Increased access to birth control does not seem to have decreased the number of unplanned pregnancies. Instead, as contraceptive technology improved over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the percentage of non-marital births in the US rose. This column uses a marital search model to make sense of this seeming paradox, and concludes that advancements in contraception led to more premarital sex, an increase in out-of-wedlock births, and a decline in the fraction of the married population.