The 1937-37 trial of Dorothea Palmer proved to be a landmark case in how birth control information was distributed in Canada.
In 1936 Dorothea Palmer was working as a nurse for the Parents’ Information Bureau (PIB). Her job was to go door-to-door in the town of Eastview, near Ottawa, offering birth control information and the opportunity to buy contraceptive devices through mail order. Her arrest and subsequent trial changed the course of Canadian society.
Parents’ Information Bureau
Parents’ Information Bureau was founded by A.R. Kaufman in Kitchener, Ontario the previous year. Its purpose was to let mainly poor families know about alternative methods of birth control and offer them inexpensive supplies. Kaufman hired knowledgeable married women, mostly nurses, as his education and sales force. According to the Special Collections Library at the University of Waterloo, Dorothea Palmer was born in England in 1908 and had some training in an English hospital. She was operating a lending library in Ottawa when she decided to earn some extra money working for PIB.
Arrested under the Criminal Code
Palmer’s belief in the cause was strengthened when she witnessed the Depression era poverty in the lower working-class neighbourhoods in Eastview. It was a predominantly French Roman Catholic community where many families were on relief, most with a large number of children and an ignorance of birth control methods. She had been working in the town for about a week when she was arrested and charged under the obscenity section of the Criminal Code that made the selling or advertising of contraceptives illegal.
Kaufman knew that PIB’s purpose was against the law. He was also aware of the possibility that one of his workers would be arrested. He saw Palmer’s arrest as an opportunity to test the law, and persuaded her to go through to trial. He hired Toronto lawyer Frank Wegenast to mount the defence, and sat in the courtroom throughout the entire six month trial.
Landmark Case
The obscenity section had a “pro bono publico” clause which stated that no one should be convicted of an offence if it could be proved that the public good was served by the alleged action. Through nineteen days of testimony and four days of argument, Wegenast argued that Palmer had acted in the public good.
He called forty witnesses: women of Eastview who were glad to have received information about controlling their own fertility, religious leaders who saw no objections to family planning, social workers who related large families to poverty issues, and medical personnel who attested to the ill health that large families suffered. The prosecution called a few Roman Catholic leaders and one elderly doctor who objected to the dissemination of birth control information on moral grounds.
This was the longest trial in Canadian history to that date, and it took its toll on Palmer. She was harassed in the streets, was accosted once, and her marriage suffered from the stress. She was acquitted on March 17, 1937, immediately severed her ties to Kaufman and the PIB, and faded into obscurity.
However, as a result of the trial, no one was ever again charged for distributing birth control information, even though the law was not changed until 1969.
