Birth Control's Week

P:In Colorado Springs, at their 14th national biennial convention last week, the Young Women's Christian Associations reiterated their stand on birth control, unanimously voting to "put sex bootleggers out of business" by supporting legislation to permit dissemination by doctors of contraceptive information.

P:In the Catholic Holy Name Society's Holy Name Journal appeared a blast at Mrs. Thomas Norvel Hepburn, birth control advocate and mother of Cinemactress Katharine Hepburn. What provoked this sheet to impolite language was Mrs. Hepburn's recent statement that "birth control makes it possible for young people to get married and save up and have children when they really want them. ... It makes parentage a glorious fulfillment of their hopes instead of an accident of Nature."

P:In Manhattan, home from a world tour, arrived the nation's No. 1 birth controller, Mrs. Margaret Sanger, with much to say to the Press. In India, Mrs. Sanger said she obtained indorsements from 45 medical associations, founded 50 birth control centres, spoke at 100-odd meetings and "found no opposition in India from any religious group. . . . Everybody accepted the idea that something must be done to halt the increase in population and the inevitable death of women and children."

Mrs. Sanger spent three days with that half-forgotten little holy man, the Mahatma Gandhi.* He, said she, believes "that women should control the whole question of family--how many children and when. He went me one better on that score: I believe that men should say how many children and the women should say when. After all, the fathers have to support the children." But Mrs. Sanger did not bring away St. Gandhi's complete indorsement of her work. Explained she: "He just didn't know much about the subject."

P:In Columbus, Ohio, the 32nd quadrennial conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church toyed gingerly with birth control. Placed before the 600-odd Methodist delegates was a memorial supported by Mrs. Sanger's National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control and signed by three Methodist educators, one Manhattan minister, numerous church board members and trustees of the Women's Home Missionary Society. The memorial cited "indorsements"' of birth control by Methodist regional conferences, by other Protestant and Jewish bodies. It urged that Methodism, indorse "the principles of birth control legislation now pending in Congress." Sent to a committee the resolution quickly struck a snag. A subcommittee found it was "artfully drawn" in that "indorsement" was a misleading word for some birth control pronouncements mentioned in it. After killing this memorial the subcommittee set to work to draft its own views.

Other Methodist work done last week:

The potent Committee on the State of the Church rejected a proposal to broaden the grounds on which Methodist ministers may remarry divorced persons; turned down a "fanatical"' suggestion that "cup" be substituted for "wine"' in the wording of the communion service ritual; sent to the general conference an opinion that unofficial groups like the radical Methodist Federation for Social Service may continue to call themselves Methodist provided they emphasize their unofficial status.

The Episcopacy Committee voted to retire seven bishops: Frederick DeLand Leete of Iowa and Nebraska; Herbert

Welch of the Shanghai area; John W. Robinson of Southern Asia ; Eben Samuel Johnson of Africa; Frederick Thomas Keeney of Atlanta; Matthew Wesley Clair (Negro) of Covington, Ky. ; George Amos Miller of Central & South America.

* The Mahatma last week invited to his retreat at Wardha a 9-year-old Hindu girl named Kumari Shanti Devi, who, it is claimed, is India's first modern case of demonstrable reincarnation. In Delhi this child has aroused the interest of psychiatrists, physicians, scholars and ecclesiastics. In full detail she has described her last life on earth, which ended about a decade ago. Taken to Muttra, where her previous existence was supposedly passed, Shanti Devi identified her onetime husband and their son, now 10. In a crowded street she spied her first father and mother, raced to embrace them.

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