IRELAND: The Contraceptive Corps

When the train pulled into Dublin from Belfast one Saturday evening last month, customs men tensed. Out poured some 50 housewives, typists and shop girls flaunting hundreds of birth control devices. Members of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement, they were challenging the anti-birth control policies of the Catholic-dominated Dublin government and, in particular, the Criminal Justice Act of 1935, forbidding the import or sale of contraceptives.

Though a majority of Ireland's Catholics probably still support the church's strictures against birth control, there has been growing agitation recently to repeal or modify the...