Birth Control in Kentucky: From the Indigent Women to All the Women of the World

This presentation has the objective to address the roles of the Kentucky Birth Control League (KBCL), founded in 1933, by Mrs. Jean “Chas” Tachau. KBL was one of the branches of the American Birth Control League responsible for organizing a vast network of practitioners supporting birth control in their offices, in conjunction with the wealthy community with a focus on controlling the bodies of the rural poor women. Since Kentucky banned sterilization from its legislation (1933), is it possible to identify eugenics narratives in the Commonwealth? From the early sympathy for the eugenics movement by the Kentuckian geneticist Thomas Morgan Hunt to Clarence Gamble’s founding and support of the Mountain Maternal Health League (1936-1986, Berea, Kentucky) the birth control movement in Kentucky, and the records of KBCL reveal the urgency by the wealthy class of the birth control of women considered “lazy” and not capable of making her own reproductive decisions. At the same time, the ambivalent perspective of birth control must be considered when we recognize the demands from rural women to space pregnancies for personal reasons, justified by economic distress or their mental health, to cite some nuances found in the records. KBCL activity was recorded by a field worker (only two during KBCL existence) who traveled by car to each county of the Commonwealth advertising the benefits of “birth control” and diligently articulating the creation of “sponsoring groups”. Contraceptives were free for patients and for physicians, later paid with the resources gathered by the sponsoring groups in the form of donations by the advocates of birth control for the "indigent”.