Right of Reply: Valerie Passmore

A woman who has never used it responds to Deborah Orr's recent praise for the Pill

DEBORAH ORR makes the astounding claim ("The myth of sexual freedom", 8 January) that the contraceptive pill is the single most important invention of the 20th century. What? More important than, say, flight, antibiotics, tampons, computers, sliced bread, plastics, nuclear fission?

It has become an unquestioned cliche that the Pill arrived in the 1960s and changed the world. As one of the four fifths of the fertile female population of this country who don't use this form of contraception I find the claim risible.

Is it Deborah Orr's impression that before the 1960s women were either celibate or producing dozens of children? The decline in fertility and women's sexual liberation has infinitely more complex economic and social causes than the mechanics of one form of contraception.

To state baldly, with no supporting argument or fact, that this marginal birth control device triggered "sexual liberation, then feminism and now the remaking of our ideas about family structure in the West" is a breathtaking claim. Isn't she aware of Marie Stopes' long (pre-Pill) pioneering work in birth control?

Ms Orr actually states that birth control in its entirety is an invention of this century. But, of course, people have been trying to limit their fertility for millennia: the ancient Egyptians are known to have used contraception, and Casanova recommended half a lemon used as a diaphragm. The condom has been used almost universally.

Yet another sweeping statement of the author is that with the Pill "all responsibility for contraception was dumped into the arms of women".

Who does she suppose was previously responsible for using the diaphragm or Dutch cap and the douche; and attempts at procuring early miscarriages with hot baths, gin, slippery elm and other folk remedies passed down through the ages for ending unwanted pregnancies?

Frankly, the invention of the automatic pet-feeder has had a more liberating effect on my life than the Pill ever did.