The Birth Control Issue

As the strongest Roman Catholic presidential hopeful since Alfred E. Smith, Massachusetts' Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy well knew that the issue of religion might hurt him in 1960 as it hurt "the Happy Warrior" in 1928. Consequently, out of a shrewd sense of political necessity, Candidate Kennedy provoked discussion of his Catholicism months ago, got accustomed to facing blunt questions with plain answers, and managed to run his fleet-footed political race with remarkably little religious heckling. But last week Kennedy found himself caught in a Catholic-Protestant clerical crossfire on the incendiary issue of birth control. And before the week was over even the Protestant Democratic candidates were catching the ricochets.

In a 1,500word statement issued after their week-long meeting in Washington, more than 200 Catholic cardinals, archbishops and bishops attacked popular talk of a world "population explosion" as "a smoke screen behind which a moral evil may be foisted on the public." Denounced by the U.S. Catholic hierarchy was "a systematic, concerted effort" to build support for the use of U.S. public funds "in promoting artificial birth prevention for economically underdeveloped countries." The church leaders urged instead greater scientific efforts to feed and uplift backward peoples. U.S. Catholics, declared the bishops, "believe that the promotion of artificial birth prevention is a morally, humanly, psychologically and politically disastrous approach to the population problem." Catholics, they continued, "will not support any public assistance, either at home or abroad, to promote artificial birth prevention, abortion or sterilization whether through direct aid or by means of international organizations."

Blunt Inquiry. Protestant reaction to the statement was swift. It was tragic, said Dr. John C. Bennett, Congregational minister and faculty dean of New York's Union Theological Seminary, to see Catholic leaders pressing "a point of view . . . which has no sound moral or religious basis, and which has been rejected by most other Christian groups." The Catholic bishops' position, said Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike of San Francisco, would "condemn rapidly increasing millions of people in less fortunate parts of the world to starvation, bondage, misery and despair." Bishop Pike, himself a convert from Roman Catholicism, demanded to know if the Catholic bishops' policy "is binding on Roman Catholic candidates for public office."

With that blunt inquiry, Bishop Pike inevitably dropped the problem at the doorstep of the nation's best-known Roman Catholic office seeker--Jack Kennedy. Dodging a personal opinion of the bishops' policy ("That's my business"), Kennedy burned at being put on the spot. Bishop Pike's question, said Kennedy, "should be directed to all public candidates and to all public men. Do they call up other candidates when the bishops of their faith make some kind of statement? I don't want to be called up every time the bishops and priests make a statement of some kind." Added he to a reporter: "If anyone is trying to imply that I reached my decision as a result of what the bishops say, it is not true."

Judge the Measure. More calmly, Kennedy stated that he had in fact felt "for many years" that it would be a "mistake" for the U.S. Government to advocate birth control in other countries. "We have to be very careful how we give advice on this subject," said he, noting that the U.S. has never urged birth control at home or in Western Europe. "Accordingly, I think it would be the greatest psychological mistake for us to appear to advocate limitation of the black, or brown, or yellow peoples whose population is increasing no faster than in the United States." If he were in the White House, presented by Congress with a foreign aid bill that asked recipient nations to curb population growth, Kennedy said, he would judge the measure by whether it "would be in the interest of the United States." If such a bill became law, said he, "I would uphold it as the law of the land."

As Kennedy's challenge to the other candidates began to take, Adlai Stevenson (Unitarian) said that the U.S. "should not impose birth control programs on foreign countries," but the U.S. should not "hesitate to consider requests for aid to birth control programs from foreign countries where population growth is inimical to economic well-being."

Senator Stuart Symington (Episcopalian) said: "I approve the Government's furnishing of planned parenthood information abroad where it believes the action is to the interest of our country."

Minnesota's Senator Hubert Humphrey (Congregationalist) said the U.S. should not "set policy for other nations and people." U.S. foreign aid, said Candidate Humphrey, "should not be denied on the basis of any country's policy relating to birth control."

New Jersey's Democratic Governor Robert B. Meyner (unaffiliated) sidestepped the debate with a curt "no comment." Texas' Lyndon Johnson (Disciples of Christ) said nothing. California's Democratic Governor Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown, doubtless sharing the discomfort of fellow Catholic Kennedy, said "the question of the regulation of birth is something that I am not prepared to answer. I certainly don't believe this country has the right to impose upon any country any particular ideas it may have, nor [to] interfere with the religious practices of other countries."

On the Program. Obviously enjoying the controversy he had provoked, Bishop Pike remarked blandly: "The asking of [my] question does not militate against any particular Roman Catholic candidate who, as an American citizen, and hence not subject to ecclesiastical force, can disavow the policy which the hierarchy of his church has proclaimed." At week's end, a spokesman for the aid-dispensing International Cooperation Administration said that not a penny of U.S. foreign aid had been spent to spread birth control information overseas, added that "no such action was contemplated." Hence, said he, the controversy was actually "very academic."

But nobody was listening. The birth control issue was joined, and Jack Kennedy knew that the deep-rooted religious challenge to his presidential ambitions, newly burst into the open, could be hazardous indeed.

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