For Fewer Puerto Ricans

If the U. S. had a population of 1,500,000,000 it would still be less jam-packed than little Puerto Rico.

Against the U. S.'s 42.8 humans per square mile, Puerto Rico had 501.6 in 1935, up 176.1% in 25 years and soaring steadily. The New Deal has spent millions on the Island's economic rehabilitation, but students have long been convinced that the one basic remedy for the Islanders' appalling poverty is to cut their appalling birthrate. Every move to legalize dissemination of birth control information, however, has been stopped dead by Roman Catholic clergy.

In 1936 Dr. Ernest Gruening, able director of the Department of the Interior's Division of Territories & Island Possessions, thought he had struck a truce with San Juan's Bishop Edwin Vincent Byrne, opened up 15 birth control stations. The Bishop's roars soon drove him to cover. Last week Bishop Byrne was roaring again because both houses of Puerto Rico's Legislature had just passed a bill permitting physicians to tell their patients about birth control. Governor Blanton Winship's predecessor, Catholic Robert H. Gore, began his term by announcing that he trusted in God to control population. Governor Winship, late of the Army's Judge Advocate General's Department, was expected to side with Science, sign the bill.

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