Founding Feminists is FMF’s daily herstory column.
A regular schedule of force-feedings is being drawn up by Workhouse authorities for Ethel Byrne, now serving a 30-day sentence for giving out information on contraception last October at the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn.
On October 26th, after providing services to at least 400 women since it opened ten days earlier, the clinic at 46 Amboy Street was raided and closed by police for violating Section 1142 of the New York State Penal Code, which prohibits anyone from giving out information on contraception, or actual birth control devices. Byrne’s trial was held before a three-judge panel on January 8th, with sentencing on the 22nd.
Ethel Byrne has been undergoing force-feeding three times a day since just after midnight yesterday morning. The procedure consists of having a rubber tube inserted through her mouth and into her esophagus while a pint of milk, two eggs, and a small amount of brandy are poured in through a funnel.
The authorities have announced that they will not end the feedings when she has recovered from the immediate effects of her four and a half day hunger strike. They will continue the ordeal until she agrees to eat and drink voluntarily. Commissioner of Correction Lewis has been besieged by telephone calls from people objecting to Byrne’s treatment, but he insists that it is nothing unusual:
Mrs. Byrne is being fed because the law requires it. Forcible feeding is nothing to cause so much comment. It is an every day matter with us. We constantly get alcoholics and drug addicts who must be forcibly fed. We are not permitted to allow prisoners to commit suicide. The only difference between Mrs. Byrne and the others is that Mrs. Byrne has someone on the outside giving out statements about her and us.
That “someone” is Margaret Sanger, who along with Fania Mindell will go on trial tomorrow for the same offense as Byrne. Since Sanger has also vowed to go on a hunger strike if jailed, Workhouse officials said today that she will not be allowed to go over four days without food as her sister did, but will probably be force-fed after two.
Neither Sanger, nor Byrne’s lawyer have been able to see the prisoner for three days, and there is growing concern about her true condition, despite reassuring bulletins issued by the Workhouse that allegedly show her condition improving. At 6:00 this evening the latest report said that her temperature was 97, pulse 96, respiration 19, blood pressure 122, and that her physical and mental condition were both “good.”
On another front, it was announced today that a delegation from the Committee of 100 will go to Albany on the 31st to ask New York Governor Charles Whitman to commute Byrne’s sentence. The Committee was organized by Gertrude Pinchot and other active members of the National Birth Control League, such as Rose Pastor Stokes, Crystal Eastman and Juliet Rublee, to protest the arrests at the clinic and to raise money to help with the growing legal expenses of birth control advocates.
The mass meeting in Carnegie Hall tomorrow night in support of those arrested at the clinic, and to promote the legalization of birth control, is now a sold-out affair, though six box seats will likely be empty. They have been reserved for the three judges who convicted and sentenced Ethel Byrne, the Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted her, and two of his staff members. The police, on the other hand, are expected to show up, since there will be an attempt to distribute copies of the first issue of the “Birth Control Review,” containing articles favoring contraception.
The immediate goal of local birth control advocates is to repeal the law under which Byrne has been convicted and Sanger and Mindell charged. Section 1142 of the New York State Penal Code reads as follows:
INDECENT ARTICLES: A person who sells, lends, gives away, or in any manner exhibits or offers to sell, lend or give away, or has in his possession with intent to sell, lend or give away, or advertises, or offers for sale, loan or distribution, any instrument or article, or any recipe, drug or medicine for the prevention of conception or for causing unlawful abortion, or advertises or holds out representations that it can be so used or applied, or any such description as will be calculated to lead another to so use or apply any such article, recipe, drug, medicine or instrument, or who writes or prints, or causes to be written or printed, a card, circular, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind, or gives information orally, stating when, where, how, of whom, or by what means such an instrument, article, recipe, drug or medicine can be purchased or obtained, or who manufactures any such instrument, article, recipe, drug or medicine, is guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be liable to the same penalties as provided in section eleven hundred and forty-one of this chapter.
The punishment prescribed in Section 1141 is a sentence of “not less than ten days nor more than one year’s imprisonment or a fine of not less than fifty dollars nor more than one thousand dollars or both fine and imprisonment for each offense.”
