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Catholics and Contraception: An American History. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. xiii + 337 pp. $29.95 cloth.
In Catholics and Contraception: An American History, Leslie Tentler provocatively claims that the recent history of American Catholicism, "can only be understood by taking birth control into account" (4). In this meticulous, mature book, Tentler proves her point, using the Catholic ban on contraception to illuminate new detail as well as subtle shadings within the twentiethcentury American Catholicism. Tentler traces the historical development of Catholic teaching about contraception from delicately worded late-nineteenthcentury sermons about the "sin of Onanism" through the 1968 promulgation of Humanae Vitae, the papal encyclical that affirmed the Catholic ban on birth control in the wake of the emergence of the anovular pill. Placing the evolution of Catholic teaching on contraception alongside developments within Catholic popular and clerical culture throughout the twentieth century, Tentler effectively documents diverse ways that contraception intersected with and affected practices, institutions, and relationships within American Catholicism.
Tentler contends that the issue of authority was central to conflicts within the Church over the permissibility of contraception. Because the Church's ban on birth control was primarily enforced through sacramental practice that linked regular confession to frequent reception of the Eucharist, Tentler argues that the effect of the contraceptive ban on Catholics was most pronounced in the confessional, where lay Catholics faced standards of religious piety that at times conflicted with the realities of family life, and where priests internally struggled with enforcing a teaching that...