The Birth-Control Issue

Kept aglow by the hot breath of clerical argument, the sputtering dynamite charge of birth control--tossed gingerly from hand to hand among presidential candidates--last week landed in the middle of Dwight Eisenhower's news conference. What was the President's reaction, a newsman asked, to a recommendation made last July by a special presidential committee chaired by William H. Draper Jr., investment banker and industrialist? The Draper committee's recommendation: the U.S.. as part of its foreign aid program, should heed requests for assistance from nations trying to curb runaway population. Mindful of the furor raised by the U.S. Catholic bishops' recent statement opposing such use of U.S. funds (TIME, Dec. 7), Ike gave the question an answer calculated to snuff it out as a political issue.

"Not Our Business." "I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity of function or responsibility," said Eisenhower. "This thing has, for very great denominations, a religious meaning ... I have no quarrel with them, as a matter of fact this being largely the Catholic Church, they are one of the groups that I admire and respect, but this has nothing to do with governmental contact with other governments. We do not intend to interfere with . . . the internal affairs of any other government . . . And if they want to go to someone for help, they should go, they will go unquestionably to professional groups, not to governments."

Concluded Ike firmly: "This government will not, as long as I am here, have a positive political doctrine in its program that has to do with this problem of birth control. That's not our business."

"A Primary Need." But the President's air of finality just fanned the sparks. Protestant Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike of San Francisco, who had been the first to toss the birth-control issue to leading Democratic Presidential Hopeful Jack Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, tossed it back at the White House. The bishop: "The President has chosen to refuse . . . to allow this nation of abundance to meet a primary need of countries who want aid towards population control to help avert increasing starvation and misery." In Detroit, the Rev. Dr. R. Norris Wilson, overseas relief director of the National Council of Churches (Protestant), said that if the U.S. refused a request for birth-control assistance overseas, "I would feel that my country had been disgraced." Said the Planned Parenthood Federation: "The President's position flouts the authoritative findings of experts in public health . . .: experts in economic development . . .: and experts in scientific research."

Answering blasts came from the Catholic press. "Protestant misrepresentatives like Bishop Pike," said the Catholic News, newspaper of the Archdiocese of New York, differ from the Ku Klux Klan "only in degree." The Brooklyn Tablet, another diocesan paper, said it would be "the Fifth Essence of Arrogance--the kind that foretells madness," for the U.S. to allow other nations to believe that Americans want to encourage a slowdown of other peoples' population growth.

"A False Issue." In Manhattan for the Democratic Advisory Council's strategy sessions. ex-President Harry Truman tried to dodge a possible party-splitting row. Said Truman, when asked if the birth-control controversy would hurt Kennedy's chances: "Why should it? It's a false issue so far as the presidency is concerned. They always get up false issues to break up the Democratic Party before a convention." But, on the hunch that "they" might have a point, his fellow members of the Advisory Council urged creation of a "National Peace Agency," which would study, among other things, "overpopulation, including acceptable methods of dealing with the problems of over-rapid population expansion."

Clearly the birth-control issue was still far from defused.

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