Out of all the dust of discussion, the straight repeal emerges clear and clean. The doctors said it was the only practicable legislation and the lawyers that it was the only sound legislation. It has been noticeable that physicians in discussing birth control legislation if they have leaned at all toward laws to keep the imparting of information exclusively in medical hands, have done so with a view to safeguarding the people from harmful or fraudulent methods, and have not urged it as a means for regulating morals. But laymen, notably club women, quite frequently have jumped at a hasty and thoughtless conclusion that somehow if the knowledge is kept by law in the hands of the doctors only, and is given out by them according to their discretion, it will be kept from reaching those who want to utilize it in illicit relationships. This assumption is the flimsiest kind of self-deception. The notion that doctors as a whole can see to it that they give instruction only where the use of it will stand the highest test of ethics and wisdom is nonsense. The function of the medical profession is to cure and prevent disease. It is not to act as arbiter of morals and ethics. Any pretense that it should do so is built on shifting sand. It is utterly unfair to the doctors to expect them to serve in any such capacity, and to propose laws that would impose upon them any such responsibility. Occasionally, of course, the doctor is not only physician but friend to his patient, and is therefore in a position to give moral advice without intrusion, but that relationship is incidental to his profession and not inherent in it. Laws that would try to empower physicians to act as inquisitors into the private lives of their patients and to be responsible for the ethical use of contraceptive instructions, would be an imposition both upon the physicians and upon the people. There is no evidence that the profession wants any such spurious responsibility thrust upon it. Medical men in general are sufficiently high grade human beings to have a high regard for morals, and as individuals they can make their influence felt, but that is an entirely different thing from foisting upon them as a class a law-imposed task of managing other people’s private lives. Legislators, citizens and physicians alike must recognize that the source of moral stability is individual character, and that no repressive or paternalistic laws can ever produce the desired results.