In December 1914, Dr. Barnett M. Rhetta of Baltimore, Maryland, read a paper before the Maryland Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association. Rhetta was a well-known black physician in the area, a leading member of the National Medical Association and an advocate for black representation in public health associations. His paper, entitled “A Plea for the Lives of the Unborn,” raised some sticky subjects, especially for black physicians in the early twentieth century. Rhetta argued that physicians must not help people have fewer children but instead must advocate on behalf of the unborn. Rhetta furiously denied the legitimacy of contraception and abortion, recognizing a large problem in the debate over reproductive health for African Americans: eugenics. Rhetta declared, “Eugenics has been defined as ‘That science which deals with influences that improve the unborn qualities of the race.’ In other words, it is that science which tends to improve mankind by breeding better children.” Rhetta noted the purported benefit of this idea: “When properly applied, there is no higher calling in the field of medicine. But to you, and for me, as practiced here today, it means death.” He continued, “Cranks … have spread it that in the name of Eugenics and for the betterment of the race, the Negro in America should be silently wiped out.” Here was the crux of Rhetta's quandary. How could he support greater access to contraception or abortion without playing into the hands of white supremacists who wished to eliminate the black race?

Rhetta's fervent rejection of contraception reflected the very ambiguous relationship between race and contraception. Black and white doctors, each claiming medical expertise, applied the politics of racial betterment (or racial survival) to their own political aims. Whereas white supremacists expressed the wish to see African Americans quarantined from infecting the sexual health of whites, black doctors challenged scientific racism and saw the debate over sexual hygiene and birth control through their own lens of racial solidarity, survival, and respectability.

Interestingly, Rhetta reappears in the press a few decades later.