1923

Founding of Committee on Maternal Health under medical reformer Robert Dickinson, to promote scientific study of conception control; in 1929, with support of Bureau of Social Hygiene, it sponsored a major study of efficacy and safety of chemical contraceptives (spermicides) conducted at F. A. E. Crew’s laboratory at University of Edinburgh between 1929 and 1932; CMH “hope to control venereal disease, as well as to reduce poverty and its related afflictions, through improved methods of contraception” (Borell V, 68). A later BCIC (Birth Control Investigation Project conducted in England developed the spermicide Volpar in 1938 (74-75). Major advances in efficiency of spermicides did not occur until the 1950s, when new bases were developed as vehicles for spermicides (76).