Contraception Controversy

God ordained the act of love for man's procreation, and to thwart this purpose is. according to Roman Catholic doctrine, a sinful contravention of God's will. Birth control by mechanical or medicinal means is absolutely forbidden by the church, and women for whom childbearing is a health risk are enjoined to practice abstinence, either total or periodic, from sexual intercourse. It follows that Catholic doctors and nurses may not prescribe contraceptive devices, even for non-Catholic patients. But should Catholics, when they are in a position to do so, stop non-Catholic doctors from prescribing contraceptives for non-Catholic patients?

This question, based on an incident in a New York municipal hospital, is engaging the attention of Protestants, Jews and Catholics throughout the country--outside New York, especially in Connecticut and Massachusetts, where Catholic voters have succeeded in making the dissemination of birth control information illegal. In Brooklyn's Kings County Hospital, Dr. Louis Hellman had been about to fit a contraceptive device to a diabetic woman, mother of three, whose life, in his opinion, would be endangered by another pregnancy. He was stopped from doing so by his supervisor, Dr. Harvey Gollance, acting on the orders of Dr. Morris A. Jacobs (Jewish), commissioner of hospitals. New York State law specifically authorizes physicians to prescribe birth control devices or drugs if the health of patients requires it. Commissioner Jacobs refused to explain his action, but he was quickly accused of yielding to pressure from Catholics, who have consistently fought any form of birth control in New York's city hospitals.

The Protestant Council of the City of New York, the United Lutheran Church in America, the New York Congregational Church Association, the Presbytery of New York and the New York Board of Rabbis promptly jumped on Jacobs' ruling as imposing a minority's moral theology on the majority; the National Councils of Catholic Women and Men and the Catholic Physicians' Guilds of New York sprang to the support of Dr. Jacobs. New York's Mayor Robert F. Wagner bucked the question to the hospital department. "As a practicing Catholic," Wagner said, he is opposed to the use of contraceptives in city hospitals, but "this is a medical matter--I leave that to their judgment."

Commissioner Jacobs met with President Dan M. Potter and other members of the Protestant Council but said only that he would pass their objections to his policy along to the Board of Hospitals. Last week the pro-contraception forces prepared for a long and drawn-out battle; the American Jewish Congress and the American Civil Liberties Union called a meeting to set up a citizens' committee and consider preparing a case for testing in the courts. Their position was best summed up by an editorial in the New York Times: "Freedom of religion works both ways; and in this delicate area hospitals must certainly remain neutral, neither imposing birth control therapy, when it is medically indicated, on anyone to whom it is religiously repugnant nor withholding it from those to whom it is not."

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