Birth control laws : $b shall we keep them, change them, or abolish themDennett, Mary Ware
History
Birth control laws : $b shall we keep them, change them, or abolish them
Dennett, Mary Ware
Birth control; Birth control -- Law and legislation -- United States
Due either to the criticisms on this proposed legislation or to unaided
sober second thought, this bill has recently been supplanted by another
“doctors only” bill, which is now supported not only by the officers
of the American Birth Control League, but by the New York Committee
on Maternal Health, a group made up mostly of physicians under whose
auspices, research work in contraceptive method is being carried on.
Dr. Robert L. Dickinson is its Chairman. This new bill is somewhat less
restrictive, and has fewer inconsistencies and loopholes than the first
proposed bill, but is none the less a medical monopoly bill in intent,
and is none the less class and special-privilege legislation. And like
the first one, it leaves the subject of the control of conception still
classed in the obscenities and penalized as a criminal indecency.
It also has the same stuttering provision which makes contraceptive
information and means “not non-mailable” under certain conditions.
These conditions are, when they come from or are sent to a doctor,
a medical publisher, an importer, manufacturer or dealer, and with
a final provision that the retail dealer can not send anything of
the sort to any one except a physician or some one who has a written
prescription from a physician. It provides for importing and exporting
under similar restrictions.
This newest version of a “doctors only” bill has been drafted by George
E. Worthington, Acting Director of the Department of Legal Measures of
the American Social Hygiene Association. It reads as follows:
Section 211, to be amended by adding the following:
_Provided that_:
Standard medical and scientific journals and reprints therefrom and
standard medical works which contain information with reference to
the preventing of conception are not non-mailable under this section.
_Provided further that_:
1. Any article, instrument, substance, drug, or thing designed,
adapted or intended for preventing conception, or any written or
printed information or advice concerning the prevention of conception
is not non-mailable under this section when mailed by a duly licensed
physician to:
a. another person known to him to be a duly licensed physician;
b. one of his bonafide patients in the course of his professional
practice;
c. a printer or publisher, or by a bonafide printer or publisher to
a duly licensed physician.
2. Any article, instrument, substance, drug or thing designed,
adapted or intended for preventing conception is not non-mailable
under this section when mailed in the regular course of legitimate
business by:
a. an importer to a manufacturer or wholesale dealer in drugs, or
by a manufacturer or wholesale dealer in drugs to an importer;
b. a manufacturer to a wholesale dealer in drugs or by such
wholesale dealer to a manufacturer;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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