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

#MiddleburyCT #Contraception #BirthControl

This article was originally published in the November 2022 issue of the Middlebury Bee-Intelligencer.

By DR. ROBERT L. RAFFORD

The gravestone of Middleburian Virginia Johnston Goss sits in Riverside Cemetery in Waterbury. She tried to keep confidential patient records from being seized by the state’s attorney in 1939. (Dr. Robert L. Rafford photo)

Throughout the 1930s, lines were drawn along religious lines for and against repeal or reform of the Connecticut 1879 anticontraception law, with Catholics opposing it and all other major Christian denominations supporting it. In 1931, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical condemning birth control as “shameful … intrinsically vicious … a grave sin and “horrible crime.” (Hartford Courant) Months later, the Rev. Fletcher D. Parker, pastor of the Immanuel Congregational Church in Hartford, summarized other Christian views when he called the Connecticut anticontraception law “absurd,” saying the “repeal of this obsolete law is a primary charge upon our consciences as pioneers for a better Christian civilization.” (Hartford Courant).

The Maternal Health Center at the Chase Memorial Clinic on Field Street in Waterbury opened on October 11, 1938, serving thousands of Connecticut women. On Friday, June 9, 1939, the Waterbury Democrat newspaper featured a front-page story, showing that, under the approval of Waterbury Hospital, the Henry Sabin Chase Memorial Dispensary was hosting a birth control clinic.

Dr. Broadstreet Henry Mason (1881-1942), Waterbury Hospital superintendent, and Middlebury’s Dr. Charles Lewis Larkin Sr. (1889-1967), chief of gynecology at the clinic, characterized the situation as one of semantics. Dr. Mason explained that a gynecological clinic “includes in the normal course of its work the giving of some information on birth control.” Dr. Larkin added, “That’s a long way from the popular conception of a birth control clinic where any woman may go who doesn’t want to have children.” (David J. Garrow, “Liberty and Sexuality,” 1994).

The Rev. Eugene Philip Cryne (1883-1963), the pastor of St. John of the Cross Church in Middlebury from 1922 to 1933, was then president of the Catholic Clergy Association of Waterbury and pastor of St. Patrick’s Church. As a result of the newspaper article, he called a meeting of Catholic clergy the next day, where a resolution condemning the clinic was drafted. That Sunday, every Catholic congregation in and around the city heard the association resolution read from the pulpit. The association urged Catholics to avoid contact with the clinic, and declared it was “unalterably opposed to the existence of such a clinic in our city and we hereby … publicly call the attention of the public prosecutors to its existence and demand that they investigate and if necessary prosecute to the full extent of the law” (Garrow).

One congregant of St. Margaret’s Catholic Church, State’s Attorney William B. Fitzgerald (1902-1981), immediately mounted an investigation. On June 23, police arrested on bench warrants Drs. William A. Goodrich (1908–1959) and Roger Burdette Nelson (1908-1993), clinic staff physicians who reported to Dr. Larkin. Arrested too was clinic president, founder, director and certified nurse Clara Lee McTernan (1899-1982), wife of the founder of the McTernan School in Waterbury and Fitzgerald’s next-door neighbor and friend.

Fitzgerald ordered contraceptive and other items seized from the clinic and wanted the confidential patient records, but they were not in the clinic. They were in the possession of Junior League clinic volunteer Virginia (Johnston) Goss (1911-1997) of Middlebury, wife of Scovill industrialist Richard Wayne Goss (1905-1981) and mother of the future CIA Director Porter Johnston Goss. When she heard of the raid on the clinic, she absquatulated with the records to Long Island, but was immediately convinced to return with them.

The attorney chosen for those arrested was J. Warren Upson (1903-1992), father of former State Senator Thomas F. (“Tim”) Upson. Upson held that the 1879 anticontraception law was in violation of the United States Constitution, and the Superior Court agreed. However, the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors ruled in State v. Nelson in 1940 that the 1879 law was constitutional. The three defendants were found not guilty because no criminal intent was determined. As a result of the State Supreme Court decision, all birth control clinics throughout Connecticut voluntarily closed their doors, and they would stay closed for the next two decades.

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.