in Ireland and over 200,000 in Britain. Abortion is seen by many as a back-up to contraception.

So yes, the McGee case was a landmark one on the road to a more liberal, secular Ireland. But our law against contraception was neither uniquely Irish nor uniquely Catholic, and the repeal of this law has changed society in ways that are not as unambiguously good as we like to pretend.