16/07/13
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15984258Above is a link to a BBC article on 'How the contraceptive pill changed Britain,' written by Rebecca Cafe.
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| Source: 'How the contraceptive pill changed Britain'- Rebecca Cafe (BBC News 2011) |
The article briefly outlines what the author considers the biggest effects of the invention of the Pill to be, namely the movement towards co-habitation, the reduction in the 'necessity of marrying to have sex and the lowering the incidence of shot-gun marriages.'
'According to the latest prescribing review, two million women take the pill in England and Wales. It is estimated that 70% of all women in Britain have used the pill at some stage in their lives.'
"[The Pill] has enabled individual's- women and men- to control their reproductive health and to choose when they want to have [a child], so I think from a social point of view, it's bound to have had an impact on families and relationships." -Tracey McNeill, Marie Stopes vice-president and director of UK and EuropeThe article also highlights that economists such as George Akerlof, Janet Yellen and Michael Katz believe that 'courtship' used to involve an implied promise that is a woman became pregnant, the man would marry her, but as women are now able to control when they had children, the implied promise disappeared. They wrote in a study on the effects of the pill:
"The pill encouraged the delay of marriage through routes such as reducing the necessity of marrying to have sex and lowering the incidence of shotgun marriages." -The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Issue 2, May 1996.Jane Falkingham, the director of ESRC Centre for Population Change (CPC) agrees that 'the pill was part of a social change that separated partnerships and children.' 'In Britain in the early 1960s, fewer than one in 100 adults under 50 were estimated to have cohabited, whereas nowadays one in six do'- according to a report by the CRC.
The article was really useful in steering me towards the issues of shot-gun marriages and cohabitation, subjects I will research in much more depth.
