Paving the way for Title X

The Family in America: When Margaret Sanger launched the American Birth Control League in 1921, she faced fierce resistance not only on the part of the Catholic church but also among all varieties of American Protestants, including fundamentalists and modernists of the northern denominations. The Episcopal church’s position was typical; the Lambeth Conference of Bishops of 1908 and 1920 had delivered warnings against the use of contraception as well as the false teaching that the conjugal act was an end in itself. In essence, the foe that Sanger would need to split was not a Catholic one; it was the widely shared Christian consensus against birth control that not even the Reformation had breached.