Welsh Journals

WOMEN, GOD AND BIRTH CONTROL: THE FIRST HOSPITAL BIRTH CONTROL CLINIC, ABERTILLERY 1925 Margaret Douglas Seventy years ago, in June 1925, the first ever hospital birth control clinic opened at Abertillery, Monmouth. But for chance and a writer's curiosity, this important event in the history of the Birth Control Movement, not just in Wales but in the whole country, might have been lost to the archives. In 1992 I had been researching a play set in the south Wales valleys in the 1920s. I had read a biography of Marie Stopes and came across a reference to a 1925 newspaper cutting in which the Abertillery Free Church Council were protesting about the opening of a birth control clinic at the Abertillery and District Hospital. I wrote to the hospital to ask if they had any record of such a clinic and received a helpful but negative response. As far as the present management knew, no such clinic had ever existed. They did, however, send a detailed history of the hospital which had been compiled in 1977. While referring to all the events concerning the hospital from its inception in 1920, no mention was made of a Birth Control Department opened in 1925. With just a newspaper cutting and a tenuous connection with Marie Stopes, I embarked on a two year search that began in Abertillery and ended at the Wellcome Institute in London. I visited many libraries, the Cwmbran Archives, and talked to numerous local people along the way. Gradually, the extraordinary story of the clinic unfolded and this important piece of history began to see the light of day. In 1921, Marie Stopes had opened her Mother's Clinic for the instruction of birth control to married women. Later that year she formed the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, (CBC), with such eminent members as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell. Birth control had become part of the political agenda in the early 1920s when members of the women's section of the Labour Party, led by Dora Russell, campaigned for provision to be made available to women at local authority welfare clinics. But the newly elected Labour Government of 1924 was not going to jeopardize its first election success with such a controversial issue, and it was the end of the decade before the state began to take any responsibility for women's health. The first issue of Birth Control News, Marie Stopes's own newspaper, was published in 1922. Although W. H. Smith refused to stock it, it nevertheless found a circulation as far afield as the south Wales mining valleys. Its value is attested by a young miner whose wife had died giving birth to twins after her doctor had refused to give information about birth control. He wrote to Marie Stopes: 'When I get vour monthly papers, I hand them on to married women, I wish to God my wife was here.' Information on birth control had long been available to those who could afford it, and even in the early 1920's there was some concern from Bishops and other luminaries, that the middle-class population was declining, while that of the working class soared.