Dr. Marion Powell talks about the changing attitudes towards birth control

An interview with Dr. Marion Powell talking about the changing attitudes towards birth control.

Duration: 1:57 minutes.

[Title card reads: Dr. Marion Powell talks about the changing attitudes towards 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.] I think that I was much more involved in the public health aspect of family planning in the 60s and it wasn’t until the law was changed in 1969 that it became acceptable to distribute birth control sort of out on the street. I think when you’re talking about being acceptable to distribute birth control, it probably, there was still a lot of stigma. I’m sure women, many women came to the women physicians in the hospital and got birth control pills, but I think it was more likely the married women, the women who wanted to space their children, women who wanted to perhaps limit the size of their families were the ones who had access to birth control. And I think it was the alternate delivery systems of the late 60s where public health got into the family planning clinics, the street clinics, the VD clinics out on the street where some of the young people began coming. I can remember back in the mid 60s when we opened a clinic out in Scarborough, the first year we saw only married women or women who at least had children. And within two or three years we were debating about whether we could see 15-year-olds without consent and then the law changed and suddenly it was acceptable for hospitals to give birth control, to set up birth control clinics, there was funding for birth control. I think that before that much of the birth control was distributed, was available through postnatal clinics, through genaecology clinics and not available really in that alternate delivery, what I would call alternate delivery system.