Loretta Lynn Once Said She Would Have Used ‘The Pill’ If She’d Known About It: ‘It’s Hard for a Woman to Have so Many Kids’

Country music legend Loretta Lynn sang a song about birth control, “The Pill,” so controversial that some radio stations still won’t play it. Some felt her take on the plights of pregnancy and the benefits of oral contraceptives weren’t compatible with their values.

However, Lynn didn’t back down from the message in the song from the ’70s, revealing she loved her six children, but she would have been on the pill if she had known about it.

Loretta Lynn’s song ‘The Pill’ is still a controversial classic

“The Pill” was never a popular hit with country music radio, though it was Lynn’s highest-charting song on pop radio. Time reported in October 2022, “According to Luminate (formerly Nielsen Music), the song was played just once by a country radio station in the U.S. in 2022, even though it’s a classic of the genre.”

While “The Pill” became one of the more controversial tunes in Lynn’s catalog of songs, she didn’t think it was as bad as some of its peers. “It isn’t as dirty as some of my other songs,” she confessed in an interview with Time.

The 1975 tune’s lyrics include: “All these years I’ve stayed at home / While you had all your fun / And every year that’s gone by / Another baby’s come / There’s a gonna be some changes made / Right here on nursery hill / You’ve set this chicken your last time / ‘Cause now I’ve got the pill.”

Loretta Lynn she would have used ‘the pill’ if she’d known about it

Lynn loved her six kids but said she would have used birth control if she had known about it because being pregnant wasn’t always easy for her. More specifically, she told NPR’s Fresh Air, “I sure didn’t like it when I got pregnant a few times.”

“It’s hard for a woman to have so many kids. And at the time, I guess I had four. And then I got pregnant and had the twins,” she explained. “But I was a little angry. … If I’d had [the pill] I would have used it. ‘Cause back when I was having all the kids, we didn’t have birth-control pills. Or if we did, I didn’t know anything about them.”

She told Time, “I had four kids before I was 18. If I had had the pill, I would’ve been popping it like popcorn.”

“The pill is good for people,” she also said (per American Songwriter). “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.”

Loretta Lynn said she would have picked ‘The Pill’ over the Grand Ole Opry

In an interview with Playgirl (per Time), Lynn said she would have defended “The Pill” against anyone, even the Grand Ole Opry.

“I sung it three times at the Grand Ole Opry one night, and I found out a week later that the Grand Ole Opry had a three-hour meeting, and they weren’t going to let me [sing it] …,” she said.

“If they hadn’t let me sing the song, I’d have told them to shove the Grand Ole Opry!”