Medicine: Voluntary Parenthood

Birth Control as an open, organized movement instead of a furtive, unmentionable but widespread practice appeared again last week when the American Birth Control League held, in Manhattan, its first general conference in five years. The calibre of the sponsors suggested a changing social attitude—the wife of Morgan Partner Thomas W. Lament, the wife of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mrs. Cornelius N. Bliss, Mr. and Mrs. Harry H. Flagler, Sherwood Eddy, Norman Thomas, Mrs. Stanley McCormick, Harry Emerson Fosdick. . . . The conferees deplored the fact that there are only 29 centres in the U. S. where birth control information is given— four places in California (Los Angeles, Oakland, Pasadena, San Francisco), one in Colorado (Denver), eight in Illinois (all in Chicago), one in Maryland (Baltimore’s Bureau of Contraceptive Advice, only one outside of New York using an unmasked name), one each in Detroit, Minneapolis and Newark, ten in New York, one in Cleveland. The conferees pointed with satisfaction to recent endorsements of Birth Control —by the Junior League of New York City, the Universalist Church (last month), the Congregational Ministers of Connecticut, the Central Conference of America Rabbis (last June), the English National Council of Women (last month), the New York City Federation of Women’s Clubs, the New York League of Women Voters.* Disclosed for the first time last week to the general U. S. public was the fact that Russian experimenters have successfully inoculated women against pregnancy. Four or five doses of serum made from spermatazoa has made women infertile for from five to six months, when further injections continued the temporary sterility. Chief mover of last week’s conference was Mrs. Frederick Robertson Jones, wife of a famed Manhattan insurance economist. She has been president of the Ameri-can Birth Control League since Mrs. Margaret Higgins Sanger resigned in 1928. Brown-haired, slim, energetic, mother of two college daughters (Bryn Mawr, Yassar) herself a Radcliffe graduate, she has made Birth Control a learned, professional, socialite movement.

*Members of the Pennsylvania League of Women Voters were affronted at their convention in Pittsburgh last week when Manhattan’s Dr. James F. Cooper urged them to “have children by choice, not by chance.” fMrs. Sanger, Chairman of the Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, was busy at Columbus, Ohio, last week, arguing for permissive Ohio laws, at least for the canceling of inhibitive laws.