- Person
- Lena Levine
- Lived
- 1903–1965
- Field
- Family planning medicine
- From
- American
The story
Lena Levine was born in Brooklyn in 1903, the youngest of seven children of Jewish immigrants from Vilna. She qualified as a doctor in 1927 and practised obstetrics and gynecology in Brooklyn. Her interest in birth control began in the 1920s, when she met Margaret Sanger. After her husband died and her young son was left disabled by encephalitis, she gave up delivering babies and trained as a psychiatrist, which let her treat both the physical and the emotional sides of the problems women brought to her.
Her professional home became the Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in New York, which Sanger had opened in 1923 as the first legal birth control clinic in the United States. Over five decades it gave birth control and infertility care to thousands of patients and trained doctors and nurses from around the world. Working with the physician Abraham Stone, Levine became assistant director. The bureau opened a Fertility Service in 1945 for couples who could not conceive, expanded marriage counselling, and Levine and Stone organised the first group counselling programme in the United States on sex and contraception. When she died in 1965 she was the bureau’s director.
Levine also helped carry family planning abroad. In 1948 Sanger proposed an international committee on planned parenthood, and in 1952, at a conference in Bombay, it became the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which set out to create family planning associations country by country and to support research into simpler contraceptives. The Jewish Women’s Archive credits Levine as one of its founders, and she served on the council and executive committee of its Western Hemisphere Region. Historians judged her more prominent internationally than at home.
She also wrote popular books and pamphlets, from The Doctor Talks with the Bride to The Modern Book of Marriage, arguing that women deserved accurate information, access to birth control and equality in marriage.
Why it matters
The family planning services she helped pioneer, from contraceptive advice to fertility treatment, are now part of ordinary health care, and the federation she helped found still serves families worldwide.
About Lena Levine
Brooklyn gynecologist and psychiatrist who helped run Margaret Sanger’s pioneering clinic and build the International Planned Parenthood Federation, bringing birth control and fertility care to women.
Sources
- Lena Levine Jewish Women’s Archive
- Birth Control Organizations: International Planned Parenthood Federation Margaret Sanger Papers Project, New York University
- Clinical Research Bureau Wikipedia
- Lena Levine Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.