Sanger Milestone

Last week Mrs. Margaret Higgins Sanger Slee's tireless 31-year campaign to make birth control legitimate in the U. S. passed another successful milestone. Three years ago Mrs. Sanger's good Japanese friend, Baroness Shizue Ishimoto, sent Mrs. Sanger's good Manhattan friend, Dr. Hannah Mayer Stone, 120 rubber pessaries. Dr. Stone intended to try the devices on 120 women clients of the Manhattan Birth Control Bureau, first and busiest of 283 similar centres now disseminating information and supplies in 42 states. U. S. customs officials promptly confiscated the pessaries under the Tariff Act of 1930. That law is the result of a Federal statute which the late gorilla-like prude, Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), rammed down Congress' throat in 1873. These statutes lump contraceptives with abortifacients, smutty writings and lewd picture postcards as "obscene," and forbid anyone to import, mail or ship them across state boundaries.

Last January Federal Judge Grover M. Moscowitz of Brooklyn ordered the customs officials to give Dr. Stone her pessaries on the grounds that contraceptives might save the life and health of women, that therefore police officers who prevented the use of contraceptives interfered with the prerogatives of physicians. The decision practically canceled the whole series of "Comstock laws." Reluctant to yield to reversal of a 63-year-old U. S. prohibition, Government lawyers appealed to the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting in Manhattan, who last week upheld the Moscowitz decision, enabled Mrs. Sanger to crow: "Contraceptive material may be lawfully admitted into this country and disseminated, if intended for legitimate use."*

* Not relaxed was Government disapproval of smutty books and pictures. Last week a jury in Judge Moscowitz's court found Mr. & Mrs. Samuel Roth, operators of the Golden Hind Press, Black Hawk Press and Fifth Avenue Book Shop, guilty of distributing obscene matter. Last' week Post Office inspectors sought to break up "obscene correspondence clubs," some of which have thousands of members mailing one another filthy pictures, erotic books.

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