Today, there are many safe and accessible ways to access birth control for women in the U.S. But, it wasn’t legalized in this country until 1936. Before that, here in Arizona, there was a movement of birth control advocates who provided it to women across the state — often illegally.
It was led by birth control activist and nurse Margaret Sanger, alongside a group of well-to-do socialites who believed in the effort. In fact, the clinic they founded here evolved into Planned Parenthood of Central and Northern Arizona, an organization still very much relevant today.
Mary Melcher, longtime Arizona historian, joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
MARY MELCHER: Well, in early Arizona, there was no access to birth control. Women had large families. There was a very high input mortality rate, and care during childbirth was difficult. It mattered where you lived and if there was a good midwife nearby. And often people were not delivered by physicians. They were delivered by midwives. So it was a matter of chance, whether or not you had adequate care in childbirth.
So I mean, in terms of women's reproductive lives, they were really pretty difficult because they had no control over how many babies they had and they had a difficult time raising their children because the healthcare was pretty primitive.
LAUREN GILGER: And then birth control kind of comes along. It's legalized at some point, but it kind of happens around the same time that a very famous birth control activist, Margaret Sanger, comes to Arizona. She lived in Tucson, right?
MELCHER: Right. Yeah. She moved to Tucson in 1934 for the same reason that many people moved to Arizona during this time. And it was to improve a relative's health. Her growing son suffered from asthma and doctors recommended that they come to this sunny Southwestern state for the climate. She had already been involved in the birth control movement since the 1910s starting clinics. She had gotten arrested. She'd served time in jail, but she thought it was very important that women had access to birth control.
GILGER: What are we talking about when we're talking about birth control in this era?
MELCHER: The pill didn't come in until about 1962. She was distributing diaphragms, sponges and spermicide. That's what they'd have available at clinics.
GILGER: Right. So Margaret Sanger ends up in Tucson and sort of begins this pretty lively movement of birth control activists in the state in early statehood days, recruiting some pretty powerful and recognizable women in Arizona history.
MELCHER: Right. When she went to the Phoenix area, she recruited Peggy Goldwater and May Hurd as well as the wife of Walter Bimson, who headed the Valley National Bank, which was a really important bank in the Phoenix area at that time. In Tucson, she also met with prominent women who could provide some financial support to the clinic, and also they served as volunteers. By this time, by the 1930s, there were about 55 clinics existing in the U.S., and they all relied on the same model where they had volunteers serving as receptionists and keeping some records, volunteer doctors, and a paid nurse.
So when she went to Tucson, she met with women who were interested in providing birth control for their community, and they rented a little house in an old barrio, and they called it Clinica para Madres, Mother's Health Clinic, and they opened it in 1934, and at this time, the Comstock Law was in effect, which made birth control illegal, so they operated illegally for a couple years.
GILGER: They opened one in Phoenix as well later on.
MELCHER: Yes, they opened one in Phoenix in 1937, and it was the same type of situation where she got women from the community involved. She found a volunteer doctor and they had a paid nurse and then they opened up and they distributed birth control.
GILGER: You mentioned a few names there we should pause on because you said Peggy Goldwater obviously married to Barry Goldwater, former U.S. senator here, ran for president a Republican. May Heard, is that the Heard Museum Heards?
MELCHER: Yes, yes. And her husband, she and her husband owned the Arizona Republic at this time, the newspaper. So they were really prominent.
GILGER: Yeah. So talk a little bit about the impact of these two clinics for mothers, as they called them in Tucson and in Phoenix in these early days. They were serving people who were poor, rural, often women of color, right?
MELCHER: Yes. The one in Tucson opened in a barrio and there are photos of Margaret Sanger with a bunch of the women who use this clinic sitting on the steps of this house. And a lot of them are Mexican-American. In Phoenix, they opened near the county welfare office. So, it was a prominent location, it was downtown.
And at this point in our history, middle class women and upper middle class women could consult physicians and get birth control because it was legalized for married women in 1936.
GILGER: Married women only, OK.
MELCHER: Yeah. And through doctors. So, at this time, a lot of people didn't go to doctors. They didn't go, they didn't have formal medical services. So these clinics were really important to women who didn't have access to physicians and didn't have money.
GILGER: Right, so you've got this sort of underground system happening in the years before it's even legalized and then it's a little bit iffy afterward. There was also a Catholic priest involved in this, which is surprising, I'm sure, to a lot of people.
MELCHER: Yeah. Father Emmett McLaughlin, he provided health care to his community. He was in south Phoenix, he was a priest there. He started St. Monica's Clinic because he knew people needed prenatal care, women needed prenatal care, they needed help giving birth. And he saw the need for birth control. He was a priest for these huge families and often they couldn't support their families.
So eventually his clinic became St. Monica's Hospital, which evolved into Memorial Hospital located on Buckeye Road and Seventh Avenue. So he saw the need for birth control and he clashed with the church a lot over this. They didn't want him to, they didn't want him to administer his hospital, and finally he ended up leaving the priesthood.
GILGER: Wow, OK. so an advocate in many ways. I wonder, do you think most people would assume that this began with a group of socialites, many of whom were conservative at the time, and creating this thing that now is very much on the other side of the political spectrum?
MELCHER: Well, these women had access to contraceptives themselves and they saw the need for it because they knew how the healthcare needs in their communities. A lot of the women had worked in some kind of TB sanitariums or hospitals where they were helping people that had, you know, no healthcare in a sanitarium.
So they had volunteered in different ways. So they saw the need for this. And I think it wasn't a political issue in that way, like it became politicized related to abortion. Some of these women were pro-choice. Peggy Goldwater was always pro-choice.
GILGER: That's interesting. Let me ask you about the religious conflicts here. You mentioned the Catholic priest involved in this and the pushback he got from the church at the time.
But this was still sort of an unresolved issue, even within the Catholic Church. When you're looking at large populations of especially Latino women back then was this a religious issue for them or something that pushed back against their religion?
MELCHER: There's a Bishop Gercke who was very strong against any type of birth control and was very outspoken about Catholic women not using it and yes a lot of the Mexican American women were Catholic But I ended up interviewing a woman who was the director of Planned Parenthood in southern Arizona, Virginia Urun, who was Mexican American who found a photo of her Mexican American grandmother in the clinic's files, and then she learned that her grandmother had used contraception because of a health issue. So I think that they used their own independence and made their decisions even though the Catholic Church was against it.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The story has been updated to correct the spelling of Virginia Urun's name.
