National Committee on Maternal Health

The Committee on Maternal Health was organized in New York City in 1923 by Robert L. Dickinson (1861-1950). After obtaining financial backing from several society women, Dickinson recruited physicians for the Committee to sponsor medical investigation of contraception, infertility, spontaneous abortion, and related issues. In 1930 "National" was added to its name, and the role of the Committee shifted to that of a clearing house for information on these issues; the Committee sponsored a series of monographs which were to serve as a handbook for doctors. The shift occurred because Dickinson was unsuccessful in obtaining sufficient data from hospitals for their research, and also failed to gain support from the medical profession for a clinical investigation through Margaret Sanger's Clinical Research Bureau. Dickinson, however, did associate himself with Sanger's Clinic in a private capacity after 1930, and was to serve as mediator through whom organized medicine made its peace with the birth control movement. Dickinson died in 1950. The Committee's office at the New York Academy of Medicine was closed in 1955, shortly before the resignation of the executive director. The Population Council was its successor organization; the data-gathering section remained in New York and the Council itself located in Princeton, N.J.

The Committee on Maternal Health was organized in New York City in 1923 by the renowned gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson for the purpose of sponsoring the study of contraception and related issues. At first Dickinson, who had long been interested in problems of human sexuality, directed the efforts of the Committee toward taking medical control of contraception away from Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and the American Birth Control League. With this aim in view and with help from the Rockefeller-funded Bureau of Social Hygiene, the Maternity Research Council was created under the auspices of the Committee. Eventually, however, Dr. Dickinson and Mrs. Sanger became the mediators through whom the medical profession and the birth control movement were able to cooperate and the Clinical Research Bureau survived under the direction of Dr. Hannah Stone.*

In 1930 the Committee on Maternal Health's name changed to National Committee on Maternal Health and its role shifted to that of publisher and clearing-house for public information and education. At the same time Dickinson and other members of the Committee not only served in an advisory capacity to the birth control movement at large, they also were concerned with various aspects of maternal and child welfare, among them sexual relations and marriage counseling. The Committee's sponsorship of contraceptive research received a boost in 1934 when the Standards Program was developed through the help of Dr. Clarence J. Gamble. Under this program delivery and testing of contraceptives in the. South came to be carried out on an extensive scale in the later years of the 1930s. During the 1940s the Committee focused on such timely issues as women war workers and abortion studies.

By the time of Dickinson's death in 1950 the Committee save for Gamble's Standards Program was virtually inactive. Its offices at the New York Academy of Medicine were closed in 1955 and the work of the Standards Program was transferred a few years later to the newly-established, Pathfinder Fund (a Gamble family foundation). Some of the Committee's other work was subsequently taken up by the Population Council.

*For more on the inter-relations between the Committee and the birth control movement as well as its subsequent history, see James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue; the Birth Control Movement and American Society since 1830 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1978).