Dr. Marion Powell talks about the popularity of the Bay Centre for Birth Control

An interview with Dr. Marion Powell talking about the popularity of the Bay Centre for Birth Control.

Duration: 2:26 minutes.

[Title card reads: Dr. Marion Powell talks about the popularity of the Bay Centre for Birth Control] [An older woman wearing a pink blouse and a black blazer is seated in front of a gray curtain. She is speaking to an interviewer who is off camera.] Bay Centre grew to be a fairly big important clinic, but it was the street presence. People would go by and see Bay Centre for Birth Control and then they would want the Pill, and they’d remember that it was downtown, and people came from all over Toronto to Bay Centre. And I think it was combined with the teaching, we had a lot of residents, family practice residents who came from all across Canada, spent time at Women’s College and I think they learned the basics of contraception which they weren’t getting frequently in their undergraduate training. I think the other approach that it was a family physician primary care approach not a specialist approach to contraception and maybe we de-medicalized it, so that you didn’t feel you were going into a sterile physician’s office. You felt you were going among friends. You saw people that were just your age, or a little bit older who could talk the same language you talked. I think that is what we call peer counselling, but we were able to sort of communicate that ease and comfort and I think that it was the backing of Women’s College that made that a very important part. But combined with that was the, I think fairly good research that went on, the marketing that went on. The fact that Bay Centre became sort of synonymous with the voice of authority when the press wanted it. And it is still true when the press wants something on the newest advances in contraception such as Norplant, they instinctively think about Bay Centre when they are doing it. And again, it is the backup of Women’s College that I think we sometimes overlook in realizing what a long way we’ve come in contraception. From the days when the police chief said to me “as long as you don’t provide contraception for a single woman, you are alright. But the minute you provide contraception for a single woman, you’re in trouble”. And going back farther it was the sort of the support, the role modelling I’d had from Marion Hilliard that made me able to say “to heck with the chief of police. If she needs birth control, she can have it despite her age or what her mother thought, or anything else".