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Advocates. Prominent physicians who have been outspoken advocates of birth control include the late Abraham Jacobi (former President of the American Medical Association), S. Adolphus Knopf, William J. Robinson, A. L. Goldwater, Ira S. Wile, Donald R. Hooker, Reynold A. Spaeth, Lawrence Litchfield, Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane, Lord Dawson (King George's physician).
Other prominent professional and social leaders who have been active supporters of birth control are Herbert B. Swope, Frank I. Cobb, Arthur T. Vance, Heywood Broun, B. W. Huebsch, George Haven Putnam, Sinclair Lewis, Judges John Stelk, Benjamin B. Lindsey, William H. Wadhams, Mrs. Felix M. Warburg, Miss Jeannette Rankin, Lionel Sutro, Airs. Juliet B. Rublee, Winston Churchill, Mrs. Willard Straight, Mrs. Norman deR. Whitehouse, Mrs. C. C. Rumsey, Mrs. Amos R. E. Pinchot, Mrs. Julius Rosenwald.
Birth control has always been more or less closely associated with Malthusian doctrines of population, and many leading biologists and social scientists see in it the only practicable solution to the problem of subsistence, though most scientists are reserved in their support of the movement, and would stipulate certain eugenic safeguards. Among such thinkers might be mentioned Thomas Nixon Carver, Edward M. East, David Starr Jordan, G. Stanley Hall, Raymond Pearl, Franklin H. Giddings, Edward A. Ross, Irving Fisher, H. H. Goddard, Warner Fite, George H. Palmer, William P. Montague, Roswell H. Johnson, C C Little, Samuel J. Holmes, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, (Theodore) Lothrop Stoddard, Charles W. Eliot, Charles B. Davenport, Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Cox, Leonard Darwin, Dean Inge.
Arguments Con. Opponents of birth control base their objections chiefly on the danger of widespread immorality if contraceptive information is freely available, especially to unmarried persons. The fear of pregnancy they believe to be the most effective check to promiscuity with the majority of people. Birth control is artificial, unnatural and an offense against the laws of God, in the same class with abortion and infanticide. On the medical side, there is also the fact that some methods are injurious to health.
Opponents. Prominent objectors to birth control are less vocal than in the past, but the late Theodore Roosevelt's protest against "race suicide" is well known. Many churchmen are outspoken against the movement, as, for instance, Archbishops Mundelein of Chicago and Hayes of New York, Dr. John Roach Straton and other Catholic and Fundamentalist leaders. Justice John Ford of New York, John S. Sumner of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, Commissioner of Accounts David Hirshfield of New York and Health Commissioner Herman N. Bundesen of Chicago are other leading opponents.
*Anthony Comstock was Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. He died in 1915.