Founding Feminists is FMF’s daily herstory column.
The Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau’s clinic was raided this morning by New York City police, who arrested two doctors and three nurses, then seized massive amounts of “evidence,” including confidential patient records.
Dr. Hannah Mayer Stone, medical director, Dr. Elizabeth Pissoort, assistant director, and nurses Antoinette Field, Sigrid H. Brestwell, and Marcella Sideri were charged with violation of Section 1142 of the New York State Penal Code, which bans birth control devices and contraceptive information as obscene materials.
The raid was as surprising as it was outrageous, because it has been 11 years since State Appeals Court Judge Frederick Crane ruled that though New York State’s ban on birth control and the dispensing of birth control information was valid, an exception must be made for doctors prescribing contraception to their married, adult patients, if they do so “for the cure or prevention of disease.”
The clinic has operated since January 2, 1923, and was the first to legally provide birth control services in the United States. The nation’s first birth control clinic was opened by two nurses on October 16, 1916, was raided 10 days later, then shut down permanently when it tried to re-open. The clinic raided today has been operated in such a way as to carefully conform to the law, as interpreted in 1918 by Judge Crane, in that only licensed physicians dispensed birth control and only to married women whose health would be endangered by a pregnancy.
In an ironic note, just moments before the raid occurred, a visiting out-of-State physician was talking to one of the members of the staff and asked if they had any trouble with the authorities. He was told: “No, those days have passed.”
But almost immediately after that conversation, eight police officers came in, pushed the clinic’s many women patients and their children out into the street, took the women’s names, then began arresting the doctors and nurses. They confiscated practically everything in sight, from forceps used to handle instruments being sterilized to confidential patient files that are the personal property of the doctors.
All those arrested were taken to the police station, where they were booked, then released on bail pending trial.
