Dr. Mary had previously been on the staff of the Grosvenor Hospital and had held her evening clinic there. To one of her patients who had been operated on for glandular tuberculosis she had prescribed a cervical pessary. When a few evenings later the woman had come back to be refitted, Dr. Mary had been out and her substitute, horrified and shocked, had presented the matter to the board. Dr. Mary had been called before them. She had told them in no uncertain terms that the giving of contraceptive information to patients in need of it was part of her work and that she had a right under the law to do so. The board had disagreed with her and asked for her resignation. I did not wish to complicate the question of testing the law by having a nurse give information, because a nurse did not come under the Section 1145 exception. But since I could find no doctor I had to do without. Ethel, a registered nurse, had a readiness to share in helping the movement, though she did not belong to it in the same sense as I. Then, as long as I had to violate the law anyhow, I concluded I might as well violate it on a grand scale by including poverty as a reason for giving contraceptive information. I did not see why the hardships and worries of a working man’s wife might not be just as detrimental as any disease. I wanted a legal opinion on this if possible. My next problems were where the money was to come from and where the clinic was to be. Ever since I had announced that I was going to open one within a few months I had been buried under an avalanche of queries as to the place, which for a time I could not answer. The selection of a suitable locality was of the greatest importance. I tramped through the streets of the Bronx, Brooklyn, the lower sides of Manhattan, East and West. I scrutinized the Board of Health vital statistics of all the boroughs—births and infant and maternal mortality in relation to low wages, and also the number of philanthropic institutions in the vicinity. The two questions—where and how—were settled on one and the same day. That afternoon five women from the Brownsville Section of Brooklyn crowded into my room seeking the “secret” of birth control. Each had four children or more, who had been left with neighbors. One had just recovered from an abortion which had nearly killed her. “Another will take me off. Then what will become of my family?” They rocked back and forth as they related their afflictions, told so simply, each scarcely able to let her friend finish before she took up the narration of her own sufferings—the high cost of food, her husband’s meager income when he worked at all, her helplessness in the struggle to make ends meet, whining, sickly children, the constant worry of another baby—and always hanging over her night and day, year after year, was fear. All cried what a blessing and godsend a clinic would be in their neighborhood.