Daily Worker editorial on the raid of the Birth Control Research Bureau at 46 West 15th St. in New York City, one of the first legal clinics of its kind.

‘Birth Control Clinic Raided’ from The Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 36. April 17, 1929.

The exact motive back of the sudden and malignant police raid on the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau is not yet clearly revealed. Reaction always likes to operate in the dark. Two women physicians and three nurses were arrested, huddled into a police wagon and rushed off to the dungeons of the West Twentieth Street Station. It is pointed out that even the letter of the law was adhered to at the Research Bureau in that only women diseased or in such precarious health as to prevent them safely from bearing children received attention.

It is easily understood, however, that the black forces fighting birth control for the masses, while winking at and abetting every form of contraception for the parasite few, are allied in spreading this new police net against an idea almost universally accepted elsewhere in the modern world.

There is the orthodox American Medical Association that fears bad business for the pill makers in every effort to prevent disease and breed a healthy race. There is the Catholic Church that fought the child labor amendment to the federal constitution, thus joining with the greatest exploiters in considering children nothing more than so much machine fodder for the factories, cannon fodder for the next war. The recent alliance between the fascist dictator, Mussolini, and the Roman Catholic Pope at Rome, was completely cemented with a nation-wide decree, carrying heavy penalties, against birth control.

The ignorance, the greed and the reaction characteristic of the orthodox medical quacks, orthodox religion and hungry profiteers are all typical of New York’s Tammany Hall rule that sent its police against the West Side clinic that was doing pioneer work in a forbidden field.

What is needed, no doubt, in the land, is a broad campaign of open and defiant violation of all laws against birth control. Nearly all the women patients in the Birth Control Clinic when it was raided were reported as in their thirties and either carrying or leading children. They were heavily burdened with the struggle for existence. They felt they could not assume the tremendous responsibility of rearing large families.

Birth control is legalized in the Soviet Union. Special instruction is provided, free to all. This is one of the big contributing factors to the cutting down by nearly two-thirds of the death rate of children in Moscow, for instance. Of the 49,860 children born in 1928, only 6,400 died. In 1921, under czarism, 16,000 children under the age of one year died out of the 54,300 who were born during the year. Thus during the past year, the lives of 10,000 children were saved where they had previously been sacrificed. Incidentally the population of Moscow grew by 6.1 per cent, with births accounting for one per cent of the increase.

Capitalist “civilization” in the United States is still on the edge of barbarism insofar as children are concerned. Testimony to this fact is clearly given in the criminal raid against the Birth Control Clinic.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1929/1929-ny/v06-n036-NY-apr-17-1929-DW-LOC.pdf