Women’s reproductive rights are often centered in current conversations about access to birth control, especially by progressive religious activists. Advocates for birth control frequently contend that women should have the ability to choose if and when they want children. Yet concern about women’s rights had little, if anything, to do with early debates over legalizing birth control in the 1930s. Instead, as sociologist Melissa J. Wilde asserts in Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion, decisions to support legalizing access to birth control had more to do with “whether [religious groups] were believers in the white supremacist Read more