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Access to birth control in early 20th-century Ireland

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Photograph of a laptop on a desk. The laptop screen shows a live event with the speaker Laura Kelly. There is a red telephone icon with other video call icons in the top left-hand corner of the screen. Laura has brown hair with a fringe. She is wearing a red top with a large beaded necklace. Around the laptop, there is a vase with sprigs of pink blossom and a glass bottle of water next to a glass cup.
Exploring Research: Dr Laura Kelly, Photo: Kathleen Arundell. Portrait: Steven Pocock. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).

What you’ll do

Watch a recording of Dr Laura Kelly talking about the experiences of Irish men and women trying to access contraception in the early 20th century. 

You will learn how they attempted to resist the legal and moral bans on birth control through an exploration of personal letters written to the British birth-control campaigner Marie Stopes.  

The talk reveals the everyday challenges that ‘ordinary’ Irish people faced. It will explore how many people believed a lack of access to birth control negatively impacted their health, and this motivated their desire to access effective contraception. 

Dates

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Past

Need to know

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Auto-captioned

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About your speaker

Black and white photographic headshot of Dr Laura Kelly

Dr Laura Kelly

(she/her)

Laura Kelly is a senior lecturer in the History of Health and Medicine at the University of Strathclyde. She is a co-director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH) and a member of the Scottish Oral History Centre (SOHC). Laura is an expert on gender history and the social history of medicine in 19th- and 20th-century Ireland. She has recently finished researching a Wellcome-funded project on the history of birth control in 20th-century Ireland.