Historical Purpose

The support of a charitable and educational undertaking, to-wit: providing clinical and other services for birth control prescription and treatment, in cooperation with the American Birth Control League, and educating the public concerning the medical, social, and economic and eugenic and ethical importance of birth control.

A pamphlet entitled "Birth Control - Aims and Program of the American Birth Control League," distributed by the Austin Maternal Health Clinic about two years after it was established, explains the founders' outlook in more detail as the clinic tried to explain to the public "Why Birth Control is Important":

Birth Control lessens destitution and dependency. It enables married couples to avoid having more children than they can support. With millions of families on public relief, the independent wage earner should be given every aid in lifting himself and his family out of poverty.

Birth Control promotes health. It reduces maternal and infant mortality by enabling the mother to space her children properly and to postpone pregnancy until she has the health and strength she needs to pass safely through childbirth and to bring into the world a sound, vigorous child. It enables parents to limit their children to the number for whom they can provide a healthful home, adequate food and good care; it prevents the psychic ill health caused by the fear of undesired pregnancy and by long continued sexual abstinence; it lessens hereditary diseases by enabling people afflicted with them to avoid parenthood; it decreases abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies.

Birth Control lessens prostitution. It promotes early and happier marriages; it frees young people from the need of postponing marriage until they can support children, and it makes possible the continuance of normal marriage relations even when another child is undesirable.

Birth Control promotes peace. Unless the present rate of population increase is reduced, overcrowding and the consequent need for national expansion will lead to wars of conquest. To prevent such wars, the growth of population must be checked by lowering the birth-rate.

In September 1937 the Maternal Health Clinic of Austin held its first clinic session in a space provided by the city (thanks to the efforts of Dr. Banner Gregg) in Brackenridge Hospital. As she had promised, Dr. Elizabeth Patterson volunteered to be the first "clinician," and she served in that capacity into the mid-1940s. Though Dr. Patterson tried to stress the need for the clinic to employ a "Social Service Worker" to help her, none was provided, probably for financial reasons, and none would be hired by the clinic until the late 1960s. In early January 1938, Dr. Patterson reported that since its founding the clinic had served fifty-one "patients," about eighty percent of whom had been referred by social workers, doctors, nurses, or government agencies. Of these first patients, Dr. Patterson said, forty had been "White," two had been "Negro," and nine had been "Mexican." Only seven had been Roman Catholic.

According to Charles Wright, the clinic's work "moved along well" until the early fall of 1938, about a year after it had been founded. But according to Jane Gracy Bedichek, editor of The Bedichek Family Letters, there had been "much unpleasant opposition from angry Catholic spokesmen"; Lillian Bedichek and others who supported the clinic were called "loose women." On September 20, Wright says, "a crisis meeting was held by the Board as a result of verbal attacks made against the program by certain Roman Catholic priests. The decision was made to rally community support." The Board organized a Public Relations Committee, which included Lillian Bedichek, Herman Brown, and Rev. Clabe Hall; the committee circulated petitions, lobbied City Council members and "influential citizens," and tried to court the local press.

Finally, the committee met with a special session of the City Council in an attempt to convince the Council that the clinic had "a vital connection with Public Health." All to no avail. On October 4, 1938 the City Council voted 5-1 that the clinic should be moved out of Brackenridge "for the reason that the matter is a highly controversial one and not properly a governmental function." The very next day the clinic was relocated. Roy Bedichek wrote his daughter Sarah a few days later: "Mama's birth control clinic was kicked out of the City Hospital by Mayor Miller and his cohorts (mostly Catholic) and landed somewhere on East Avenue."

The Maternal Health Clinic's second location, 1206 East Avenue, was only temporary. On December 17, 1938 the clinic shifted its operations to an old house at 1300 Sabine Street, just across the way from Brackenridge Hospital.  The building, supposedly "one of the original pioneer German cottages" in Austin, was small (probably less than 600 square feet) and apparently dilapidated; the clinic was only moved there after extensive improvements had been implemented "by local business firms and labor unions." The Board finally purchased the property in June 1939 for $1,000. For almost ten years the clinic had only one examining room, and for several years it did not even have a fan to cool the place in hot weather; during at least one "torrid" summer, patients and volunteers in the clinic sweltered in 105-degree heat. But the new location had one distinct advantage: its proximity to both Brackenridge Hospital and East Austin, the city's designated minority district and its most poverty-stricken area.