September 14, 1936 - Dorothy Palmer - a podcast by Stephen Hammond

Dorothea Palmer arrested for distributing information on birth control. In the early 1900s, Canadian women had no access to information about birth control. Most religious and medical leaders even opposed making information about it available. Dorothea Palmer, born in England in 1908 before immigrating to Canada, was instrumental in gaining reproductive rights for women. Palmer worked for the Parents’ Information Bureau in Kitchener, Ontario, where her job involved visiting the homes of poor women. She took on the initiative of informing these women about birth control, even though she knew that doing so was illegal. Palmer was arrested on September 14, 1936 in Eastview, an Ottawa suburb, as she left the home of a family with many children. She was criminally charged with disseminating information about birth control. Her trial, which dragged on from October to March of 1937, entailed 19 days of testimony, four days of arguments and 40 witnesses. In the end, the judge acquitted Palmer, saying she was providing information for the “public good.” The Crown appealed the judgment, but a few months later, Ontario’s chief justice and two associate judges dismissed the appeal. Although the case was an important step towards giving women information about their reproductive rights, real change took decades. It was 1969 when dissemination and advertising about birth control was taken out of the criminal code.

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