Moral Barriers to Birth Control Access: How the Pill Changed Dutch Women's Lives - When Religion Did Not Get in the Way

Abstract: This paper shows that the potential impact of access to oral contraceptives is non-universally distributed across women because of moral frictions. On the demand side, we show that area-level beliefs about the pill affected the extent to which women benefitted from the pill after it became available to minors in 1970 in the Netherlands. While controlling for these demand-side factors, we study the role of supply-side frictions. Any short- and long-run benefits from the pill cancel out if more than 28% of health professionals around a woman at the time of liberalization were religiously opposed to the pill.

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