Forward to Laws Relating to Birth Control in the United States and its Territories

Date

1938/--/--

Source

Margaret Sanger Papers Microfilm Edition: Collected Documents Series, C16: 422.
"Forward to Laws Relating to Birth Control in the United States and its Territories" Laws relating to Birth Control, New York; Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, 1938.

Identifier

Text

Foreward

Only those among us who have had intimate contact for years with the problems of women who want, need, and cannot get authentic information on birth control can realize the misery that has resulted from the passage of the so-called Comstock Federal laws and the state laws patterned on them. They have intimidated physicians; they have made the study of methods in medical schools difficult; they have hampered research; they have made public notification of clinical service illegal; they have forbidden general dissemination of information on methods, even when written by doctors; they have prevented untold numbers of mothers from obtaining scientific information on family limitation and driven them to quacks and abortionists; and they have been responsible for flooding the nation with unwanted children many of whom are a burden to both their parents and the community.

The passage of the Federal laws classing contraception with obscenity will forever remain a dark chapter in the annals of American history. These laws have done more to prolong the suffering and slavery of women than any other single factor. Owing to these laws we have the appalling spectacle of the death of thousands of women from abortions. Could we but view the accumulated damage in human misery since these statutes went into effect it would put to shame even the most callous of our opponents. In fact it would make “countless thousands mourn.”

It is after all the mothers of the nation who have suffered most from these laws; it is the mothers who have staggered under their inhumane mandate. it is they who have paid in the sacrifice of their own lives, in the high infant death rate, in the multiplication of the feebleminded and the unfit. They have paid for it in the fact of poverty, in the fact of unemployment, in hopelessness and despair. We are paying for it in the ever increasing burden of taxes as well ass in the deterioration of our national stamina and of the race.

As we read these statutes and realize how carefully their framers thought out ways and means to block any knowledge of the prevention of conception, we are more than ever grateful to the Justices of the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit whose sane and liberal interpretation of the Federal law in 1936 now makes it possible to incorporate birth control in programs of public health and preventive medicine in almost every state in the Union. When such service is complete we can begin to feel that our goal, “Every Child a Wanted Child,” may be reached. By this means we shall build for the future a better, strong, more healthy race--in mind and body--than this country has ever known before, a race worthy to carry on the tradition of our pioneering forefathers whose courage and stamina started the young nation on its upward path.