Planned Fertility

The Roman Catholic Church has always deplored the family with too few children or none. Birth-controllers used to worry only about families with too many children. But that was three decades or so ago, when Margaret Sanger began her crusading. Last week the Planned Parenthood Federation (it used to be called the Birth Control League) actually made a deep bow to a Roman Catholic.

For his research into the causes & cures of sterility, the P.P.F. gave one of two* Lasker Foundation awards to urbane, white-haired Dr. John Rock--the first Roman Catholic doctor to be so honored. Dr. Rock, 57, has studied the problems of fertility for 20 years. The first to demonstrate that human sperm can fertilize a human egg in the laboratory (TIME, Aug. 14, 1944), he is director of the Fertility and Endocrine Clinic at the Free Hospital for Women, Brookline, Mass.

As a citizen, Dr. Rock, the father of four, believes that physicians should be free to give contraceptive information: "I don't think that Roman Catholicism forces a man to interfere with other people's freedom of conscience and action within their own moral principles. In a democracy such as ours, a man's religion does not oblige him to force legal restrictions on another man's freedom of action."

*Also given the Lasker Award, $500 and a gold medallion: Manhattan's Dr. Richard N. Pierson (a Presbyterian and father of four), for organizing, in 1930, the medical committee of the old Birth Control League, other activities.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.