Islam & the Modern World · How the West Changed
The sexual revolution and the pill
Handle with care. Handle with care: many people you speak to will have a personal history here. Never make it about their past.
In short
- 1.The pill (approved in the US in 1960) separated sex from childbearing for the first time at population scale.
- 2.The promised results were fewer unwanted pregnancies and stronger marriages; researchers across the political spectrum note that out-of-wedlock births and family breakdown rose sharply instead.
- 3.Islam's answer is not repression but easy, early, well-supported marriage.
The claim being examined
The 1960s sexual revolution is usually told as pure liberation: contraception separated sex from childbearing and freed people, especially women, from fear.
The Islamic position
Islam does not treat desire as shameful; it channels it into marriage, where responsibility, lineage and provision are attached to it. Removing the consequences did not remove the costs, it moved them.
Analysis
The US Food and Drug Administration approved the combined oral contraceptive pill for contraceptive use in 1960. Two economists at Harvard, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz (Journal of Political Economy, 2002), showed the pill's decisive effect on women's career and marriage timing. On the unintended side, the economist George Akerlof and colleagues (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1996) argued that by making pregnancy avoidable, the pill removed the social expectation of marriage when pregnancy occurred — the "shotgun marriage" — and that out-of-wedlock births consequently rose rather than fell. The US National Center for Health Statistics records the share of American births to unmarried mothers rising from roughly 5 per cent in 1960 to around 40 per cent by the 2010s; UK figures from the Office for National Statistics show a comparable rise in births outside marriage. Be accurate about what this shows: it is a correlation embedded in a very large social change, not a single-cause proof. The Islamic argument does not depend on the statistics anyway. It is that sex carries consequences by design — children, attachment, obligation — and a society that engineers away the visible consequence still pays the hidden one.
From the Qur'an
وَلَا تَقْرَبُوا الزِّنَا ۖ إِنَّهُ كَانَ فَاحِشَةً وَسَاءَ سَبِيلًا
Do not go near zina. It is an immorality and an evil way.
وَمِنْ آيَاتِهِ أَنْ خَلَقَ لَكُم مِّنْ أَنفُسِكُمْ أَزْوَاجًا لِّتَسْكُنُوا إِلَيْهَا وَجَعَلَ بَيْنَكُم مَّوَدَّةً وَرَحْمَةً
Among His signs is that He created for you spouses from yourselves, so that you may find rest in them, and He placed between you affection and mercy.
From the Sunnah
O young people, whoever among you is able to marry, let him marry; it lowers the gaze and guards chastity. Whoever is not able, let him fast, for it is a shield for him.
Sources
George A. Akerlof, Janet Yellen and Michael Katz, QJE (1996) · Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, JPE (2002) · US National Center for Health Statistics · UK Office for National Statistics, Births in England and Wales · Akerlof, Yellen & Katz, "An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States", Quarterly Journal of Economics 111:2 (1996)
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