In Poughkeepsie, N. Y., in 1952, a Roman Catholic hospital presented seven Protestant physicians with an ultimatum to quit the Planned Parenthood Federation or to resign from the hospital staff. Three agreed, but four declined and were suspended. After a flood of protests, they were reinstated at the beginning of 1953. The peace of the community was badly disturbed, and people across the nation, reading of the incident, felt uneasy.

In New York City in 1958, the city's Commissioner of Hospitals refused to permit a physician to provide a Protestant mother with a contraceptive device. He thereby precipitated a bitter controversy involving Protestants, Jews and Roman Catholics that continued for two months, until the city's Board of Hospitals lifted the ban on birth-control therapy.

A year later in Albany, N. Y., a Roman Catholic hospital barred an orthopedic surgeon because of his connection with the Planned Parenthood Association. Immediately, the religious groups of the city were embroiled in an angry dispute over the alleged invasion of a man's right to freedom of religious belief and conscience.

These incidents, typical of many others, dramatize the distressing fact that no controversy during the last several decades has caused more tension, rancor and strife among religious groups in this country than the birth-control issue. It has flared up periodically on the front pages of newspapers in communities divided over birth prevention regulations in municipal hospitals and health and family welfare agencies. It has erupted on the national level in the matter of including birth-control information and material in foreign aid to underdeveloped countries. Where it is not actually erupting, it rumbles and smolders in sullen resentment like a volcano, ready to explode at any moment.