Laura Kelly, <i>Contraception and Modern Ireland: A Social History, c. 1922–92</i> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. 350. ISBN 978-1-108-96977-2. $89.99 (hardcover).

The last several years have seen a growth in scholarship examining the history of contraception and abortion in modern Ireland.The works of Cara Delay on the history of abortion in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Ireland, Lindsey Earner Byrne and Diane Urquhart on the abortion journey and a new monograph by one of Ireland's foremost historians, Mary E. Daly, on fertility control in twentieth-century Ireland have greatly expanded our understanding of these complex histories.This monograph by Laura Kelly of the University of Strathclyde is a significant contribution to the field and adds substantially to the study of social history in Ireland and Britain.Kelly's book explores contraception in Ireland across a seventy-year period, from the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the Health (Family Planning) Amendment Act of 1992.She explores access to contraception for different generations, sexual knowledge and morality, birth control practices and the impact of the Pill, the significant influence of the Catholic Church both locally and through papal encyclicals, feminist and family-planning activism, and the development of the pro-life movement in response to concerns about increases access to birth control and abortion.The monograph arises from a Wellcome Trust research fellowship and the extensive reading and research that has driven the work is very evident.Unlike the works of Daly and Delay, Kelly uses oral-history methodologies alongside archival research.She persuasively argues for the value of oral history in assisting the pursuit of the history of experience and for integrating women into historical scholarship (p.13).It presents opportunities and challenges for a topic of such an intimate private nature, which can be rendered invisible in the written record.Kelly is interested in the experiences of men and women as they navigated family planning and birth control access across this period of change.Previous works have focused more on policy reform, or the work of activist organizations, and Kelly's key contribution is the bottom-up approach that centres the voices of ordinary men and women who were of fertile age in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s or 1980s.She conducted interviews with thirty men and seventy-three women born before 1955 about their experiences with birth control and family planning.These came from a range of socio-economic backgrounds and almost all were or had been married.Kelly is reflective on her methodology and its gaps and limitations, together with her own positionality as interviewer.The candid nature of the conversations is evident in the quotes extracted in the volume.Kelly perceptively notes that her interviews coincided with or followed soon after the Irish abortion referendum in 2018 which had resulted in greater openness in telling stories about reproductive