‘The nurses’ birthed a better place at Stinking Creek

…Looking back, Kemner and Gall say it was birth control, as much as anything, that changed the fate of Stinking Creek.

The daughters of women who had 14 or 15 children in the 1950s and 1960s grew up and had three or four. Their daughters and granddaughters now have one or two, or none.


“I saw how my momma lived, and I weren’t gonna live like my momma,” says Suzi Carnes Brown, who was born with Kemner’s help. Her mother had nine children. She had four. Her daughter has one.

…”I’d talk to them when their husbands weren’t around,” says Kemner. “Men didn’t like it at all. Back then, a man’s worth was the size of his family.”

Shrinking family size meant more money for food, clothing and housing because there were fewer to feed, clothe and house.

…”What’s being done in Appalachia is the classic strategy for the developing world,” says Greg Bischak, senior economist at the Appalachian Regional Commission. Birth control, education, health care and infrastructure work together to ease poverty, he says.

“It works here, too.”

USA Today