Piety and the Pill: American Orthodox Judaism and the Contraception Debate in the Postwar Era

In 1952, the Orthodox Union published a heated exchange. The topic was Judaism's attitude toward birth control. In the first installment, an Orthodox Jewish physician penned an essay on a "major problem of today from a Torah viewpoint." For this writer, contraceptives were indeed a considerable conundrum. The Bible, after all, explained Dr. Willy Hofmann, charges mankind to "be fruitful and multiply" (Gen. 1:28). The author allowed that there might be special dispensation for dire health needs. Yet based on "quotations and explanations from the Talmud and Scriptures," Hofmann asserted, "it is quite obvious that Jewish tradition and viewpoint cannot consider planned parenthood for social or economic reasons."¹ His forceful conclusion fit the expectations of tradition-bound faith leaders in the United States who feared the impact of this new contraception.²

Others disagreed. An Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn contended that Hofmann's approach was misguided and failed to understand the religious significance of modern scientific innovation. Alluding to widening fears of global overpopulation, the letter writer, perhaps aware of similar views among Protestant theologians, suggested that God had provided more reliable forms of contraception because "He now finds it necessary to reduce a number of His children through Birth Control."³ Yet another writer, Rabbi Ephraim Sturm of the National Council of Young Israel, sided with Hofmann on birth control and condemned his interlocutor for "spreading atheistic thought."⁴ Sturm's censure was freighted with "anti-secularist" and "pro-family" language that would have resonated with Orthodox elites and other religious leaders of American tradition-bound faiths. He demanded that the Orthodox Union resist the "democratic talk about tolerance"—the only rationale he could think of that would have justified publication of the letter—and prevent birth control supporters from bringing "idols into my temple."⁵

Two components of this correspondence stand out. First, in regular Talmudic jurisprudence, rabbinical scholars marshal dozens of citations and analysis of those texts to prove their position. This is the stuff of an elite literary genre: scholarly, sober and as dispassionate as possible. But this exchange on birth control, with its references to American pluralism, secularization, and overcrowding, was anchored in sociological and political terms rather than typical rabbinical rhetoric. Despite Willy Hofmann's insistence that his position was backed by citations from the Bible and the Talmud, he did not include prooftexts or offer religious "explanations." Hofmann, instead, cited likeminded leaders within the Catholic Church! The other letter writers also steered away from engaging in careful reading of traditional Jewish sources. To be sure, sociological factors have always, to some degree or another, influenced Jewish legal decision making, known as Halakhah.⁶ Yet, these forces usually hover in the background; explicit use of this form of argument around birth control in the Orthodox Union publication, in lieu of traditional Jewish sources, was striking.

Second, and perhaps even more surprising, the debate excluded female voices. Their absence was noticeable; women had regularly contributed to this Orthodox magazine since its formation in the 1940s. The silence among Orthodox women contrasts with female peers from other religious communities who played a prominent role in public discourse on contraception. For American Christians, the birth control debate was wrapped up in critical questions of religious authority and modern sensibilities, often obscuring other important questions about women's bodies and rights. The reticence of Orthodox Jewish women, though, was probably not the result of pious modesty. Nor did it reflect agreement with the rabbinate's generally negative view on contraceptive use. Orthodox women spoke up, for instance, to challenge the rabbinical establishment on the place of women in the workplace.⁷ The available sociological data suggests that Orthodox women used contraceptives, ignoring the positions taken by their religious leaders. Catholic and Protestant women wrote articles and published letters—oftentimes under pseudonyms to avoid shaming—about the religious propriety of birth control, its impact on their lives and bodies, as well as the awkwardness, in the case of Catholics, of an all-male celibate priestship making religious decisions that had the greatest...