New York has a unique sort of post-script to its State law, passed in 1881, eight years after the first law. The main statute (Section 1142 of the Penal Code) is of the most sweepingly suppressive variety. The added provision (Section 1145) declares that “An article or instrument used or applied by physicians lawfully practicing, or by their direction or prescription, for the cure or prevention of disease, is not an article of indecent or immoral nature or use.” Just how an _article_ can have an immoral or indecent _nature_ has never been explained. However, this section has within the last few years been judicially interpreted to mean that the giving of contraceptive advice by a physician to a patient who was diseased or seriously threatened with disease is not an act of criminal indecency. And under this interpretation a Clinic has been established in New York City by the American Birth Control League. It is now (1926) in its third year of service and reports that during its first year it gave contraceptive instructions to 3000 patients. Similar service is creeping gradually into a few of the New York Hospitals, but it is being rendered quietly, indeed almost furtively, so pervasive is the effect of the general legal taboo. As recently as 1919 thirty of the chief hospitals in the city officially stated that no preventive instructions would be given even to seriously diseased women. These prohibitions, in the 24 States where they exist, are a part of the _obscenity_ statutes, just as is the case in the Federal statutes. They appear under such headings as “Obscene literature” and “Indecent Articles.” In California the prohibition comes under a general chapter heading,—“Indecent Exposure, Obscene Exhibitions, Books and Prints, Bawdy and Other Disorderly Houses.” None of the laws define contraceptive information as, per se, obscene, indecent, immoral, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or any of the other revolting things named in the statutes, but they list it along with these things, in most cases there being no more separation from them than that which a comma affords. Section 102 of the Federal law makes a still closer connection of idea, for it prohibits “importing, advertising, dealing in, exhibiting, or sending or receiving by mail obscene or indecent publications or representations or means for preventing conception or producing abortion, or _other_ article of indecent or immoral use or tendency.” This knowledge is thus definitely classed as one among “other” things of indecent or immoral use. Science and indecency are in fact hopelessly jumbled in the whole mass of law affecting this subject. There is not the slightest differentiation between what is scientific truth,—a part of the world’s store of knowledge, and things which are the expression of sexual depravity and perversion.