Mary Kahl

Controversy and Courage: Upper Hudson Planned Parenthood from 1934 to 2004 Mary Kahl

Controversy and Courage lays out in dramatic detail one community's struggle to enable women to control their own childbearing. From the Depression years in Albany, New York, when the poor had no access to birth control, up through the advent of the Pill and the sexual revolution, to the current battles over abortion, the family planning movement has never been free of religious and political controversy. The history of Upper Hudson Planned Parenthood is a microcosm of the national experience of family planning clinics, but it is also a uniquely local story with its own heroines and heroes, its own legal battles, its own victories. Controversy and Courage chronicles the eventful and contentious fight for reproductive freedom in Albany for the past 70 years.