ABSTRACT
This chapter argue that the influx of professionals into the cause changed the goals of the birth control movement, from a campaign to increase the area of self-determination for women and all working-class people to a campaign infused with elitist values and operated in an elitist manner. Birth control can have three major social purposes: to increase the individual freedom of women; to control overall population trends; and to improve and protect health. In 1916 the birth control activists had been politically connected to the Left wing of the feminists and to pro-feminist groups of socialists and anarchists. As the clinic movement mushroomed around the country, however, conflict raged about how and by whom the clinics should be controlled. New genetic theories provided reliable methods of prediction, and therefore control, of the transmittal of some identifiable physical traits, and they stimulated a great deal of scientific research into human genetics.
