Birth Control League Of Massachusetts

In the summer of 1916 Van Kleek Allison, a Fabian socialist agitator, was arrested for distributing family planning pamphlets to workers at Boston's North End Candy factory. A group of citizens, known as the Allison Defense Committee, formed in his support (Allison was sentenced to two months in prison in 1917). By August 1916 the group was sufficiently organized to vote to change its name to the Birth Control League, although beginning with the October 30, 1916 minutes, the group referred to itself as the Birth Control League of Massachusetts (BCLM). Separate funds were raised, one for Allison's Defense and the other for the League. In autumn a constitution was drafted and adopted with Blanche Ames Ames as President.

Over the next few years organizers of the League developed ambitious and far-reaching plans designed to make birth control a public issue. They were active in educational work, meetings, and conferences, and membership slowly grew. In May 1919 under the leadership of Dr. Evangeline Young, the League reorganized as the Family Welfare Foundation.

The Foundation was unsuccessful in its goals and the group voted in 1920 to disband. In February 1928 one of the original members of the BCLM, Dr. Antoinette Konikow, printed a flyer inviting interested women to her house for a discussion and demonstration of contraceptives. She was arrested on the evening of the meeting and was charged with violating Massachusetts law against "advertising" or "exhibiting" contraceptives. (She was later acquitted.) Members of the old BCL formed the Emergency Defense Committee on her behalf. In May 1928 the Emergency Defense Committee returned to the old name of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts (BCLM) with Blanche Ames Ames once again as president. (She held the post until 1935 when she resigned along with Cornelia James Cannon because of a conflict over the wording of an advertisement that ran in Boston newspapers). During the next year the membership campaign continued and by May 1930 a paid field secretary, Caroline Carter, was engaged and an office rented in her home on Joy Street in Boston.

In 1931 the League went before the Joint Legislative Committee on Public Health for a hearing at which fourteen physicians testified to the medical need to give contraceptive advice to married women for medical reasons. A petition, "The Doctor's Bill to Clarify the Law," was signed by more than a thousand physicians and presented to the committee. It was unsuccessful. However, in 1932 Attorney Murray Hall advised the league that it would be acting within the law if it opened clinics, and funds were raised for the establishment of the Brookline Mother's Health Clinic. The following year a similar clinic opened in Springfield, followed by clinics in Worcester, Fitchburg, Salem, New Bedford, and in the South End of Boston. The League sponsored these clinics (Mother's Health Offices), placing them under the supervision of a Medical Advisory Committee. By 1936 the Mother's Health Offices or doctors in the outlying districts who worked in cooperation with the League to care for patients unable to pay the usual doctors' fees were serving five hundred people yearly.

Although the League was operating under the assumption that these clinics were legal, the Salem clinic was raided by police in 1937. The police took all the patient records and filed complaints against the doctor, nurse and social worker. The clinic was closed pending trial. Two more clinics, Brookline and Boston, were also raided and similar charges made, although no records were seized. The League then closed all the clinics. The clinics, which cared for 3000 low income married women, never reopened.

In 1939 the BCLM became the Massachusetts Mothers' Health Council (MMHC) and the members began working to change the anti-birth control laws through legislation.