Moral barriers to birth control access: How the pill changed Dutch women's lives - When religion did not get in the way

We investigate how religious beliefs affected the take up of the birth control pill and impacted women's outcomes using the 1970 liberalization of oral contraceptives in the Netherlands. We first document a massive and immediate drop in fertility among minor women, aged 21 or younger, for whom access restrictions were most drastically lifted. We then evaluate how area level social norms - as proxied by votes for religiously opposed political parties - influenced pill adoption by examining its impact on female fertility control and human capital formation. We find that younger women who grew up... Mehr ...