Daddy Issues All the Way Down

When Mary Eberstadt first published Adam and Eve After the Pill: The Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution in 2012, she cast a critical eye on reproductive dynamics in the post-liberation world, offering a contrarian message about the large-scale consequences of a mass-produced contraceptive device, the birth-control pill, that would enable couples to blithely separate sexual activity from its natural procreative end. Many weren’t ready to hear what she had to say.

That was then. A lot has changed in the decade since. As Eberstadt acknowledges in the book’s updated version, Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited, the social unrest of the last 10 years has primed a rising skepticism of liberation’s false fruits, sometimes among the most unlikely sources.

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