Medicine: Birth Controllers on Parade

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London's Dr. Norman Haire, copresident of the World League for Sexual Reform, in Manhattan: "Father Coughlin doesn't care how much the children suffer on earth, so long as they are prepared to pick up their little harps and sing Hallelujah."

Next day, with a fresh rose in his lapel, Johns Hopkins Gynecologist-Naturalist- Botanist-Historian-Professor Howard Atwood Kelly, 75, piously denounced "a certain mechanical meddling with married life which is abhorrent to me. . . . Think of an elaborate conference on Birth Control in the Mayflower Hotel! Such a thing would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. And a great social gathering, too, at which details were talked over. Disgusting! ... I have nine children, and 14 grandchildren. . . ."

Dr. William Gerry Morgan, onetime president of the American Medical Association, telegraphed his "continued vigorous opposition" to let-up on the Federal law which pronounces it a crime for doctors to send out birth control information or material by mail.

Cried Dr. Prentiss Wilson, Washington obstetrician: "The American Medical Association comes into the debate with un clean hands. It has refused as a political organization to study that which as a medical society it lists as one of the major problems confronting women."

The House Judiciary Committee decided that it had heard enough Birth Control talk for this season, closed the hearing, pigeonholed the bill.

Mrs. Sanger rented a Washington house from which she planned to campaign all winter.

Although the women got nothing but publicity out of their parade to Congress, their propaganda and a gradual change in U. S. mores had produced local results throughout the land. Examples:

1) One hundred and forty birth control clinics in 66 cities of 27 States.

2) Thirty States which have no limiting statute on the dissemination of contraceptive information.

3) Sixteen States which with varying restrictions specifically permit the medical profession to give out information on contraception.

4) Only one State (Mississippi) which specifically forbids doctors to give the information.

5) Only one State (Connecticut) which specifically forbids the use of contraceptives.

6) Commercialization of contraceptives has ceased to be clandestine. Stella Bloch Hanau of the Birth Control Review says that in the vicinity of New York alone 300 manufacturers are making contraceptives of one sort or another. Peddlers hawk material on subway platforms. A 1932 survey of western Florida showed that one form of contraceptive was being sold in 376 gasoline stations, garages, restaurants, soda fountains, barber shops, pool rooms, cigar stands, news stands, shoe shine parlors, grocery stores. Slot machines for dispensing exist in several states. Contraceptives are now advertised in such magazines as Outdoor Life, Eagle Magazine, Illustrated Mechanics and Locomotive Engineers' Journal.

*In the Mayflower Hotel where the birth controllers last week conducted an American Conference on Birth Control & National Recovery. was on exhibit a room full of 100 brands of contraceptives, shipped illegally from Manhattan.

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