39 Blanche Ames Ames, Statement by the President of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts (January, 1935)

The Birth Control League of Massachusetts has always advocated dignified methods of publicity and the methods used have been made to conform with the wishes of our medical advisors and with the approval of our legal advisors.

The Birth Control League seeks to protect the rights of Parents to regulate conception and to acquire proper medical advice and materials by which to space conception of their children, in order to improve the chances for health and well being of these children-to-be-born and of the family.

It does not restrict the need for regulation to medical necessities only, but teaches wisdom of control for reasons of poverty, of insanity, of drunkenness, of malformation.

It asks the medical profession, both in private practice and in hospitals, to prescribe Birth Control, when parents want such information, whether they wish to regulate conception for economic reasons or for medical reasons or for personal reasons which have a worthy motive.

In urging the production of the finest and most vigorous children, and in safeguarding the health of mothers, the League strikes at the heart of the problems of eugenics, economics, and morals. And in ennobling the spirit, that is “the vital and conscious functions,” in women and men, it seeks for harmony of married life in conformity with religion.

As a justification of the correctness of this policy and in answer to recent criticisms we would point to the achievements of the Mother’s Health Office which confines the giving of contraceptive advice to married women whose physical or mental condition is such that it is believed that immediate pregnancy would be dangerous.

The success of this plan is proved by the fact that within tow and one half years such information has been given to 650 women after careful physical examination had shown that there was an genuine reason for giving the advice. As further evidence of the confidence that the Mother’s Health Office has inspired, patients have been sent there from 16 hospitals, 32 social agencies, and 53 private physicians.

This policy has been declared by our lawyers to be not within the prohibitions of the Massachusetts statutes relating to the giving of contraceptive advice.

Another recent activity of the League has been the circulation of the Parents’ Petition which is a request to the Massachusetts Medical Society for an investigation of the entire situation from the medical point of view. In this petition the Medical Society is being asked to instruct the Parents of Massachusetts as to the relative value of modern contraceptive measures, including the so-called “safe period” as advocated in the book “The Rhythm” which is published with the approval of the Archdiocese of Chicago (Roman Catholic).

It has been felt by the officers of the League that a more substantial advance could be made by following these lines of effort rather than by methods involving greater publicity; that the sane and sound progress of the movement depended to a great degree on the cooperation of the medical profession and that this cooperation would be to a considerable degree alienated by certain types of publicity.

Notes:

1. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.

Click here to learn more about Blanche Ames Ames

This speech is also repinted in Sandra J. Sarkela, Susan Mallon Ross, and Margaret A. Lowe (eds.), From Megaphones to Microphones: Speeches of American Women, 1920-1960 BWestport, CN: Praegar,2003, pp.91-92.

Copyright by Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. All rights reserved.