Connecticut’s 99-year journey to lawful contraception – Part II of IV

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Now the home of the Connecticut Community Foundation, this Field Street building in Waterbury once housed the Chase Memorial Dispensary and the Maternal Health Clinic. Clara McTernan established the clinic to help local women seeking reproductive information. A Middlebury doctor was the clinic’s chief gynecologist and a Middlebury woman was its bookkeeper. (Dr. Robert L. Rafford photo)

By DR. ROBERT L. RAFFORD

In July 1923, the family of the late Henry Sabin Chase (1855-1918), some of whom lived in Middlebury for many years, began constructing the Henry Chase Memorial Dispensary on Field Street in Waterbury. Designed by noted architect Cass Gilbert, it honored Henry Sabin Chase, founder of the Chase Brass and Copper Company, and was intended to provide medical care for the people of Waterbury. At the time, no one could foresee the significant role that clinic would play in the drama surrounding birth control in Connecticut.

Scorn for birth control heightened in the late-1800s. President Theodore Roosevelt warned in 1903, that “… what is fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country, that is the question of race suicide, complete or partial … the man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage …, and has a heart so cold … as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race” (The Baltimore Sun). His ‘race suicide’ invective would echo through speeches of anti-contraception advocates for decades to come.

On October 17, 1916, in a poor neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, Margaret Sanger opened the country’s first birth control clinic dedicated to helping surrounding families. In 1917, the first Connecticut legislative attempt to modify the 1879 anti-contraception law was submitted. It asked lawmakers to allow doctors to provide information about birth control to married patients, but it failed.

In 1923, Sanger gave a speech in Hartford, after which the Planned Parenthood League of Hartford was formed. At the large gathering she declared, “We want to establish birth control clinics in this state. We want these to be places with doctors and nurses in charge where a man or woman may come for individual instruction in the use of contraceptives” (Hartford Courant).

While the prohibition of birth control began with Protestant Christian officials, by the 1920s the opponent was primarily the Catholic church. The Congregational Church in Connecticut officially endorsed birth control in 1929, and all other major non-Catholic Christian denominations followed shortly. Rabbi Abraham J. Feldman of Temple Beth Israel in Hartford, speaking in 1931, said the Central Conference of American Rabbis approved the principle of “birth regulation” in 1930 (Hartford Courant). In 1930, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical condemning birth control as “a grave sin,” “shameful,” intrinsically vicious,” and a “horrible crime” (Hartford Courant).

In 1932, a clinic opened in Port Chester, New York, just over the line with Connecticut. Hope ran high that clinics could soon sprout up across Connecticut, in part because there had never been a conviction for violation of the 1879 “Barnum” law, and the need among Connecticut citizens was overwhelming. The first Connecticut clinic opened in Hartford in 1935. At the time, over 60% of Americans, including a majority of Catholics, supported the distribution of birth control information. Not all were in favor; in a bizarre example in 1937, Representative John G. Fitzgerald of Ansonia submitted a bill that would mandate the surgical sterilization of any representative or senator who advocated birth control.

Clinics soon flourished across Connecticut, and in 1938 Clara Lee McTernan, wife of Charles McTernan, the founder of the McTernan School for Boys in Waterbury, established the Maternal Health Clinic in the Chase Memorial Dispensary on Field Street in Waterbury. The clinic, the 10th opened in Connecticut, was under the aegis of Waterbury Hospital, with Charles L. Larkin Sr., M.D., (1889-1967) of Middlebury its chief gynecologist. Virginia (Johnston) Goss (1911-1997), another Middleburian, mother of future CIA Director Porter Johnston Goss, was the clinic’s bookkeeper.

Things looked bright for the families of Connecticut. The year prior, the New York Times reported that the American Medical Association had endorsed birth control as “having a definite place in medical practice” (New York Times). Unfortunately, Waterbury’s clinic was about to become the scene of the shattering of all progress birth control advocates had made across Connecticut.

You are urged to join the Middlebury Historical Society by going online at MiddleburyHistoricalSociety.org or visiting them on Facebook. Questions about membership can be sent to Bob at robraff@comcast.net.