Birth Control's 21st

Congressmen last week foiled Mrs. Margaret Sanger's sixth attempt to get a Federal law passed which will allow doctors to give their patients advice on birth control without running the risk of being jailed and fined. Undepressed, plump Mrs. Sanger proceeded to hold a party to celebrate the 21 years of Birth Control & Sanger history. Helping her were powerful names, among them: Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, Mrs. Harold L. Ickes and Mrs. Frederick A. Delano, the President's aunt. Five hundred sponsors of the dinner included Mrs. Otto H. Kahn, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick.

Mrs. Sanger's father, Michael Hennessy Higgins, was an easygoing, loquacious, free-thinking carver of tombstone saints at Corning, N. Y. He died at 80. Her mother was a tight, aggressive little body who bore eleven children and died at 48. Margaret Higgins, sixth child, was born in 1883, developed tuberculosis from which she recovered only after bearing three children to William Sanger, an architect whom she married in 1900 and divorced in 1921. Now he practices architecture in Albany, N. Y. Of the children, Peggy, the youngest, died when 4 years old. Stuart, 30, Yale '28, once "in Wall Street," now lives in Tucson, Ariz. (because of a sinus infection). Grant. 25, Princeton '31, is a Cornell Medical senior. In 1922 Mrs. Margaret Higgins Sanger married James Noah Henry Slee, onetime president of 3-in-1 Oil Co. They have a mansion at the edge of a lake near Fishkill, N. Y. Ordinarily she prefers to be called Margaret Sanger, the name which has become the symbol of Birth Control.

1914-35, When Margaret Sanger's first marriage became unhappy, she occupied herself with public health nursing and decided that poverty, debility and big families went together. In 1914 she invented the phrase Birth Control and founded a magazine, The Woman Rebel, to propagate the idea. Dumfounded police, egged on by shocked churchmen and politicians, swore out a warrant for her arrest. She ran away to England.

In England she met Marie Carmichael Slopes, doctor of science and of philosophy, who was writing a book called Married Love because her marriage to Dr. R. R. Gates was unconsummated and she was trying to reason out what was wrong with the pair of them. Mrs. Sanger gave Dr. Stopes practical advice on contraceptives after which the two went shopping in London for material and information and Dr. Stopes got an annulment of her marriage. Result was that Married Love acquired validity and became a mighty fulcrum for birth control in England.*

In 1916 Mrs. Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the U. S. in Brooklyn. She distributed circulars in English, Yiddish and Italian offering help to neighborhood women. Police arrested her, got her a 30-day jail sentence. Thereafter she became cautious in her public activities.

In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control League. Patrick Cardinal Hayes, then simply Archbishop Hayes of New York, gave it a big boost by having the League's first convention raided.

Next big step occurred in 1928, when she founded the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control which last week failed to make a handful of Congressmen think the way Mrs. Sanger wanted them to think.

Foreign Travels. In 1922 Mrs. Sanger started her foreign voyages of propaganda. Of all her successes against the tides of human propagation she is proudest of the birth control leagues and clinics in teeming Japan and China.

Holland, England and the Scandinavian countries have no inhibitions against birth control practices. Spain became somewhat liberal after the Republican Government took charge. Germany was liberal until the Hitler ascendancy.

In 1932 Mrs. Sanger outwitted Premier Mussolini of Italy, who treasures fecundity, by traveling as Mrs. J. Noah H. Slee. "Of course," she gleefully boasted soon as she was beyond his reach: "I did not get into Rome. But I managed to hold many private meetings on birth control. In Venice and Milan I had more demand for secret lectures before women's clubs than I could supply."

Today Mrs. Sanger's birth control groups surge on. They do so partly to bring the channels of information above ground. But they are equally concerned with flushing false information out of those channels. No longer need millions of men and women be persuaded that contraception is good, possible, practicable. No longer do only "immoral" women and men who fear venereal disease use contraceptives. The household demand for contraceptives has made every drugstore in the land, and a multitude of gasoline stations, poolrooms and candy stores supply depots for the material. Most of such items are unreliable. Some are downright dangerous. Consequently the paramount objective of Mrs. Sanger and the American Birth Control League now is to make reliable information and safe contraceptives available to every mature woman who needs them.

P: The safest and most efficient (96%) technique of contraceptive known must be fitted to the woman who will use it. Only a specially informed physician should do the fitting. There are now 155 birth control clinics in 28 states where women can get fitted and advised. As latitudinarianism spreads through the U. S. fewer physicians fear to tell their patients what they know about contraception.

P: Religious bodies, bulwarks of morals, at the same time have withdrawn old objections to birth control. Notable groups which have expressly approved: Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, Lambeth Conference of Bishops of the Church of England, General Council of Congregational and Christian Churches, Universalist General Convention, American Unitarian Association, Central Conference of American Rabbis, several regional conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, House of Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

P: The American Medical Association, however, has resolutely refused to deal with the birth control movement or to investigate the virtues or dangers of various contraceptive materials and methods. But obstetricians, gynecologists and neurologists approve the whole movement.

P: Heretofore, only form of birth control which the Roman Catholic Church permitted was continence. Lately Professors Kyusaku Ogino (Japan) and Herman Knaus (Austria) propounded a theory that a woman can be impregnated only during eight days of her cycle, that during the remaining 19 to 24 days she is not apt to conceive. This system of intermittent continence fits perfectly with the word of God, say Catholic authorities. Sixty thousand copies of a single exposition of the Ogino-Knaus rhythm theory and rules have been sold. The originators say that their system is more than 90% positive if their rules are scrupulously followed. Mrs. Sanger says that Ogino-Knaus technique is less than 40% certain.

P: Despite furtiveness, commerce in contraceptives has become big business. More than 300 manufacturers today are engaged in it. One distributor of "feminine hygiene" products last year offered Mrs. Sanger $250,000 to give five-minute radio talks on any subject she pleased. She rejected the offer. Three "feminine hygiene" manufacturers last year spent $250,000 advertising in general magazines alone. Five makers of one device sold $35,000,000 worth last year. What the whole commerce amounts to is beyond computation, for most of the business remains furtive.

Abortions. A potent Sanger argument for unrestricted use of contraceptives is that women who do not want babies resort to secret abortions. She estimates that 4,000,000 U. S. women have themselves | aborted each year. Dr. Frederick Joseph Taussig of St. Louis, President Hoover's special investigator of the subject, puts the number at 700,000.* Probably 15,000 U. S. women die each year on account of faulty abortions.

To study the biggest and best abortoriums in the world, Mrs. Sanger last August went to Russia. What she saw there caused her pertly to warn Joseph Stalin and other virile Russians: "Abortions make women nervous. It is common knowledge that the practice of abortion, if it becomes a habit, can do considerable harm to woman's sex life. Neuroses may develop and these in turn may result in frigidity. In this country woman is no longer economically dependent on man. If she becomes frigid, she will not be dependent on him in any other way and, in fact, will no longer be interested in him. Yet there is an honesty and lack of hypocrisy about the Soviet policy with respect to abortions which should be noted with approval."

Says Mrs. Sanger: "I don't know how most of my ventures in this work were ever financed. I am of no economical turn of mind. I do things first, and somehow or other they get paid for."

*In 1918 Dr. Stopes married rich Humphrey Verdon Roe, pioneer designer of airplanes, who finances her birth control propaganda in England.

*"Somewhat over 2,000,000 babies are born alive in the U. S. each year.

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