Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade

PREFACE TO THE 1998 EDITION

This big book tells three sequential stories. First, it relates how the forty-year struggle to overturn Connecticut’s criminalization of even married couples’ use of contraceptives finally triumphed in the landmark 1965 Supreme Court right-to-privacy ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut.

Second, Liberty and Sexuality details how that recognition of a fundamental right to privacy in Griswold opened the constitutional door to a previously unimagined argument: that women with unwanted pregnancies ought to have access to legal abortion as a fundamental right. The earliest abortion law reformers had sought liberalization of the strictures that had outlawed—but not actually prevented—almost all abortions since the middle of the nineteenth century, but between 1966 and 1969 that goal of reform was quickly supplanted by repeal: state antiabortion laws could be challenged in federal court as infringements of women’s newly recognized constitutional right to privacy. Out of that litigation campaign—a quest that got under way late in 1969 and triumphed in January 1973—came both Roe v. Wade and its lesser-known but equally important companion case, Doe v. Bolton. The second part of Liberty and Sexuality—chapters five through eight—tells the story of the early activists and young lawyers who created those cases and the Supreme Court justices who in 1972–1973 accepted their constitutional claims.

Third, Liberty and Sexuality describes the twenty-five years of abortion litigation and congressional debates that have transpired since Roe and Doe. The first portion of that aftermath culminated in part in the huge setback that sexual liberty claims suffered in 1986 with the explicitly antigay Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick. Far more encouragingly, repeated threats to Roe’s protection of abortion rights, threats that in 1989–1991 looked likely to prove fatal, surprisingly climaxed instead in the landmark 1992 Supreme Court ruling in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey which powerfully reaffirmed Roe’s constitutional core.

The second portion of the post-Roe story, the many developments that have occurred since 1993, is newly added to this edition of Liberty and Sexuality. The year 1994 witnessed two double homicides of abortion workers by right-to-life terrorists, but it also witnessed passage of a comprehensive federal statute, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), which quickly put an end to the violently obstructive mass protests that had besieged so many abortion clinics during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Antiabortion protests were well past their peak by the time of Roe and Doe’s twenty-fifth anniversaries in January 1998. However, in one of the two most important developments of the post-Casey years, abortion opponents garnered significant political success by making partial birth abortions the subject of debate in legislatures all across the country. Courts constrained antiabortion legislation less comprehensively than they limited antiabortion protests, but the Supreme Court, in a crucial post-Casey milestone, gave gay Americans their greatest legal victory ever in a 1996 ruling, Romer v. Evans, that left Bowers in symbolic shreds.

Roe v. Wade’s creation and Roe v. Wade’s legacy represent one of the two greatest stories—the other is Brown v. Board of Education—in twentieth-century American legal history. Liberty and Sexuality seeks to tell that story as comprehensively as possible, for it—like Brown—has altered and improved the lives of millions of Americans.

CHAPTER ONE

The Waterbury Origins of Roe v. Wade

Katharine Houghton Hepburn had never doubted that Sallie Pease was an ideal president for the Connecticut Birth Control League (CBCL). Hepburn’s next-door neighbor in Hartford since 1927, a Smith College graduate, and the mother of three school-age boys, Pease was only thirty-seven—nineteen years Hepburn’s junior—when she became league president in 1934. For eleven years, since 1923, when nationally noted birth control crusader Margaret Sanger had first visited Hartford, Kit Hepburn had played a central role in holding the league together. Little headway had been made toward the league’s goal of winning legislative repeal of Connecticut’s unique 1879 criminal statute that made the use and/or prescription of any form of birth control a crime for both woman and doctor alike, but in the summer of 1935 Sallie Pease had taken the lead in the league’s dramatic but initially unpublicized decision to go ahead and simply open a public birth control clinic in Hartford. Just as the league had hoped, no one moved to enforce the law or to close the clinic, and in its first year of operation the clinic’s women doctors provided birth control counseling and devices to over four hundred married women, many of them first- or second-generation ethnic immigrants from Hartford’s poorer neighborhoods.¹ Quietly ecstatic at their success in extending to poor women the same medical advice that privately was available to those who could afford family physicians, by the summer of 1936 the Connecticut League also had clinics functioning in Greenwich, New Haven, and Stamford. The following two years witnessed similar growth and expansion, as clinic services opened in Norwalk, Danbury, New Britain, New London, and Bridgeport.² The Bridgeport city prosecutor expressly told inquiring reporters that the 1879 statute represented no bar to the services that the Bridgeport clinic was providing,³ and six months later, in October of 1938, the league achieved its hope of having clinic services available in all of Connecticut’s large cities when a one-morning-a-week clinic quietly opened in downtown Waterbury, Connecticut’s most ethnically diverse—and most heavily Roman Catholic—city.

Sallie Pease and Kit Hepburn were rightfully proud of the tremendous progress that had been attained by simply going ahead and opening clinics, rather than by unsuccessfully continuing to petition each biennial session of the Connecticut legislature for a statutory change, as the league had from 1923 through 1935. Neither public officials nor religious groups seemed actively interested in mounting any effort to enforce a now seemingly dead-letter law, and the Connecticut League would be able to continue moving forward with its real purpose of providing actual services to more and more needy women who wanted to limit the number of their children.

So when the Connecticut League convened for its annual luncheon meeting at the Farmington Country Club on Thursday, June 8, 1939, Sallie Pease had no hesitancy in speaking plainly about their new successes. The general director of the national Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA)—the newly renamed organization that was the direct descendant of Margaret Sanger’s initial work two decades earlier—Dr. Woodbridge E. Morris, had himself come up to central Connecticut for the luncheon, and while Hartford reporters took notes on Morris’s remarks about the regrettable level of maternal mortality in America, they also listened to Sallie Pease’s presidential report, in which she highlighted the opening of the Waterbury clinic as the league’s most prominent achievement in the preceding year. What was especially notable, she stressed, was that the Waterbury clinic, unlike any of its other Connecticut predecessors, was operating in a public institution, in the Chase Dispensary outpatient building of the Waterbury Hospital. So far, Pease said, it has received no publicity, but it is there in working order and will grow.⁴

Sallie Pease was a brash and flashy person, quite different in style and persona from the Greenwich and Fairfield County women who comprised much of the Connecticut League, and she hadn’t given any thought to the possible press coverage of her luncheon remarks.⁵ Friday morning’s Hartford Courant ran a modest story on page twenty-four, noting in passing the newly announced Waterbury clinic in the Chase Dispensary, but the Associated Press put the Courant story on the state news wire, and Friday morning’s Waterbury Republican printed it on page fifteen, under a headline reading U.S. Maternal Mortality Rate Reported Poor. Several paragraphs down, however, it stated how Pease had reported that during the year the first clinic in a public institution in Connecticut was opened at the Chase Dispensary in Waterbury.⁶

The Waterbury Republican, and its sister paper, the afternoon Waterbury American, were not the city’s only newspapers, however. There was also the afternoon Waterbury Democrat, which in many ways—as its name indicated—was the antithesis of the Republican. Republican-American publisher William J. Pape had been an outspoken and crusading opponent of the city’s mostly corrupt Democratic political establishment, and it was in large part because of the Republican’s efforts that Waterbury Mayor—and Connecticut Lieutenant Governor—T. Frank Hayes and over twenty fellow defendants were currently on trial for looting the city treasury. The Democrat had spoken up for the Hayes regime, and if the Pape papers were a voice for the Anglo-Saxon Yankee population that found its political home in the Republican party, the Democrat was viewed as the voice for Waterbury’s Irish, Italian, French-Canadian, and Lithuanian immigrant populations. Some 72,000 of Waterbury’s 99,000 citizens were either first- or second-generation immigrants to America, and while the ethnic parishes where most of them attended church might differ greatly in custom and in language, they were almost all Roman Catholic.⁷

Friday afternoon’s Waterbury Democrat featured a front-page headline, Birth Control Clinic Is Operating In City, and quoted Chase Dispensary supervisor Jeannie Heppel as confirming Sallie Pease’s unintentional announcement. Pastors of Catholic churches had no comment to make today, the Democrat went on, but the paper hardly had to tell its readers that Connecticut’s Catholic hierarchy, the Diocese of Hartford, was a staunch and unyielding opponent of birth control. Church representatives had turned out at every legislative session from 1923 to 1935 to oppose the CBCL’s petitions for statutory change, and just four weeks earlier the Reverend John S. Kennedy, associate editor of the diocese’s weekly newspaper, the Catholic Transcript, had been prominently quoted in the Democrat as telling three hundred Waterbury Catholics at a special Mother’s Day Communion breakfast that he was puzzled as to why some Connecticut prosecutors were so anxious to go after bingo game operators while birth control clinics were allowed to flourish. One Hartford woman who had received a birth control circular, Kennedy said, had contacted the Transcript to complain. Kennedy’s remarks, the Democrat volunteered, had been most inspirational.⁸

Different readers reacted to the Democrat’s story in different ways. Waterbury Hospital superintendent Dr. B. Henry Mason and gynecology clinic chief Dr. Charles L. Larkin both told reporters that no birth control clinic was operating at the Chase Dispensary, and Saturday’s Republican prominently headlined their claim—Doctors Deny Birth Control Clinic in City—despite Heppel’s statements to the contrary. The problem, Dr. Mason explained, was simply a matter of terminology. A gynecological clinic, the Republican said, includes in the normal course of its work the giving of some information on birth control. But such advice, Mason said, is provided purely on a health basis. A woman whose health would be seriously endangered by child bearing might get medical advice at the clinic on birth control, but not robust, healthy women. Dr. Larkin agreed: That’s a long way from the popular conception of a birth control clinic where any woman may go who doesn’t want to have children.⁹

By Saturday morning the hospital staffers finally had their stories straight, as that afternoon’s American emphasized: Miss Heppel Agrees With Dr. Mason: Waterbury Has No Birth Control Clinic. But Heppel’s actual statement, much like Mason’s and Larkin’s, did not exactly square with the headline: Nobody can come here for information unless they are referred by doctors for reasons of their health, supervisor Heppel explained. People can’t just come in as they please and get information. Clinic sessions were held each Tuesday, the American added, had begun last October, and were actually conducted by two young doctors, William A. Goodrich and Roger B. Nelson, who reported to Larkin.¹⁰

But the hospital officials were not the most significant readers of the Waterbury press. Friday’s Democrat had observed that the city’s Catholic clergy might refer the matter to Hartford Bishop Maurice F. McAuliffe, but Father Eugene P. Cryne, president of the Catholic Clergy Association of Waterbury, already had called a special meeting of the association for Saturday morning in the rectory of Immaculate Conception parish, Waterbury’s oldest Roman Catholic church. Cryne was not the most prominent or the most senior of Waterbury’s Catholic clergy, but Immaculate’s own pastor had been formally installed only one year earlier, and Monsignor Joseph Valdambrini, pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes parish and the son of a Vatican banker with a royal title, was out of town on a four-month visit to Italy. A fifty-six-year-old Connecticut native, Cryne, like many Connecticut priests, had received his religious training at St. Thomas Seminary. He had become pastor of St. Patrick’s Church, one of Waterbury’s more modest parishes, but with seventeen hundred members, mostly of Irish background, in 1933, after having previously served in a junior role at Immaculate and then in parishes just outside of Waterbury.¹¹

Eugene Cryne was, however, in the eyes of his fellow priests, a very forceful individual who had a very definite sense of right and wrong. When rules and regulations were made, they had to be abided by, a younger priest who served under Cryne explained. Although a very kind man, Eugene Cryne was a very determined person. And the resolution that was drawn up at that special Saturday morning meeting of Waterbury’s Catholic clergy at the Immaculate rectory was a very determined and very forceful resolution:

Whereas, it is the teaching of the Catholic church that birth control is contrary to the natural law and therefore immoral, and

Whereas, it is forbidden by statute law to disseminate birth control information for any reason whatsoever or in any circumstance, and

Whereas, it has been brought to our attention that a so-called birth control clinic, sometimes called a maternal health center, is existing in Waterbury as admitted by the superintendent of Chase Dispensary, according to the papers, therefore, be it

Resolved, that this association go on record as being unalterably opposed to the existence of such a clinic in our city and we hereby urge our Catholic people to avoid contact with it and we hereby publicly call the attention of the public prosecutors to its existence and demand that they investigate and if necessary prosecute to the full extent of the law.¹²

William B. Fitzgerald, the State’s Attorney in Waterbury, had like Father Cryne seen the stories in the Friday and Saturday Waterbury newspapers. And while news of the Catholic Clergy resolution did not appear in the Sunday Republican, Bill Fitzgerald certainly heard of it Sunday morning at the latest, for he faithfully attended St. Margaret’s Roman Catholic Church, and that morning—as Bill Fitzgerald remembered even decades later—the text of the clergy’s resolution was read from the pulpit of each and every Catholic church in Waterbury and in surrounding towns.¹³

Bill Fitzgerald had been State’s Attorney for only one year. Thirty-seven years old, a Waterbury native, and an alumnus of Holy Cross College, Fitzgerald had opened a Waterbury law office immediately after graduating from Harvard Law School and passing the bar in 1926. Two years later he became a prosecutor in the city’s misdemeanor court, and in 1931 he became assistant state’s attorney, both part-time positions that supplemented an attorney’s private law practice. In May 1938, however, the special grand jury that had been impaneled to investigate Mayor Hayes and the city’s financial scandals issued a detailed, seventy-four-page report to accompany its charges, and included in it was a brief but harsh condemnation of Fitzgerald’s boss, State’s Attorney Lawrence L. Lewis, for failing until very recently to take any action against the presence of gambling devices in Waterbury social clubs. The fact that these violations of the law were known but not prosecuted by State’s Attorney Lewis, and others, is a matter of distinct concern to this Grand Jury. The law enforcement authorities of the city and of the district are, therefore, deserving of the severest censure for having permitted this widespread and flagrant violation of law to continue.¹⁴

Larry Lewis felt he had no choice but to resign and return to full-time private practice in his firm of Bronson, Lewis & Bronson, but Bill Fitzgerald rebuffed Lewis’s notion that Fitzgerald too had to step down, indicating instead that he’d like to be Lewis’s successor. That choice lay with Waterbury’s local judges, particularly resident Superior Court Judge Frank P. McEvoy, the first Roman Catholic member of Connecticut’s premier trial court bench, and on June 6, 1938, Bill Fitzgerald received their official blessing and became the first Roman Catholic State’s Attorney at Waterbury. Fitzgerald voiced high praise of Larry Lewis at his swearing in, but moved swiftly to eliminate gambling from the city, with widespread raids receiving coverage even in the New York Times.¹⁵

Bill Fitzgerald had a first class mind, one lifelong attorney friend and courtroom adversary later remembered, but he was a very, very strict Catholic. Another attorney friend, also once a communicant at St. Margaret’s, agreed that Fitzgerald was very bright, but was nonetheless a very parochial, insular guy, someone very strongly receptive to and influenced by the clergy. Bill Fitzgerald was active in a number of civic and church groups, and, like Judge McEvoy, served on the advisory board of Waterbury’s Diocesan Bureau of Social Service, which was directed by Father Eugene Cryne. But most people who knew Bill Fitzgerald felt that the pressure to act came largely from within, rather than from without, that even in the absence of a phone call, Bill Fitzgerald believed there was only one thing to do. After all, just one year earlier his predecessor had had to resign because of public complaints that he had failed to enforce the often-ignored but nonetheless still-valid gambling laws aggressively, and the old 1879 prohibition against birth control was certainly still on the statute books. Yes, Bill Fitzgerald was a devout Catholic, but I don’t think Fitzgerald was any crusader at all, his one-time fellow member of St. Margaret’s emphasized. As almost everyone saw it, the state’s attorney simply felt he had to do his duty. Eight days later Fitzgerald would indicate that he had been acting upon complaints in the wake of the newspaper stories, but probably as early as Saturday morning Bill Fitzgerald had decided that an active investigation of the Chase Dispensary clinic would have to be mounted.¹⁶

Monday morning’s Republican headlined the Catholic Clergy Association’s resolution, but devoted more attention to the continuing claims that the clinic was not what its critics said it was. Like Doctors Mason and Larkin, Dr. William A. Goodrich was portrayed as minimizing the clinic’s work: Out of 250 women who come to the clinic yearly, he said, an average of perhaps 15 come for birth control advice. They get the same advice, he said, that women who can afford personal physicians get from their own physicians. More pointedly, the Republican also highlighted a conversation the newspaper had had with a Hartford attorney who had represented the original CBCL clinic there. He asserted that there is apparently no state statute under which a birth control clinic can be prosecuted as long as the clinic is operated on a health basis, the Republican said. The lawyer pointed out that prohibiting the giving of birth control information to women for health reasons would run counter to the public health laws of the state. The Hartford authorities were asked to prosecute, he said, by the Hartford Catholic clergy, and decided at the time that there was no basis for prosecution.¹⁷

But the Republican’s effort was in vain. Early Monday morning William Fitzgerald took a search warrant application to the chambers of Judge McEvoy. Fitzgerald’s request stated That he is informed and that he suspects and has reason to suspect that books, records, registers, instruments, apparatus and appliances used and kept for the purpose of violating the criminal laws, specifically Sections 6246 and 6562, are kept, deposited, stored and used in the Chase Dispensary at 43 Field Street.¹⁸

Birth control was not a new subject to Frank P. McEvoy. A sixty-year-old Waterbury native, an active member of Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church, and, like Bill Fitzgerald, a member of the advisory board of Father Cryne’s Diocesan Bureau of Social Service, Frank McEvoy had attended a small Roman Catholic college in New York, graduated from Yale Law School in 1907, and practiced law in Waterbury until being named a superior court judge in 1930. Friends thought of him as soft spoken and knew he was an ardent horseman, but Waterbury attorneys considered him narrow and reluctant to accept change. A much younger fellow Catholic attorney remembered McEvoy as wildly Irish Catholic and very parochial. Perhaps most notably, seven years earlier his wife had played the leading role in blocking any endorsement of birth control by the state convention of the Connecticut League of Women Voters. As the Republican had described it, Mrs. McEvoy opposed it violently and threatened that she and all Catholic women would resign if it were adopted. Largely because of this, the proposal … was voted down, and Mrs. McEvoy had received nationwide praise from some Catholic spokesmen for her activism on the issue.¹⁹

Frank McEvoy immediately granted the warrant application that Bill Fitzgerald put in front of him: I find probable cause exists for said complaint. Minutes later, a little before 10 a.m., Deputy Sheriff Al Francis and County Detective Koland G. Alling took the warrant and went the three short blocks that separated the Chase Dispensary from the state’s attorney’s office in the courthouse. Dispensary supervisor Jeannie Heppel had left on Saturday on vacation, but her assistant, Berta Verba, showed the two lawmen to the second floor rooms at the northwest corner of the building that the birth control clinic used. As the clinic operated only on Tuesday mornings, no one else was present, but as the Waterbury Democrat described it, the two officers confiscated several bags and boxes of articles and returned with them to the courthouse.

Bill Fitzgerald declined comment to inquiring reporters and sat down with his assistant, Walter Smyth, and Detective Alling to review the seized materials. They prepared a show-cause order, signed later that day by Judge McEvoy, directing Waterbury Hospital superintendent B. Henry Mason to appear in court the following Monday to explain why the diaphragms and other contraceptive articles that had been seized should not be condemned and destroyed. But much more importantly, Bill Fitzgerald noted two other things as he examined what Alling and Francis had seized. First, all of the patient records, the clinical cards that would identify who had been seen and for what reasons, were not at the dispensary, but were in the possession of a young Junior League volunteer, Virginia Goss, who maintained the clinic’s records and was married to a prominent young executive at Waterbury’s most famous manufacturing firm, Scovill Brass. And then, second, Bill Fitzgerald also learned that the founder and moving force behind the Waterbury Maternal Health Center was not one or another of the doctors from Waterbury Hospital, but instead was his next-door neighbor and family friend, Clara Lee McTernan.²⁰

Kit Hepburn and her children would always remember the phone call that had interrupted her daughter Marion Hepburn Grant’s wedding that Monday in the garden of the Hepburn family home at 201 Bloomfield Avenue in Hartford. But then it was utterly natural for Clara McTernan to call Kit Hepburn, for not only had Hepburn come to Waterbury to spur creation of the clinic, she had been making political waves across Connecticut years before Margaret Sanger had ever thought up the phrase birth control.²¹

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was a twenty-six-year-old newlywed when she and her husband, Dr. Thomas N. Hepburn, first moved to Hartford in 1904. Orphaned as a teenager when her father committed suicide and her mother died of cancer, Katharine Houghton graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1899, earned a master’s degree there the following year, and met Tom Hepburn, a medical student at Johns Hopkins, through her sister Edith, who was also in medical school. Thomas Hepburn’s internship and residency took place at Hartford Hospital, and in 1905 their first son was born, followed two years later by their first daughter, Katharine’s namesake, who later would win a 1934 Academy Award and Hollywood fame.

The following year Kit Hepburn, perhaps at the urging of her sister Edith, attended a speech at Hartford’s Parsons Theatre by English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst and adopted women’s right to vote as her cause too. The Connecticut Women’s Suffrage Association (CWSA) had been founded back in 1869, but now was slightly moribund. Kit Hepburn’s urge to activism was initially hindered by a tremendous fear of attempting to speak in public, but she soon overcame it, and along with her friend and neighbor Josephine Day Bennett she helped create the Hartford Equal Franchise League. In 1910 Hepburn and Jo Bennett expanded their efforts into the CWSA itself, with Kit Hepburn becoming president for 1910–1911 and again in 1913. Kit Hepburn was also busy having additional children—two more boys in 1911 and 1913, and two more girls in 1916 and 1918—and Dr. Tom Hepburn was channeling much of his energy into antivenereal disease work. He played a significant role in the 1913 founding of the American Social Hygiene Association, and a very central role in its affiliate, the Connecticut Social Hygiene Association. One of Kit’s older colleagues in CWSA work, Annie Webb Porritt, an immigrant from England, was also very active in the antivenereal disease efforts, as was Jo Bennett’s father, George H. Day. Jo’s mother, Katharine Beach Day, was a major source of funds for her daughter and Kit Hepburn’s female suffrage endeavors.²²

By 1917 Kit Hepburn was testifying before the Connecticut legislature’s Judiciary Committee on behalf of the CWSA and appearing with Montana Congresswoman and suffragist Jeanette Rankin at a Parsons Theatre rally. But in the fall of that year, in the wake of Alice Paul and other national activists’ departure from Carrie Chapman Catt’s National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) to form the National Woman’s Party (NWP), Kit Hepburn resigned the presidency of the 35,000 member CWSA and along with Jo Bennett and her other colleagues began directing most of her energies into the NWP. Both groups championed congressional approval of a federal constitutional amendment that would give American women the right to vote, but Hepburn and others felt that the NWP was the more active force. In January 1919, the House of Representatives approved a woman’s suffrage amendment, and in June the Senate followed suit. Fourteen months later, in August 1920, Tennessee became the crucial thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, and female suffrage had been won. Several weeks later the Connecticut legislature added its assent.²³

The suffrage victory allowed the Connecticut activists to direct their energies toward other issues. Annie Porritt, already an elected member of the Hartford Board of Education, helped set up the League of Women Voters as a direct successor to NAWSA, continued her work with Dr. Hepburn in the Social Hygiene Association, and became active in the Joint Committee on Delinquent Women.²⁴ But another issue that both Mrs. Porritt and Katharine Beach Day began to take an interest in by the fall of 1921 was birth control.

Margaret Sanger’s first enthusiastic follower in the state of Connecticut was a male attorney from Hazardville, a small village in the north-central part of the state, Henry F. Fletcher. Single-handedly, Fletcher four years earlier, in January 1917, had prevailed upon his local representative in Connecticut’s lower house to introduce, by request, a bill repealing the 1879 antibirth control statute. How Fletcher’s interest first occurred is unknown, but by the fall of 1916 most readers of the American press knew full well who Margaret Sanger was. Then thirty-seven years old, Sanger had first begun championing a woman’s right to control her own fertility in the summer of 1914 in her self-published monthly magazine The Woman Rebel. Heavily influenced by her own and her husband William’s political roots in socialist politics, and particularly by the perspective of Emma Goldman, Margaret quite purposefully hoped that her in-print advocacy of birth control would launch a direct challenge against the enforcement of the 1873 federal antiobscenity and anticontraception statutes that most everyone spoke of as the Comstock Laws, after their still very active principal proponent, New York moralist Anthony Comstock.²⁵

Sanger’s hope of generating a federal case in which to take on those prohibitions against the interstate shipment or importation of any goods, articles or literature dealing with sexuality or reproduction quickly came to pass: in August 1914 the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York charged her with four counts of violating the Comstock statutes. Rather than prepare a defense, Sanger sat down and wrote a sixteen-page statement of her views, arranged for the printing of a hundred thousand copies of it under the title Family Limitation, obtained false identity documents, and fled to England rather than stand trial. The ensuing twelve months in Europe constituted perhaps the most intellectually important period in Sanger’s long life, but her flight from prosecution did relatively little if any harm to America’s growing popular support for women’s right to control their fertility.²⁶

While Sanger was away, however, her husband Bill was entrapped into giving a copy of the Family Limitation pamphlet to a government agent, and in September 1915, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to a thirty-day jail sentence. One later historian calculated that Bill Sanger’s arrest proved a powerful magnet which drew many hundreds into active participation in the birth control movement, and that Sanger’s trial generated considerable support for birth control as a free-speech issue. That blossoming support also helped convince Margaret that the time was right to return to the United States, and in October 1915 she did. While she had been away the country’s first birth control advocacy group, the National Birth Control League, had been formed by Mary Ware Dennett and a number of other upper-class, northeastern women. In January 1916—with Margaret rejecting lawyers’ advice that she agree to a negotiated guilty plea in order to dispose of the 1914 federal charges still pending against her—the new league held a heavily publicized New York dinner honoring Sanger the evening before her scheduled trial. Indecisive prosecutors postponed the case once, and then again, as press interest heightened, before finally simply dropping the charges on February 18, 1916.²⁷

The government’s surrender elevated Margaret Sanger to celebrity status. Several weeks later she began a three-and-a-half-month coast-to-coast speaking tour, and birth control became more heavily publicized in America’s newspapers than ever before. In Portland, Oregon, local authorities arrested her for handing out copies of Family Limitation, but a supportive judge immediately released her. In Boston, however, when a young man named Van Kleeck Allison decided to distribute birth control pamphlets to passersby who soon included an undercover detective, a speedy trial resulted in a quick conviction and a three-year sentence, which later was reduced to sixty days. Allison’s experience did have the effect of stimulating creation of an Allison Birth Control Defense League that then changed its name to the Birth Control League of Massachusetts, and local birth control groups also emerged in other cities across the country as a result of Sanger’s triumphant tour.²⁸

Upon returning to New York, however, much of Sanger’s energy went into a deepening competition with Mary Ware Dennett for leadership of this burgeoning national movement. Sanger intensely resented that someone other than she had founded the first national birth control group, and while the NBCL was of very modest size, Dennett in early 1917 succeeded in getting a birth control legalization bill introduced into the New York State legislature. Just as with Henry Fletcher’s contemporaneous legislative effort in Connecticut, however, Dennett’s bill attracted almost no support and never emerged from committee. But Sanger’s primary interest was not legislative lobbying, and on October 16, 1916, along with her sister and fellow nurse Ethel Byrne, and several other women supporters, Margaret Sanger opened America’s first public birth control clinic at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.²⁹

Sanger had been unable to recruit a licensed physician to operate the clinic, but even on its first morning of operation a waiting line of forty-five women had formed on the sidewalk. Sanger and her colleagues fully expected to be raided and closed down by the police within days or even hours of opening, but nine days passed before a transparently obvious female undercover police officer arrived and insisted upon paying two dollars for one of Margaret’s ten-cent pamphlets. The next day she returned with three fellow officers. The clinic’s supplies were seized, and Sanger and an aide were carted off to jail. Ethel Byrne was promptly arrested as well. Released on bail after one night in custody, Sanger soon reopened the clinic but was quickly raided and rearrested.

Sanger and Byrne’s lawyer, Jonah J. Goldstein, was determined to use the arrests to challenge the constitutionality of New York’s Comstockian anticontraception statutes, and at one preliminary hearing he told the presiding judge that the law denied a woman her absolute right of enjoyment of intercourse unless the act be so conducted that pregnancy be the result of the exercise. This clearly is an infringement upon her free exercise of conscience and pursuit of happiness. The judge, however, expressed astonishment at Goldstein’s argument: A right of copulation without conception is asserted upon behalf of women in general; defendant claims this is a personal right that cannot be invaded by the Legislature. Any such contention was hogwash, he held: That men and women and boys and girls lacking in moral stamina are deterred from fornication by the fear of detection through the pregnancy of the female cannot be doubted.³⁰

Goldstein nonetheless mounted a variety of legal challenges on behalf of his defendants, but in early January 1917, Ethel Byrne went to trial and was convicted. Margaret’s sex education pamphlet which Ethel had given the undercover officer was titled What Every Girl Should Know, but the trial court commented that This contains matters which not only should not be known by every girl, but which perhaps should not be known by any. On January 22 Byrne was sentenced to thirty days’ confinement and was soon jailed despite Goldstein’s protests that she be freed pending appeal. Byrne announced she would go on a hunger strike until she was released, and amidst heavy publicity and flourishing support from the upper-class women of the NBCL, Margaret’s own trial then got underway on January 29. Goldstein attempted to persuade both Sanger and the court to accept a guilty plea accompanied by only a suspended sentence so that his constitutional arguments could be appealed to higher courts without Margaret having to accept punishment in the interim, but no agreement could be arranged. On February 2, one day after Ethel had been released from jail on account of her rapidly failing health, Margaret was convicted and chose thirty days’ imprisonment in lieu of a five-thousand-dollar fine.³¹

Margaret’s own jail time passed quietly, and four months later an intermediate appellate court affirmed her conviction. Goldstein then took his arguments to New York’s highest court, and in January 1918, that bench reaffirmed her conviction but also stated, in an indirect but nonetheless tremendously important victory, that New York’s anticontraception statute could not prevent a physician from prescribing birth control to a married woman for whom it would help prevent disease, a word which the court then defined in a most broad and inclusive manner. Goldstein resolved to appeal the case yet further, to the U.S. Supreme Court (which eventually dismissed the appeal), but the birth controllers had already registered a crucial if underpublicized triumph.³²

The New York court’s emphasis upon doctors’ rights and obligations to protect patients against threats to their health significantly encouraged Margaret Sanger’s ongoing evolution toward a more professionalized—and less politically radical—championing of birth control. Mary Ware Dennett was committed to advocating the complete repeal of all state and federal anticontraceptive statutes, and early in 1919 created the Voluntary Parenthood League, largely a successor to her earlier NBCL, to help recruit a congressional sponsor for a federal repeal bill. Sanger, however, was increasingly persuaded that milder reform measures, legalizing only the medically supervised prescription of birth control, stood far, far better chances of winning support and approval. Writing in mid-1919, Sanger now argued that when instruction in the use of contraceptives is given, it should be given by the kind of persons best suited by training and experience to give it scientifically and accurately. If everyone is permitted to impart information, those who receive it have no guaranty that it is correct or suitable to the individual’s physical requirements. Incorrect, unscientific information may bring good results in some cases, but it is more likely to cause a vast amount of disappointment and anxiety in others.³³

In November 1921 Sanger and her supporters convened the First American Birth Control Conference at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Intended in part to refocus the birth control spotlight on Sanger rather than Dennett, it also brought out-of-town birth control supporters to New York, including Katharine Beach Day, Annie Porritt, Jo Bennett, and Henry Fletcher and his wife from Connecticut. The conference’s concluding event was a large public meeting on November 13, but it was interrupted almost before it could begin by a band of New York City policemen who said they were acting at the behest of Roman Catholic Archbishop Patrick Hayes. They removed a prominent English guest speaker from the stage, and then carted Sanger off to jail when she objected. The police action set off a firestorm of press criticism and coverage, and generated a major municipal investigation of how it had been instigated. The church’s blunder transformed the conference into a national news story, and as The New Republic observed two weeks later, thanks to the church the outlook for the birth control movement is brighter than it ever was.³⁴

One of Sanger’s primary aims for the conference was to create a new national organization of her own, which was christened the American Birth Control League (ABCL). Katharine Beach Day played a principal financial role in helping launch the new group, and by the spring of 1922 Annie Porritt was taking a major role in the editing and publication of its monthly magazine, the Birth Control Review, which Sanger had initiated several years earlier. Before the year was out both Day and Porritt were formal members of the ABCL’s board of directors, and in October 1922, some weeks after returning from a London birth control conference that both she, Sanger, and Porritt had attended, Mrs. Day told Hartford reporters that Mrs. Sanger would be coming to town to speak in January. In mid-November both Day and Porritt attended the annual convention of the Connecticut League of Women Voters, distributed birth control literature, and spoke about mounting an effort in the upcoming 1923 Connecticut legislature to amend the state’s 1879 anticontraception statute. By early January ABCL organization secretary Clara Louise Rowe was in Hartford planning for Sanger’s visit, and Henry Fletcher had recruited Enfield state representative Samuel Sisisky to introduce a birth control bill when the legislature convened.³⁵

Creation of state birth control leagues as affiliates of her national organization was a central part of Sanger’s plan for the ABCL, as was her firm conviction that medically supervised birth control was the goal to advocate. Just a few weeks earlier, after finally recruiting a willing female doctor, Sanger had quietly opened a New York birth control clinic, right across the hall from her ABCL office, under the rubric of a clinical research bureau. In Washington, Mary Ware Dennett had finally, after several years effort, found a member of Congress who was willing to sponsor a Comstock repeal measure, but in Connecticut Representative Sisisky’s House Bill 504, formally introduced on January 25, provided only that the giving of information or advice or medicine or articles for prevention of conception by a doctor or nurse shall not be a violation of Connecticut’s 1879 statute.³⁶

Neither Sisisky, nor Henry Fletcher, nor the other 1923 Connecticut reformers had a clear understanding of how or why the 1879 law had come into being in the form that it had, largely because neither the surviving legislative records nor the contemporaneous newspapers provided any explanatory comments or details about the statute’s consideration or passage. It had been introduced by New Haven state senator Carlos Smith just two days after a similar bill had been put before the Massachusetts legislature as a result of the efforts of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, a Comstock organization that boasted the presidents of Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, and Yale among its members. The New England Society had been created as an antiobscenity lobby following a May 1878, visit to Boston by Comstock himself, and in Massachusetts its bill quickly passed the legislature without any apparent dissent or debate. The Connecticut bill was referred to the legislature’s Joint Committee on Temperance, favorably reported less than a week later, and passed by the senate, but then returned to the committee by the house. The committee, chaired by sixty-nine-year-old Bridgeport Representative and temperance advocate Phineas T. Barnum, of circus fame, then prepared a substitute bill, including for the first time the unique language that forbid not only trafficking in obscene literature and materials concerning sex or reproduction, but also the "use of any drug, medicine, article, or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception." The revised measure was adopted by the senate, explained to the house by Barnum, approved by the house in slightly amended form, and then again concurred in by the senate. On March 28, 1879, it became law.³⁷

The kickoff event for the 1923 reform campaign was a Sunday afternoon rally and speech by Margaret Sanger at Hartford’s Parsons Theatre, just two days before the legislative joint committee hearing on Sisisky’s bill at which Sanger herself would also testify. The Sunday event drew an impressive crowd of eight hundred to twelve hundred people, approximately two thirds of whom were women, and received extensive coverage in the Connecticut press. The Hartford Courant characterized Sanger as speaking with a sincerity which her listeners seemed quick to appreciate, and explained that at the close of her talk many in the audience wrote questions which were brought up to the stage for Mrs. Sanger to answer. In her speech she had emphasized that We want to free women from incessant child bearing; we want to free her from undesired pregnancy; during the question and answer period she bitterly attacked the Connecticut statute while also emphasizing that birth control must be handled in clinics, places with doctors and nurses in charge where a man or woman may come for individual instruction in the use of contraceptives.³⁸

During her Hartford visit Sanger stayed at the home of Mrs. Day, and either that evening or the next Mrs. Day and her daughter Jo Bennett had Katharine Hepburn join them for dinner with Sanger. Day and Porritt had already been laying the groundwork for formally starting a Connecticut branch of the ABCL, and that night at dinner the plan was ratified, with Mrs. Day becoming the group’s president. Tuesday afternoon February 13, when the legislature’s joint House/Senate Judiciary Committee convened for a ninety-minute hearing on Sisisky’s bill, the old Senate chamber was packed, people standing in the back of the room and on both sides, and with the galleries full as well. Henry Fletcher and then Annie Porritt spoke first for the birth control proponents, with Mrs. Porritt declaring that We ask this knowledge for the poor; it is now obtainable by the rich. Hartford attorney and city corporation counsel Robert P. Butler, an active Democrat, added his endorsement, and then Margaret Sanger stepped forward. She was loudly applauded when she took the floor, the Courant reported the next morning. She wore a dark dress and a string of large amber beads. She talked directly to the committee in a low voice, but so clearly that it carried to the gallery. Sanger spoke not on the bill specifically, but on the general subject of birth control, one paper said, and she emphasized strongly that the advocates of birth control are not in favor of abortion, but desire only to prevent the beginning of life.

Then opponents of the bill, beginning with Hartford Alderman and Catholic Council of Men representative Francis E. Jones, had their turn. He was followed by Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop John G. Murray of Hartford, who talked directly at Mrs. Sanger and the advocates of the bill in a manner that one reporter characterized as intense. This method is a violation of a natural law, Murray declared. The Creator gave the sex function for just one purpose and to exercise it for any other purpose is a perversion of that function. The Bishop went on to say, the Courant reported, that many families already were having too few children: The races from northern Europe which he called the finest type of people, are doomed to extinction, unless each family produces at least four children. After two female opponents also spoke, the hearing concluded with Sanger being given a few moments for a brief and very effective rebuttal. The gentlemen say it is against the laws of nature to prevent conception, Sanger declared, yet they themselves are celibates. As the crowd applauded, Sanger closed by joking that by her opponents’ standards, men shaving their beards also violated the law of nature and ought similarly to be prohibited.³⁹

By any public standard the hearing and its press coverage, like the Sunday rally, had been a great success and an auspicious debut for the Connecticut birth controllers. But their rhetorical success with the crowds stood them in little stead with the legislature, for several weeks later, without debate, both the house and then the senate accepted and approved the judiciary committee’s rejection of the Sisisky bill.⁴⁰ In Washington Mary Ware Dennett’s efforts with the U.S. Congress fared no better, as two days of hearings in early 1924 were similarly followed by judiciary committee rejection of the repeal proposal. Sanger’s ABCL—which now, with Katharine Hepburn’s addition, had three Connecticut women on its board—was quite open in all but opposing Dennett’s congressional efforts. The March issue of the ABCL’s Birth Control Review stressed the league’s opposition to the indiscriminate dissemination of birth control information and declared that any campaign for the repeal of these Federal laws was of secondary importance until some educational work had been done. Indeed, the league warned, removal of the Federal restrictions would almost certainly be followed by a flood of widespread advertising, of hastily written and probably misleading books and pamphlets. Instead the ABCL was drafting a bill which would free the hands of the medical profession and enable the clinical data to be passed from one group of doctors to another. The essence of Sanger’s political strategy was conveyed most starkly in a frosty letter that Annie Porritt sent to Dennett, removing her name from Dennett’s list of sponsors. After careful study, Porritt declared, I am emphatically of the opinion that Birth Control is primarily, in its practical aspects, a medical question, and I am also convinced that promiscuous distribution of advice without medical examinations and care, would tend to degrade the whole question, and to prevent that hearty cooperation on the part of the medical profession which is the chief hope of success.⁴¹

The 1923 Connecticut legislative hearing had featured only one rather tardy appearance and endorsement of birth control by a medical doctor, but the reformers carefully arranged to have Boston M.D. James F. Cooper, whom Sanger had recently hired as the ABCL’s medical director and primary ambassador to physicians, in attendance along with Sanger herself when the 1925 hearing convened on March 12. The 1925 reform bill, in clear contrast to the 1923 one, authorized medically supervised birth control by amending the old 1879 statute so as to provide for a fifty dollars fine where drugs which may prevent conception are sold without physician’s prescription. The 1925 hearing drew a smaller crowd than the 1923 one—about one hundred proponents and some fifteen opponents, the New Haven Journal-Courier estimated, but the idea seemed to have gained in popularity since it was brought up two years ago. Dr. Cooper was the principal speaker for the reformers, supplemented by Sanger, Katharine Hepburn, and an Episcopalian minister from New York. The judiciary committee was plainly on the defensive throughout the hearing, the Hartford Times commented, but the questions asked by the committee indicated much skepticism. One senator asked Sanger if birth control information ought to be available to unmarried women, and Sanger said no: Married women are entitled to the information, because they have moral obligations, which unmarried women haven’t. The clergyman, Reverend Thomas H. Garth, contended that no woman can be free … until she has the right of her person and can say how many children she shall bear and when, but he was quickly contradicted by the day’s only opposition speaker, Mrs. Louise H. Fisher, representing the Connecticut Council of Catholic Women. Legislation of this kind will increase the trend toward evading of responsibilities on the part of married people, Fisher warned. Persons shouldn’t enter into the married life unless they are willing to accept the obligation of children. Noting that she herself was a mother of five, Mrs. Fisher closed by declaring that There is already too much love of luxury and ease and this bill would encourage that very thing.

Once again, as in 1923, the Connecticut reformers were generally pleased with the hearing, but just like two years earlier the judiciary committee quickly recommended rejection of the bill, a recommendation that was accepted without debate by both the senate and house.⁴² Katharine Beach Day turned some of her attention toward assisting Sanger in new political explorations that the ABCL was making in Washington with an eye toward finding a congressional sponsor for a reform bill. Henry Fletcher provided Day and ABCL executive secretary Anne Kennedy with a letter of introduction to Connecticut Senator George P. McLean, whom the women found most sympathetic, but neither McLean nor any of a number of other senators with whom Day and Kennedy visited early in 1926, including Nebraska’s George W. Norris, stepped forward to sponsor a bill. Mary Ware Dennett had already given up her Washington efforts and retired from the scene, and by the end of 1926, the ABCL had pulled back as well.⁴³

Birth control activism was ebbing significantly, with the ABCL registering only 2,800 new members in 1926, as opposed to over 13,000 in 1923 and over 10,000 in 1924, and in mid-1926 Connecticut showed only forty-seven subscribers to the ABCL’s Birth Control Review. Sanger spent much of late 1926 and most of 1927 in Europe, on leave from the ABCL, and when Connecticut’s 1927 legislative hearing occurred in early March, Dr. Hannah M. Stone, the director of Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in New York, came in her boss’s stead. In 1927 the Connecticut women had resolved to champion a repeal bill, and Annie Porritt told the ABCL that while it will be a miracle if it passes, the Connecticut women would not consider anything else. Porritt explained in another letter that You can buy condoms and pessaries at the drug stores if you knew to ask for articles that were not on open display, and that the real and continuing harm done by the 1879 statute stemmed from how it undoubtedly has deterred the doctors from recommending something which it would be illegal for his [sic] patients to put into practice. The hearing itself featured Hannah Stone, accompanied by Day, Porritt, Fletcher, and Hepburn, telling the judiciary committee that contraception is distinctly a medical problem and that it should be the duty and the privilege of the physician to advise his patients in regard to it. The only opposing speaker, Mrs. Richard. F. Jones of West Hartford, who claimed that there are more women in hospitals as a result of the use of preventives than on account of natural births, was apparently not questioned on her unintended acknowledgment that tens of thousands of Connecticut women indeed did want to limit and control their fertility. Although both the Connecticut senate and house once again without debate ratified a judiciary committee recommendation that the repeal bill be rejected, one small press report stated that the negative vote in committee had been by a margin of only seven to six.⁴⁴

By early 1928 Margaret Sanger was back in the United States, but Eleanor Dwight Jones, who had been the acting ABCL president during Sanger’s absence, was successfully resisting Sanger’s efforts to reassume her previous level of organizational control. With the ABCL board, including board secretary Annie Porritt, resolutely backing Jones, Sanger in June 1928 resigned as ABCL president. Political struggles persisted throughout the year as Sanger and Jones fought for control of both the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and the Birth Control Review, with Sanger winning on the former and losing on the latter. Porritt tried to be something of a mediator, warning Jones that Mrs. Sanger is scarcely sane on the point of her antagonism to you, but adding that she fully agreed with Sanger that the Clinical Research Bureau was a separate enterprise. Otherwise the Connecticut women were largely untouched by the New York battling, and focused their efforts on building some visible local support for birth control legalization in advance of the 1929 legislative session. ABCL staff organizer Constance Heck was detailed to the Fairfield County towns of Greenwich, Norwalk, and Darien to stimulate the creation of local birth control committees, and contacts were made with Protestant ministers in Hartford, Bridgeport, Stamford, and Waterbury. Up in Massachusetts the arrest and quick acquittal of one female doctor, Dr. Antoinette F. Konikow, for giving a lecture on birth control had had the effect of reviving a state league that had been moribund for almost a decade, but the great New England success of 1928 came in November when the general conference of Congregational Churches in Connecticut endorsed the upcoming repeal bill at the behest of ministers who had been recruited by the Connecticut women.⁴⁵

The success with the Congregational clergy, and the creation of a total of fourteen local town or city birth control committees, gave the birth control advocates a major boost going into the 1929 legislative session. Margaret Sanger said no to Katharine Hepburn’s request that she come up for the February 28 hearing, but an overflow crowd of almost a thousand people turned out, and the Associated Press reported that The support was stronger this session than ever before. Hepburn, Porritt, Jo Bennett, and Henry Fletcher were joined as affirmative speakers by Leon F. Whitney of New Haven, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, Bridgeport’s Reverend T. F. Rutledge Beale, the prime mover behind the Congregational Church endorsement, and prominent Hartford physician James Raglan Miller, an old acquaintance of Porritt and the Hepburns from the Social Hygiene Association.

The afternoon was without a doubt the most lively legislative hearing the Connecticut effort had yet experienced. At the outset, Katharine Houghton Hepburn stole the show. Three quarters of the men and women in this room are common criminals and ought to be in jail, she declared, drawing indignant whispers and scattered hisses from some as the crowd understood her allusion to the anticontraception law. Instead, she went on, The crime is in having too many children where parents are too poor, too unintelligent to raise many children, in raising children that can never be adjusted to society. Also, Hepburn said, even Roman Catholic women are coming to realize that this is their concern and not that of their priests; that they, and not the priests, have to bear the children. When she finished, the New Haven Journal-Courier reported, Tremendous applause went through the room.

At least half-a-dozen members of the legislature, including three women, stood to register their support for the bill, and then it was the opponents’ turn. The leader of the opposition, B. L. Garrity of Shelton, announced that he had been told to oppose the bill by his wife, the mother of their nine children. More humorous than serious, the Journal-Courier added, the opposition leader advised that, instead of birth control being allowed among the ‘upper stratum’ a law be passed that all couples married ten years should be forced to have five children, or be sent to jail for the rest of their lives. If they want the sex relationship, he declared, let them take what goes with it. Garrity went on to compare birth control clinics to houses which people don’t speak about in polite society, but when a female committee member sought to ask Garrity whether having so many children had threatened his wife’s health, a fight nearly developed and the committee chairman ruled the question out of order as too personal. Louise Fisher’s opposition testimony produced no such outbursts, but another Hartford woman asserted that the bill savors of barbarism and paganism. Katharine Hepburn was allotted several minutes for a closing rebuttal, and tried to reiterate her earlier point that immigrant women don’t believe it’s any business of the priests, since they, the women are the real sufferers, but she was angrily interrupted by an opposing legislator from Bridgeport who shouted that people simply needed to control their lust. Let them practice self-control, not birth control! The hearing concluded with the committee asking the audience for a show of hands, pro and con, which one reporter estimated looked essentially even, about 400 to 400.⁴⁶

Only five days later, however, the judiciary committee issued a negative report on the bill, and even its supposed sponsor, Senator Ernest W. Christ, told reporters that he was not in disagreement with the committee’s action. The Connecticut women were sorely disappointed, but soon learned, as Katharine Beach Day later reported, that The Republican leaders had decreed the defeat of the bill. The women’s organizing efforts had in part been for naught because they had insufficiently appreciated the extent to which legislative policy decisions in Connecticut were made in a top-down manner. In the largely one-party Republican world of the Connecticut legislature, where Republicans that year dominated the house by 194 to 68, and the senate by the much narrower margin of 21 to 14, most members followed the recommendations issued by their leaders.

One member who did not, however, was sixty-nine-year-old Bristol lawyer and legal scholar Epaphroditus Peck. While the senate accepted the judiciary committee’s negative recommendation without debate, Peck forced a floor debate and vote in the house—the first time a birth control bill had gotten that far. Like the earlier hearing, however, the floor debate turned into a raucous affair. With Katharine Hepburn in a front row seat in the well-filled gallery, Representative Peck spoke about how the anticontraception statute was essentially religious legislation and how there had never been a prosecution under it. He noted how at the hearing opposition to its repeal had come exclusively from Roman Catholic sources, and emphasized how the entire topic involved matters purely personal.

The primary opposition speaker was Representative Caroline T. Platt of Milford, who admitted that some liberalization might be desirable for women with health problems but contended that even most Protestants did not favor total repeal. Trembling, seemingly with deep emotion, Mrs. Platt argued that if birth control was legalized, population growth would come only from immigrants, and she pleaded for ‘keeping up the proper element.’ This bill, she went on, opens the way for every girl to become a prostitute, and seventy-five per cent of them will. That statement generated such a chorus of protesting hisses that Mrs. Platt was silenced, standing erect, her trembling hand holding a sheet of paper with her notes. Platt then concluded by calling for a conference of ‘conscientious doctors and wise lawyers’ to draft an amendment. Her speech, the Hartford Courant declared, had been the first time in the history of the State that occupants of the galleries hissed a member of the House for arguments advanced on the floor.

Six other representatives, four of them women, also spoke before the