Practice of Contraception, The.
Inscribed By Hannah Stone
Sanger, Margaret, and Hannah M. Stone, M.D., eds. The Practice of Contraception. An international symposium and survey. With a foreword by Robert L. Dickinson, M.D. From The Proceedings of the Seventh International Birth Control Conference, Zurich, Switzerland, September, 1930. Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1931.
8vo.; green cloth, spine stamped in gilt; light wear; spine faded.
First edition of this compilation of papers delivered at the five-day conference. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper to Morris Ernst, general counsel to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America from 1927, and a close friend to Sanger (he was one of the eulogizers at her funeral) and Stone: May, 1932/ To/ Morris L. Ernst/ Who has helped to make/ such volumes possible./ Hannah M. Stone. Contributors to the book, in addition to Stone, who prepared a number of pieces herself, include Helena Wright, Wilhelm Reich, Hertha Riese, Martha Ruben-Wolf, and dozens of other doctors. Dr. Abraham Stone, another participant in the conference, is thanked in the front matter for his help with translations and general preparation of the book. It is divided into four Parts: Contraceptive Methods is subdivided into six sections, each tackling a different type of contraception. Part II, Abortion, contains three papers and a discussion. Part III, Clinic Reports, is comprised of seven sections, each devoted to a country or group of countries: America, England, Germany, Russia, Austria, Holland and Denmark, and India, China and Japan. Part IV, Summary, prints Stone’s summary, an index of the authors, and an appendix including The Conference Program and Resolutions.
Stone did not overstate the case in this inscription to Ernst. One of the earliest and most successful civil liberties lawyers in the United States, active in the ACLU and NAACP, and architect of the 1933 successful challenge to ban on an American publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, he was a crucial figure in the early achievements of Stone and Sanger at Planned Parenthood. He defended their birth control clinic when it was raided on April 15, 1929 and charged with violating section 1142 of the legal code. Beginning in the fall of 1933, he was their counsel in United States v. One Package Containing 120, more or less, Rubber Pessaries to Prevent Conception, when a Japanese doctor was prevented by U.S. Customs officials from getting contraceptives to either Sanger or Stone. In 1935 they won the case—on the grounds that the use of the contraceptives would be legitimately medical. When the government appealed the decision to the Second Circuit Court of New York the following year, Ernst won again; he would later demure, “it is perfectly easy to win a case after Margaret Sanger has educated the judges, and she has educated any number of them. I have merely been a mouthpiece.” Judge Augustus Hand handed down a landmark opinion insisting that the Comstock law be tempered with some “common sense”:
He advised that the language of the original [Comstock] law no longer be read literally—that the intent of the 1873 prohibitions had been to protect against materials thought problematic and dangerous fifty years earlier, but no longer so considered. Acknowledging an extensive body of medical and sociological evidence introduced by Ernst into the trial record as proof that contraception had become a safe and essential element of modern medical practice, Hand insisted that the law henceforth be interpreted to embrace “only such articles as Congress would have denounced as immoral if it has understood all the conditions under which they were to be used.” He continued: “Its design, in our opinion, was not to prevent the importation, sale, or carriage by mail of things which might intelligently be employed by conscientious and competent physicians for the purpose of saving life or promoting the well-being of their patients.
In 1937 the American Med
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