Slate: “That foretold explosion arrived in Lynn’s own music most noisily with 1975’s “The Pill,” which had been held back by label MCA since she first recorded it in 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade but the same year that Eisenstadt v. Baird guaranteed the right to contraceptives to all American adults. It finds a married woman crowing delightedly about being set free from constant pregnancy and childbirth: “All I’ve seen of this old world/ Is a bed and a doctor bill/ I’m tearin’ down your brooder house/ ’Cause now I’ve got the pill!”
Though it wasn’t primarily a Lynn composition (she’s often afforded a credit, but it was mainly written by Lorene Allen, Don McHan, and T. D. Bayless), it certainly articulated her own point of view. As she famously told People magazine in 1975: “If I’d had the pill back when I was havin’ babies I’d have taken ’em like popcorn. The pill is good for people. I wouldn’t trade my kids for anyone’s. But I wouldn’t necessarily have had six and I sure would have spaced ’em better.” In her bestselling 1976 memoir Coal Miner’s Daughter, the source of the acclaimed 1980 biopic starring Sissy Spacek, she also said she supported abortion rights, though she wouldn’t have had one herself.
The song was banned by dozens of country radio stations, and denounced by religious preachers, but if anything, those efforts to suppress it might have given its signal a boost: It became her highest-charting solo hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and in a 1975 Playgirl interview, Lynn said a rural doctor once told her that its message about birth control “reached more people out in the country and done more than all the government programs put together.”
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Her legacy can’t be reduced to her social-comment songs, just as those tracks should not be narrowed down to message anthems. Still, her refusal to resign herself to the life that was presented to women, to the strictures the music industry wanted to exert, and to the orthodoxies of any political movement, all of which crackles through those songs, probably is her most lasting gift to the music—carried forward by artists such as Reba McEntire, the Chicks, Miranda Lambert, Kacey Musgraves, Margo Price, Ashley McBryde, and countless others who are still seldom welcomed on country radio, which mostly continues to refuse to play “The Pill” even today.”