Unfertility Rites

Readers of the famed "Agony" (personal) column in the Times of London had never before seen anything quite like this: "Social consciences wanted. The improvement of contraceptive methods is a vital social problem . . . New methods can only be proved by couples willing to risk pregnancy. We urgently want volunteers for our trials."

The ad was placed fortnight ago by Dr. Henry Beric Wright, 40, medical secretary of the Council for the Investigation of Fertility Control. A surgeon worried about the world's exploding population, Wright learned his concern at the knee of his family-planning mother, Helena Wright, who has urged Britons for years to breed in tight little island size. Wright and his wife recently exported the message to a new birth control clinic in Trinidad, there met the same obstacle that baffles all modern Malthusians--contraceptives are just too much bother for the earth's fastest-breeding peoples. Trinidadians shunned the simplest mechanical devices, which Wright sadly pronounced, in any case, "an upper-mental-class activity, no good at all for Indians, Indonesians or Japanese." He finally tried a really simple, standard tablet that foams in the vagina, should kill all spermatozoa. Same bafflement: women took the tablets home and went on conceiving.

Anxious to test the tablets scientifically, Wright rushed back to England to find volunteer couples willing to risk pregnancy with only the tablets for insurance. Later they would undertake pregnancy as a countertest, get full medical treatment if sterility developed. How to find such remarkable people? Wright saw the way after newspaper stories drew 80 Birmingham couples for a similar test financed by one Captain Oliver Bird, 78, of Bird's Custard. Wright sent a carefully worded ad to the London Daily Telegraph, which rejected it with a pun: "The conception is distasteful to us." With little hope, he tried the Times, which unexpectedly accepted the ad and netted 20 replies. Tabloids quickly spotted it, published stories that netted 100 more volunteer couples.

Wright eventually hopes for 1,000 couples, all faithfully recording intercourse on wall charts, all equipped with a contraceptive supply deemed sufficient for three months ("In case of emergency, just cable your name and address for a fresh consignment"). The venture's most useful aim is one never before achieved--nobody really knows the reliability of any of the more widely used contraceptives. "This is going to be an historical trial," Wright wrote happily to his guinea pigs last week. "It is probably too much to say that you will enjoy participating in it, but we hope it will not be too much for you both and that you manage to stay the course."

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