"If We Ignore the Plight. . ."

In 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower was asked if he thought the U.S., in an attempt to cope with the population explosion at home and abroad, should play an open, active role in supporting birth control. Said Ike: "I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or governmental activity or function or responsibility."

Last week, in an 800-word letter to Alaska's Democratic Senator Ernest Gruening, Ike publicly changed his mind. Wrote he: "I realize that in important segments of our people and of other nations this question is regarded as a moral one, and therefore scarcely a fit subject for federal legislation. With their feelings I can and do sympathize. But I cannot help believe that the prevention of human degradation and starvation is likewise a moral--as well as a material--obligation resting upon every enlightened government. If we now ignore the plight of those unborn generations which, because of our unreadiness to take corrective action in controlling population growth, will be denied any expectations beyond abject poverty and suffering, then history will rightly condemn us."

The occasion for Ike's letter was the start of Senate committee hearings on a bill, sponsored by Gruening, that would establish assistant secretaryships for population control in both the State Department and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. For Gruening, Ike's support was additional evidence that the subject of birth control is no longer politically unmentionable.

Gruening himself has been a birth control advocate since his 1912 graduation from the Harvard Medical School, and his advocacy has landed him in hot political water. In 1936, as Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administrator, he was shocked by the island's economically ruinous population growth. Using federal funds, he established 14 "maternal welfare clinics." That August he returned to the U.S. for a visit--and found himself an issue in Franklin Roosevelt's presidential campaign, accused of being anti-Catholic. He soon got a call from Jim Farley, F.D.R.'s political general. "Gruening," growled Farley, "what in hell is going on in Puerto Rico? Whatever it is, stop it. It's hurting us in the campaign." Gruening hurried back to Puerto Rico and closed down the clinics.

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