6 Contraception, Community, and Controversy

Personal stories and memories gathered from oral history interviews feature prominently in my telling of the LBCIC’s story. Oral histories are often significant in a topic of this kind. However, it is important to note that while I highlight voices of a few activists involved with the LBCIC, these voices focus on feminist student activist communities. Indeed, there are many voices left out of the conversation and many voices that need to be added to the conversation around reproductive health activism in Alberta. For instance, this chapter focuses only on Lethbridge, one starting point for broader research on similar activism in the entire province. Further, the stories of the many professional supporters of the LBCIC and similar causes are discussed, but their voices are not featured here.

Perhaps more significantly, Indigenous stories are often left out of the narrative about reproductive health activism. It is not clear to what extent Indigenous people used the services at the LBCIC, or if they volunteered there. However, the history of Indigenous people and the politics of choice in Canada is an important one to consider in connection to the story of the LBCIC. Canada and Alberta have a history of cultural genocide, residential schools, eugenics, and coercive sterilization of Indigenous people.¹² Moreover, in the 1970s, Indigenous communities were still devastated after the infamous Sixties Scoop, when an estimated twenty thousand Indigenous children were taken from their homes and placed with White families who were deemed “more suitable.”¹³ Because of the federal and provincial legacies of genocide, eugenics, and the Sixties Scoop, Indigenous communities faced complicated realities in terms of reproductive politics in the 1970s. Faced with a legacy of population control, neglect, and having loved ones physically taken from them, Indigenous communities were not only looking for ways to limit their fertility through contraception and to access good reproductive and sexual health services and education but simultaneously fighting for their right to have children and parent the children they already had.¹⁴ Their stories are significant and many of their stories still need to be told.

In the meantime, I focus here on the somewhat limited but still significant story and oral histories of the LBCIC. The LBCIC, like feminist activism in Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s more generally, has often been left in the shadows of high-profile feminist activism in the larger urban centres of Toronto, Vancouver, and Montréal. Thus, the story of the LBCIC has yet to be told. Using oral histories to tell the story of the LBCIC is important because, as historian Ruth Roach Pierson states, using oral history interviews brings the historian and the reader “closest to the ‘reality’ of women’s lives.”¹⁵ The voices of six women who were involved in the LBCIC during the 1970s play a large role in this recounting of the centre’s story. These six women illustrate that organized feminist and community activism was happening and, indeed, was successfully making changes in their local and provincial communities. By sharing their stories, I am adding these southern Alberta activists to the larger historical narrative and highlighting their activism as influential and significant in the national and international histories of activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

From its inception, it was clear that the LBCIC fed an appetite for access to information on contraception and sexuality in Lethbridge. Women’s liberation activist and Meliorist journalist Luba Lisun remembers that a lack of reproductive and sexual health services and education made for some dire situations. The social stigma that barred unmarried youth from seeking contraceptives at the time did not deter them from engaging in sexual activity. She recalls that the result of inaccessible contraceptives was often unwanted pregnancy and, sometimes, marriage:

Yeah, the other side of being raised in a Catholic world was that girls got pregnant. [. . .] People I knew got pregnant as teenagers and either went away and had the child or they kept the child. Others got married right after school. I mean we still lived close enough to that period of time that that’s what you did. And it wasn’t until the mid-to-late ’60s that started to change—thinking about how to deal with that, or how things should change.¹⁶

Unwanted pregnancies resulting from inaccessibility to contraceptive and sex education services were part of the reason that the members of the Lethbridge community, especially young women like Lisun, embraced the LBCIC with open arms.

For women such as Lisun and Mary Bochenko, the LBCIC also became a means to increase their autonomy. Birth control services and education offered them independence, while also allowing them to embrace their own sexuality. Lisun and Bochenko remember that the expectation was that they (and all young, unmarried women) would practice abstinence. And many young women were encouraged to marry young so that they could begin to have sex—with the expectation that they would also bear children—without breaching familial and social moral expectations. Bochenko, a student journalist and activist at the Lethbridge Community College’s The Endeavour, recalls that “my mom was always on my case: ‘Okay, now you’re finished school, now you get married, you have a family. You do all of those things,’ and I was like: I don’t think so. There was this whole world out there that I knew nothing about, right.”¹⁷ Lisun also remembers her feelings of resistance to her family’s pressure: “You just felt like: I’m a girl and I work hard and I should have the same rights and I shouldn’t be expected to get married. I don’t want to get married. [. . .] Just don’t tell me what to do, I’m going to choose.”¹⁸ For Lisun and Bochenko, better access to birth control and sexuality information gave them the autonomy to pursue education, careers, travel, and life outside of wifehood and motherhood.

Similarly, Rita Moir, an activist involved in women’s liberation and a student journalist at The Meliorist in the 1970s, remembers the opening of the LBCIC as a triumph not only of reproductive health activism but of women’s liberation more broadly. She describes the LBCIC as a “tremendous service being offered to women of all ages.” More than that, “for us as young women and women dealing with issues of birth control, and rape, and unwanted pregnancy—it sounds melodramatic—but we were fighting for our lives, our futures.”¹⁹ Her memories of the LBCIC capture the gravity of the situation for young women in particular but really for the public in general: by breaking free from moral regulations, people’s sexual and social autonomy would increase.

Like Moir, Lisun, and Bochenko, medical professionals in Lethbridge noticed and recognized the need for better reproductive and sexual health and sought to improve it. Burgess states, “I got to know a couple of the gynecologists who were very interested in supporting women’s health [. . .] because they were seeing the fallout of it: unwanted pregnancies and whatnot.”²⁰ Terri Forbis, director of the Lethbridge Family Planning Centre in the late 1970s, remembers “the lack of information and how that was affecting young people, and not just young people, older women too. I had clients that were forty-four years old that had so little information about their bodies and about reproduction and what was happening.”²¹ Forbis says she found solidarity with other professionals who were seeing the same consequences of a lack of reproductive and sexual health information.

Forbis also remembers not only public need but significant public desire for reproductive and sexual health information.

At the time, the Kinsey studies were a huge big deal for people. Or Woody Allen movies where he actually started introducing sex into movies and providing people with information about sexual functioning and relationships. And it was just so not talked about anywhere that people were really hungry for it. Really hungry for it. But they still had to get it served under the table. That’s why the Birth Control and Information Centre was so controversial—this was really putting everything on the table.²²

Her memories reveal that desire for information was increasing rapidly through the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, as Forbis explains, the LBCIC provided essential services related to reproduction, contraception, and sexuality that citizens desperately wanted and needed. However, social stigma surrounding topics like contraception, sexuality, VD, and abortion made the services and education taboo. According to Forbis, the LBCIC was seen as controversial because it offered these desired services openly and unashamedly. While working at the Lethbridge Family Planning Centre, Forbis recognized that the LBCIC was the first organization in the region to offer this type of comprehensive and judgment-free reproductive and sexual health education.

The LBCIC also provided training in reproductive and sexual health service provision and education for its volunteers and employees. Thus the centre became a space where specialized skills in human sexuality education were learned and practised. According to Forbis, “At that time, there were so few of us that had any skill set in how to talk about sexuality that we were really sought after by different professional groups and agencies that didn’t have that skill set and wanted it.”²³ As Forbis remembers it, the LBCIC was a model for what comprehensive sex and reproductive health education should look like. In laying that foundation, employees and volunteers at the centre developed specific skills that distinguished them from other kinds of health and education professionals.

Because such a variety of communities came to support the LBCIC, it also became a site for coalition building. Women such as Burgess, Moir, Lisun, and Bochenko came together within a strong and supportive network of like-minded activists. The supporting community was not limited to feminist activists. Indeed, many Lethbridge citizens, including progressive local professionals, came together in support of the centre and often built coalitions across communities and causes. In fact, according to the oral history narrators, it was the strength of these coalitions and communities that made the centre such a success during its six years of operation.

Lethbridge coalitions and communities built around reproductive and sexual health activisms resembled coalitions built in many cities across Canada and the United States at the time. Historian Christabelle Sethna has traced important work achieved through student and feminist collaborations in Canada including the McGill Birth Control Handbook (first published in 1968) and the Abortion Caravan in 1970 initiated by the Vancouver Women’s Caucus.²⁴ While Lethbridge was a much smaller city, and located in a Bible Belt, the unity of students, youth, and feminists there was just as significant as those in Vancouver or Montréal. Moir explains that, in part, these coalitions were built into the culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s: “So, there were a lot of student activists, the newspaper [The Meliorist] was a student activist newspaper [. . .] and so we actively supported places like the Birth Control and Information Centre.”²⁵ Local feminists, students, and youth comprised the largest community of support.

While activists provided the numbers and volunteer power to run the centre, support from them—as people sometimes deemed too radical—was not enough to maintain it. Burgess, Moir, and Forbis emphasize that it was the support and advocacy of local professionals, doctors and nurses especially, that really won the city’s approval to fund the LBCIC and initially safeguarded it. Lethbridge doctors like Johnson and Hall recognized the need for a birth control centre and supported the movement through referrals for birth control and abortions.²⁶

Local professionals also helped to combat the inevitable voices of criticism against the centre. A typical complaint was registered in an April 1974 letter to city council. “As a realist,” the writer declared, “I believe that if society demands that birth control (conception) [sic] information should be given to unmarried teen-agers, then a clinic operated by medical doctors (and never by hippie type unqualified persons) is the only proper answer.”²⁷ The theme was repeated, with an added pejorative, by another complainant, who told council that “I do not want my children taught by a bunch of hippys or second class people that run this centre.”²⁸ These were obvious efforts to discredit the young student and feminist activists who supported the LBCIC.

Burgess, then in her early to mid-twenties, remembers that, for some, her youth and appearance undermined her authority as head of the LBCIC. As a result, she and the board members agreed to hire Claranne (Tinky) Bush, a young academic with a PhD in physiology, to increase the centre’s credibility.²⁹ Once reputable doctors and other professional figures from local schools, clinics, and the municipal government threw their support behind the reproductive and sexual rights mandate of the LBCIC, perceptions of respectability followed, and other citizens joined the campaign.

In fact, according to the oral history narrators, the small population and rural surroundings of Lethbridge brought communities together and was ideal for coalition building. Moir describes the unique way that the small city and rural surroundings of Lethbridge in particular, and Alberta more generally, were places where coalitions and collaborations became an integral part of local activism. She argues that the smaller rural population in Lethbridge and southern Alberta actually strengthened their community:

Lethbridge was pretty rural compared to Montreal or big cities. We were far more likely to form coalitions because we didn’t have a critical mass of people that you could have groups that were all 22 year olds or you know all 30 year olds or all 70 year olds. You brought together people who wanted to talk about the same thing and grapple [with] the same issues [. . .]. And in Lethbridge that [separate activist groups] just couldn’t have worked—there wouldn’t have been enough people.³⁰

While Lethbridge may not be commonly recognized as an activist space, given its location in the Canadian Bible Belt, the rural location and setting contributed to fostering strong activist coalitions and bringing together communities of activists and local professionals. For example, the different communities supporting the LBCIC found solidarity in 1974 when a group called Citizens in Action (CIA) pressured the city to pull funding from the centre. Burgess and Moir both explain that the strength of their communities ultimately overwhelmed the protest. Moir recalls that she did not feel ostracized “because we had such a broad base within our women’s movement in Lethbridge.”³¹ Similarly, Burgess notes that “there was always a group of people to support you. And I really felt supported.”³² This supportive activist community proved stronger than social anxiety, public pushback, and controversy.

Commitment to the LBCIC was key to defeating the intense controversy that erupted in 1974 over its municipal funding. That year, the centre became a target of CIA when its LIP grant came up for renewal. Citizens in Action put forward a recommendation that the city withdraw all municipal funding from the LBCIC. Without that, the provincial and federal monies would also be lost and the centre forced to close.³³ The CIA campaign led to a public debate between supporters and opponents of the centre. In April and May, the debate played out in newspaper editorials and in letters to city council.³⁴ This local debate reveals important aspects of both opposition and support.

Opposition was largely fuelled by anxiety around youth having access to such reproductive education and services. Moir recalls public apprehension that the centre was “promoting promiscuity” and “teen sexuality or irresponsible sexuality.”³⁵ In letters to council, some citizens referred to the LBCIC and the literature it distributed as immoral. Letter writer Rosemary R. Edmunds went as far to charge that the “literature made available with regard to this project is obscene. We should all be enraged at such pornographic material being available to adults, let alone children.”³⁶ Forbis also remembers people’s concerns

about sex education and “What are you saying to our kids? And what about values? What values are you going to be imparting? You’re going to be telling our kids it’s OK to have sex. And if you talk about birth control they’re going to want to go out and do it. And we want you to be abstinence only [education]. And then, what about the abortion issue? Are you going to be talking about abortion?”³⁷

These questions illustrate the social anxieties around contraceptive and sexuality education of youth that partially fuelled protest against the LBCIC.

At the same time, the debate and the opposition to the centre actually worked to strengthen the resolve of LBCIC supporters and enhance the coalitions built around it. Indeed, CIA was unsuccessful in getting the LBCIC’s funding pulled and the centre continued to be supported by the city until 1978. Moir and Burgess both remember overcoming such controversies with the unyielding affirmation of their cohorts of feminists, students, and local progressive professionals.

In 1978, as a result of two political shifts, the LBCIC lost its LIP funding and closed its doors. By then, the Alberta government included reproductive and sexual health services as part of provincial health care. The services were then regulated by provincial legislation and bureaucracy. At the municipal level, the centre’s closure was caused largely by a change in municipal leadership. A new mayor and council were less sympathetic to the LBCIC and used the new provincial legislation to justify closing the centre in favour of opening the Family Planning Centre (FPC), a provincial health service that both levels of government could regulate more closely. The new FPC tried to fill the same gaps that the LBCIC had filled during its operation, but the new municipally run board, often acting as gatekeepers, sometimes limited what the FPC could accomplish.³⁸

While government regulation of these services presented new limitations, it also represents a broader acceptance of these issues on an official level in Alberta society. Seen from the perspective of reproductive and sexual health activism, the closure of the LBCIC and the increased regulation of the FPC were defeats. However, the inclusion of these services under provincial health care meant a reduction in costs to both the centres and citizens. And the inclusion of such health services in the provincial health-care system illustrates that reproductive and sexual health were becoming part of a normalized model of health and wellness—in large part thanks to the activists, including those at the LBCIC, who brought public attention to sexuality, contraception, abortion, and VD and made these health services legitimate.

While the LBCIC closed its doors in 1978, the stories shared about its six years of operation illuminate a significant instance of feminist reproductive rights activism in southern Alberta. The history of these activists demonstrates initiative, political dedication, and commitment to their communities. Additionally, the story of the LBCIC illustrates that this activism persisted in the face of both inertia (“we do not need this here”) and conservative opposition (“we do not want this here”). Lethbridge may not be the first place that comes to mind when one thinks about activism in Alberta, let alone Canada. But as the story of the LBCIC shows, the small city was home to some dedicated feminists in the 1970s.

Thank you to all of the oral history narrators whose stories inform this work. Also, thank you to the Glenbow Archives and the Galt Museum and Archives, especially archivist Andrew Chernevych, for the invaluable assistance over the years. Thank you to Anastasia Sereda, Erin Gallagher-Cohoon, and Tarisa Little for valuable feedback on this piece. Thank you to Erika Dyck and Carol Williams for your mentorship and guidance throughout my research on the LBCIC. Thank you to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which funded part of this research throughout my MA and PhD through the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Master’s Award and the Canadian Graduate Student Doctoral Award.