Birth Control

Lord Dawson of Penn, personal physician to the British Royal Household and to Edward of Wales,* last week testified that birth control was an excellent thing. Said he: "To ask this generation to go back to the helter-skelter method of having families is like crying for the moon." He could find no evidence of physical or moral harm from the practice of birth control, nor did he have any respect for "gloomy forebodings as to the break-up of family life."

However, this was no new thing for the Right Honorable Lord Bertrand Edward Dawson, first Baron Dawson of Penn, to say. Famed a generation ago (he is now in his 60's) for his work and books on gastrointestinal diseases, he advocated intelligent control of conception from the first stirrings of the movement for birth control. In 1921 he wrote his Love, Marriage & Birth Control.

History. Mrs. Margaret Sanger* invented the phrase "birth control" in her The Woman Rebel (1914). But Mrs. Annie Besant, who has since abandoned the social rebelling of her young matronhood for theosophy and the patronage of Jiddu Krishnamurti (TIME, July 12, 1926), really started this purely modern movement. That was in 1877 when she was prosecuted in England for selling pamphlets on contraceptives. English wives theretofore knew nothing of them; English husbands regarded them as exotic refinements of bawdiness. No English wives who bore children on the duodecimal system learned that any protection existed. They asked their gossips, they told their gossips, what little information disseminated through the country. Women of the upper class learned fairly accurate data; their birth rates declined quickly. Women of the lower social levels received faulty and sometimes harmful instruction. A Malthusian League was formed.*

Mrs. Sanger, a Manhattan graduate nurse, first married in 1900 when she was 17, began her crusade for contraceptives in 1915. She has since been the most potent leader of the movement throughout the world, founding the American Birth Control League in 1921 and, later, similar associations in Japan, China and India.

In England the movement was taking care of itself. There the National Council of Public Morals in 1916 established the National Birth Rate Commission with 43 members representing medicine, science, economics, statistics, education and religion. Birth control, the control of population, has all those aspects.

Of them religion has been the most reluctant to admit the wisdom of control. The sacred writings of all religions make specific injunctions for generation, impugn sterility. The barren woman must hang her head; the fertile woman is praised, yet not glorified. Her labour is not pitied. However, the Protestant churches have begun to examine the problem. High prelates of the Church of England have advocated control. The Protestant Episcopal Church, at their San Francisco general conference last June listened to sane expositions (TIME July 4). Their viewpoint is, of course, ethical. They would balance a moral equation--their dogmatic injunctions versus the daily practices of their members.

Also on ethical, but not religious, grounds is Judge Ben B. Lindsey's Companionate Marriage, published this autumn. He tries to phrase a solution whereby humans, bewildered in this present strident civilization, can make their practices agree with their professed mores.

Methods. There exist mechanical and chemical means of preventing conception. But it is illegal in this country to tell your neighbor about them. Section 211 of the Federal Penal Code forbids that.

A thorough treatise on contraceptives is Dr. Marie Carmichael Stopes' Contraception, Its Theory, History and Practice: a Manual for the Medical & Legal Professions & All Social Workers. But only doctors and lawyers can lawfully buy it. (This is the case, also, with most of Havelock Ellis' books.)

In Manhattan the American Birth Control League conducts a clinic to instruct poor mothers "for health reasons."* New York State laws permit that. Dr. James F. Cooper is medical director of the clinic. He found that uninstructed, desperate mothers had been enduring abortions. Ten abortions for a woman was a common number. One woman admit ted 40. In England the Malthusian League, conducts a similar clinic for poor women. Other countries have them. Those better off, as in the U. S., themselves must collect information.

* He was physician extraordinary to the late King Edward VII.

* In 1922 she married a second time, to J. Noah H. Slee of New York.

* Holland, Belgium, France and Germany now have Neo-Malthusian leagues. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834). English political economist, advocated drastic restrictions of populations to prevent people starving each other out. Contemporaries harried him.

* The American Gynecological Society, the American Association of Obstertricians, Gyneologists & Abdominal Surgeous, and associated societies recognize the American Birth Control League, and cooperate with it from the medical side.