Morris Ernst documents

The United States has a long history of using subjective moral reasoning within a legal context, a history that stretches back to the religious Puritan foundation of the country and that is often both complicated and contradictory. Morality movements have adorned the early history of America and have been used to influence such revolutionary issues as the temperance movement, the legality of prostitution, and the use of contraception by both married and unmarried women in the early 20th century. Many of these issues relate to gender and sexuality, and consequently women have been involved in them in varied and politicized ways. The Morris Ernst birth control documents vividly exemplify American sexual morals and their relation to the regulation of women’s rights. In particular, the case of The People of New York v. Sideri, documented and lovingly preserved by Ernst, provides a compelling example of the use of moral rhetoric in American law, specifically in relation to women’s reproductive rights.

In 1929, the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau of Manhattan was raided by police and five clinicians were taken into custody under suspicion of defying the New York State Obscenity Act. Morris Ernst, a prominent civil liberties lawyer of the time, was selected to represent the defendants in the court case that would determine their fate. Their crime? Allegedly providing contraceptives to a married woman, an illegal act under New York Penal Law. Here, a segment of the case that was preserved by Ernst delineates the strict laws imposed on women’s access to contraception during this time period. The Sideri case, especially the arguments of the prosecution who strongly enforced this penal law and opposed birth control rights, exemplifies the legal use of moral rhetoric in American history and can be situated within a broader historical context of moral sexuality rhetoric that continues to the present day and encompasses such vital modern issues as abortion and gay marriage rights. A later section of the document defends this penal code as necessary for the "benefit of the morals and health of the community."

This excerpt, from the prosecution's argument in this court case, details the common traditionally-held beliefs of this time period regarding the moral threat of uninhibited birth control access. Here, it is apparent that the "moral dangers" of birth control were thought to uniquely affect and "degrade" women rather than their male counterparts, even if both were engaging in the same sexual activity. At this time, the prosecution argues, sexual activity for purposes outside of reproduction could only lower the wife to "the level of the prostitute" and create widespread "sex perversion" and "gross immorality." These are the norms that Ernst and the defendants were tasked with arguing against in the Sideri case.

This paragraph from the documents of the Sideri case provides an interesting alternative view to that expressed by the prosecution in the previous image. Here, the writer cites a previous case regarding contraceptive access, where a defendant argued that restricting women's reproductive rights essentially infringed on their inherent American right to "the pursuit of [in this case, sexual] happiness." The defendant is quick to negate this view, however, explaining that this argument is meaningless because it could also be used to defend any other "crimes" that bring joy to the culprit, such as adultery or stealing. From a historical perspective, it is interesting to see these two viewpoints juxtaposed against each other and, in particular, to note that such modern ideas about women's rights to sexual pleasure were present in 1929, even if they were vehemently argued against by the law.

"Marital continence," or restraining from sexual activity within marriage, was offered by the prosecution as the only method of protecting married women from pregnancy in cases where pregnancy could result in "death or invalidism" for the woman in question. At this time, contraception was considered dangerous to morality even in cases where health reasons necessitated its use within a marriage.

The defendants in the Sideri case were eventually found to not be guilty of violating the New York Obscenity Act. This was, however, simply because the jury determined that they were not guilty of illegally allowing contraceptive access to the woman in the case, not because any part of the Obscenity Act was found to be unlawful or changed. It was not until Ernst's later case, colloquially called US v. One Pack (1936), that the United States saw any significant change in contraceptive legislation. The Sideri case, however, is an important document because it serves as an in-depth representation of the moralistic views that were utilized within legal settings in order to legitimize the restriction of women's sexual freedom.