A handwritten note attached to this draft reads: "If this can be cleaned up. It will do for our files."
]]>This is a revised version of Sanger's Jan. 18, 1932 speech ""My Way to Peace." It is not clear if this version was ever delivered or published. Handwritten interlineations were made by Margaret Sanger. At least one page is missing. It is possible this is a draft version of Sanger's speech to the Oklahoma Junior League on Nov. 23, 1933.
A handwritten note attached to this draft reads: "If this can be cleaned up. It will do for our files."
Mr. Chairman, Ladies & Gentlemen:
In this day of great world upheaval it is natural that there should be drawn up variousplans and proposals as to the means of world peace. My way to world peace is not the way of moratoriums, reparations, or tariffs; it is not the way of Versailles treaties; my way to peace is the way of the people. My way is to direct and control the populationthrough birth control.
There is probably no other subject that has such a practical significance,which at the same time cuts so deeply into the foundations of social evolution and world peace, as birth control. Birth control is a keynote,-–it is asignal of a new moral awakening; a moral responsibility, not only for those children who have already been born; a responsibility not only for those that are about to be born;but for those who have not yet been conceived. It is not only a health and economic expedient; it is a great social measure principle, and that measure principle is interlocked and interwoven with the spiritual progress of therace, and its future.
The definition of birth control is "the conscious control of the birth rate by means that prevent conception of human lives." When you prevent the conception of human life, you do not have to destroy human life. You do not destroy,-–you do not interfere with the development of human life, because there is no life to interfere with or to destroy. It is no more an interference with life to prevent conception than to remain single orto live in celibacy. We say "control." When you control the birth rate you do not have to limit it, any more than when you control your own furnace; you do not put out the fire. You merely adjust its temperature to the requirements of the weather, (you do not have to put the fire out) considering the time of the day and the season. When you control your automobile, you do not necessarily have to stop the engine. And when you control the size of your family, you do not have to limit yourself to one or two children, but you control it the number; first according to the state of the mother’s health affecting the possible inheritance of the child; second, according to the father’s earning power; andthird, according to the standards of living that you wish to maintain. When we say conscious control-–I wonder if any of us can imagine what it is going to mean when the human voice race is conceived consciously, not just as a result of casual accident--the reckless abandon of the moment--but when it is consciously planned fordesired and consciously conceived consciously. I tell you my friends, we don’t know what iscan only glimpse the wonders that will be be before us, when that possibility becomes a reality.
You hear people say, "Why control the birth rate? There is plenty of room in the world and in this country for unlimited population? What we need is a more equal distribution of the necessities of life, a new social system." The control of nature is not the control that we desire today, because there are only two ways of controlling the population in that way; either by increasing deaths, or by decreasing births.
Let us regard this. Population has always been controlled. From the beginning of time,--back as far as we know anything about the human race, there has been control of numbers population by the control methods of Nature. his is not the control we desire today. There are only two ways to control population-–either increase to decrease the birth rate or decrease to increase the death rate, and all through the history of mankind, population has been controlled by the death method increasing the death rate. Nature has been the most ruthless advocate of birth control through by this method. She has accomplished it through famines, pestilences, diseases, floods and wars. Nature thrusts to the wall the old, the weak, the maimed, the mentally deficient, until she perfects her type. Only the fit and strong are able to survive through the way of nature.
This might have been doubtless is an excellent way for Nature to perfect our civilization. But today, whether we like it or not, we no longer allow control of the population through nature’s method of increased death rates. Civilization has progressed beyond that. Now With the development advance of Christianity; with the development organization of Charity and development of Humanitarianism, we have thrust aside the hand of nature, we have interfered with nature’s methods, we will not allow these methods to operate. Civilization takes into the race care of the old, the feeble, the diseased, the insane, the morons the mentally deficient, and makes it almost imperative for them to exist and increase their numbers and multiply. Defectives are now fast breeders. The feeble minded woman is three times as fast fertile as normal mothers woman. This constitutes a real menace to our civilization. There is no doubt that those privileged to carry on the torch of civilization are comparitively lessening in numbers than those who have become [illegible] on the race while at the same time they carry the financial burdens of the unfit.
We find, according to psychological tests made by Professor William Starr-Meyer a few years ago, that only 15,000,000 out of a population of 165,000,000 could be classified as intellectuals and it was found that 85,000,000 had the minds of juveniles under fourteen years of age, 45,000,000 were just average and 15,000,000 were known to be feeble-minded. The great majority of the feeble-minded, the degenerates and the morons do not live in institutions but are mothers living in homes and multiplying rapidly. Is America then, safe for democracy? In this country, the feeble-minded, if they are twenty-one years of age, have the power to vote and their vote is just as good as that of the fifteen percent who are intellectuals. Isn’t it time to do something about this?
We have today what is scientists call a differential birth rate: or in other words a difference in the birth rate of two groups in our population, For the last two generations perhaps, a certain number of people, mainly the fifteen percent intellectuals have been controlling their birthrate-–that is the group with the small families. They have, perhaps, two or three or four children, but in that group, the greatest number of children achieve maturity. Here, consideration is given to the mother’s health, to the child's education and to the possible development of talents of the children.and It is from this group that we find the most children going to high schools the longest. Their children go to colleges, universities and eventually they fill filling the best positions in society.
The other group of large families struggles in poverty and in ignorance. Here we find that poverty and ignorance lack of birth control go hand in hand. We find the mothers broken on the wheel of poverty maternity. Everywhere they ask what they can do to prevent bringing another human being into this world. The fathers become desperate when unemployed, & discouraged. They become over-burdened and morally unfit. It is in this group that we have almost all the great social problems of the day. You have slums, over-crowding, high maternal and infant morality, child labor, illegitimacy, illiteracy. Many in this group are not only unemployed, but unemployable, I found, while working among this group, that it is not their fault that they have more children than they can decently provide for. I found an awakening consciousness on the part of these women to mothers and a desire to have only the number that they could decently take care of, but, because of their poverty, they have found every door closed against them.
Because these are the mothers who have to go to public institutions, hospitals, etc., for medical advice and care, and when they are taken to the hospital to have their babies or to have abortions performed,when they as what they can do not to have any more and they are told that it is against the law to give them this information; or that it is immoral and against the laws of nature. Yet, allthe time, the wives of the professional classes are obtaining information to enable them to limit their families.
What do we do about these evils of society problems? We do not like them; we try to legislate them out of existence. We have been trying for over fifty years to do away with child labor, yet, have we done it? A few years ago, we had several million children under fifteen years working at gainful occupations in the United States. Mainly, These children are taking the place of adults and competing with their fathers and mothers in industry just mainly for a daily existence. Behind them are more and more children forced out of schools and homes, little children who should be getting their education for the sake of in preparation for the future of the race. It is a long story, that of child labor. Go to the beet fields of Colorado or to the cotton fields of the South and you will see the devastating effects of ignorance on these people of birth control & child labor. The child labor committee worked valiantly to try to legislate this evil out of existence, but it cannot succeed until Birth Control Clinics are in operation in these sections; until the mothers of these children have the proper scientific information necessary to control their power of fertility.
One can go through almost all of these our social problems and you can see at a glance how they are interwoven and how they with and pivot around the question of birth control. Let us consider together two more problems connected with the welfare of the race. Take the simple question of maternal mortality. Every physician will tell a mother who has heart disease or kidney disease that she should not go through child-birth again. If she does should become pregnant again, according to the laws medical ethics, it is legal to interrupt this condition to save her life. But instead of then instructing her in the means of contraception, she is sent back to her home with only a statement that the doctors will not be responsible for her life if she should warning not to get into that condition again. She then goes back to her children home in a fearful and nervous condition with a death sentence hanging over her head. and in a weakened state of mind. Can you imagine the effect that this fear creates in a home and what itmeans to the husband and children? Every sick mother should be protected by the best information available.
We move from the mother problem to the infant problem. There we find conditions just as bad; there the mortality is even larger. Approximately 200,000 little children never reach their first birthday; ninety-five percent of them are unwanted and the large majority of them die from causes of due to poverty and neglect. There is not one person here who believes that we can do away with this problem next year or the following year--and yet the state allows these mothers to remain in utter ignorance of how to prevent the coming of 200,000 more lives next year and the next year, who are doomed in advance to die from causes of poverty and neglect.
Our Children’s Bureau tells us that from some of their statistics with that this question of unfit infant mortality has is concerned with three very vital factors. The first is the father’s wage. As it goes up, a larger number of the children survive--if it goes down,a larger number of children die. Second, is the spacing of children in a family. In other words, Where two or three years elapse between the birthdays of children, they have a better chance to survive and develop. The mother has had an opportunity to recuperate and rebuild her health. The family income has been stretched out over the intervening period of years to meet the family needs. We know that the spacing of children determines their chances of survival--that the second child has a better chance to live than the fifth, and the fifth a better chance to live than the twelfth, certainly. We have the astounding statistics that sixty percent of all the twelfth children born in this country are doomed to death before they reach their first birthday. In other words, about six out of every ten children who are twelfth in their family are doomed to die before they breathe their first breath. What a waste of child life! And Waste of mother power! Which Both of these might have been put into the constructive forces in this world of race building instead of making of our women only incubators or child-bearing machines, which is, what women have been throughout the ages become when they are ignorant of birth control.
While We know All of this these statistical facts we know, and we should try to alleviate some of the conditions but our efforts are only palliative. We can correct them only to a certain degree. We give free lunches to children, educational care, do everything possible to keep them alive. You rescue a child to live & bring it through its first years, and then you we have to battle again to carry them it through the succeeding years and then when it becomes fourteen, it secures working papers and starts to compete with his father in industry thereby creating labor problems. Thus all workers become their own rivals in trade the labor market. The law of supply & and demand dominates their existence
How stupid the labor organizations have been to recognize the power of limited numbers in a union, but not to fail to recognize how illogical it is to permit themselves to become their own rivals the same principle in their families.
It seems to me there is no greater cruelty than bringing a child into this world when the parents are diseased or when there is no provision for its care when the parents are diseased. When studying law or when preparing In contemplating to take training the robe of priesthood or entering even law or the least of the professions, you have to one must study carefully to fit yourself oneself for your one's duties. But anyone can become a father or mother. It makes no difference how unprepared or how unfit one might may be-–no difference what one can earn–-one can have as large a any number of children as wanted. Let us consider the children born of diseased parents. If we know we had to pass through other human bodies in order to reach another world, would we not be most particular and careful to choose the kind of parents we should have? We would be more than particular, so why should we not be just as particular about our obligations to the children we expect to bear?
It is not only a personal question; not only a question affecting family welfare but it is also a question affecting world affairs.
In 1924, the United States Government came to the realization that there was a serious population problem in this country. We were not so much concerned about the number of people as about the quality of the population. The United States Government therefore put a ban on immigration. No alien could enter who had certain diseases or was feeble-minded, or illiterate, or who came here for the practice of prostitution. There is a very long list of undesirable aliens who cannot come into qualities which ban aliens from this country. Furthermore, in case If in case some of them who do get in, these undesirable qualities are indicated within five years, these individuals can be deported. This is a good law. We do not want undesirable types to stain the blood stream of the Nation, but, if it is right that undesirables, that they shall not come into the country from without, then why isn’t it equally important that they not increase and multiply from within the country? They propagate the same undesirable qualities that we are trying to keep out of by our immigration laws. These laws of the United States Government caused a great upheaval in Europe and have disturbed the flow and flux of population throughout the whole world. Since we have had a selective quota of population, you can imagine what it has meant to some of those countries that had free entry into our country for so many years. Let us consider two countries that are no longer able to find a place for their surplus population in the United States.
There are two countries that we must call danger spots in the world: Italy and Japan. These two countries have a very acute population problem. Japan is a country mostly mountainous with a population of 67,000,000 of people and with a territorial area not quite as large as California. She cannot possibly feed her population and has never tried to reduce her birth rate and density of population which is very heavy indeed. There are only about 148 square miles and over 400 human beings are crammed into each square mile. It means that Japan, not being able to expand in other countries who would not have her people, had to look for other outlets for her large over-population. South America was willing to take care of part of thissurplus population, but not all the ships that Japan has could take her surplus population to South America. Japan cannot accommodate them all at home and South America can only accommodate a small percentage.
Japan has an inadequacy of the most important natural resources, but and although she has a good water power and a large textile industry which however, is even these are insufficient for that great population for which she must provide. Manchuria had all that China wanted and lacked in raw materials, and at the first opportunity she marched right into Manchuria at the psychological moment when the rest of the world was busy at home with its own problems, and it seems that there she will stay. She has acclaimed proclaimed that "Might is Right", and says: "What are you going to do about it?"; and it is now indeed too late to do much about it.
Now let us look at Italy who has 119 square miles with a population of 41 millions of people, with over 340 people to a square mile. In 1921 the population was 28 millions at the rate of 156 people per square mile, and in 1922 the population was 40 millions at the rate of 548 people per square mile. The birth rate in 1921 was 30.4, and in 1927 it was 26.4. On top of this population which she could not provide for with the world against her immigration, she had 4 to 5 thousand additional human beings being born into her population annually. Over 25% of Italy’s natural increase was coming into this country every year. France received 6 or 7 percent of Italy’s increase, but France has curbed this percentage because of her unemployment problems. Italy is unable to till her own home areas. She has low standards of living and a slight margin of life. Her water power might be developed but at a great expense. She has very little iron ore and other raw materials. If she would should build up her textile industry she would have strong competition in from Japan.
Neither the industrial nor the agricultural possibilities of Italy can provide for her people, yet we know that Italy is increasing; that her dictators call upon her to increase and multiply; and I read that there is now a law in Italy providing that every woman must report to a health station periodically to show cause why she has not had a baby every two years. However, this condition of population today have has not been brought about by dictators alone and although we have only recently become conscious of the importance of birth control and its relation to over-population, with the facts of science and knowledge that we have today, it seems to me that any dictator who insists upon increasing the population by force, such a person should be made to account for it at the world court of human justice.
Other countries are doing their best to adjust their populations. Germany is today doing all possible to keep her birth rate down and avert a re-occurrence of the conditions of 1914. France is now trying to compete with Germany by boosting up her birth rate. France increases her numbers fearing that Germany will come across the border to invade her. It is absurd for France to thus compete with Germany whose proportionate majority is so great that France will not catch up to her even in 10 years. France’s death rate--both infant and maternal--is very high, and she should decrease this death rate instead of trying to increase the present population.
England also had an acute problem of over-population and unemployment, so she decided to send her surplus people to some of her colonies in order to remedy the situation. But it did not work out properly. These people were not happy in the wilds of Australia and Canada because of the different environment and climatic conditions. They did not have the resistance and vigor to withstand the climate. The colonies were therefore obliged to send them back to England saying: "We can’t use your slum population. They can’t stand the rigors of the climate."It all comes back to the "quality" of the human being.
My way of peace is a way of birth control. It can be applied in three ways: First, by continence--not marrying. This however, should not be recommended because it implies the abandonment of the natural marriage relationship which and very often results in the break-up of family life. Second, by sterilization. This method is recommended by physicians only in extreme cases where other forms of contraception are not possible. It is for those who have not the mental equipment or moral character to use means of contraception, and yet who should be given help to prevent their bringing more children into the world. There you have chemical and mechanical methods over which the whole controversy on birth control has been waged.
It is to these methods that the Roman Catholic Church objects. An analysis of the Pope’s recent Encyclical, "On Chaste Wedlock" reveals that they countenance intercourse marital intimacies only for propagation or under certain conditions wherethere can be no possibility of conception.
Now, my way to peace is to apply the same constructive knowledge to this subject that has been applied to industry and to the world of life itself.
This is part of the program that we are trying to bring about now. We hope that a falling birth rate will do its part to avert future wars, and to maintain world, as well as international, peace. We want to make it possible for people to have the best scientific information available. We want the medical profession to take this responsibility and to distribute information in their public and private practice. We want women to be free from the fear of pregnancy. We want children to beconceived and born in love, and to be given heritage of a sound body and a sound mind.
We believe that through Birth Control, untold millions can be relieved of misery andunhappiness. We believe this is the first and most important step we must take if we would bring peace on earth and good will to men and scatter it over the face of the world.
The general aim of the birth control movement is to legitimatize the practice ofcontraception through scientific and hygienic methods, and to educate the adult public as to its advantages from the personal and social points of view. International in scope, the movement has been known under a number of names; in the British Empire as “neo-Malthusianism”; inFrance as “conscious generation”; and occasionally as “voluntary parenthood.”
In English-speaking countries the present movement derives from Malthus. In the second edition of his famous Essay on Population, published in 1903, the English clergyman first enunciated his law of the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence. The only solution he suggested for overpopulation was the practice of celibacy and late marriage. In 1826 Dr. Charles Knowlton, a Boston physician, was prosecuted for publishing a small book, The Fruits of Philosophy, advocating mechanical and chemical methods of contraception. In 1876-1877 Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant were prosecuted and convicted for distributing that book among the working classes of Great Britain. Their conviction led to the foundation of the Malthusian League in 1878 by Dr. Charles Drysdale and his wife, Dr. Alice Vickery Drysdale. A Dutch League was founded in 1881. The neo-malthusians differed from Malthus in advocating contraception to prevent overpopulation and to reduce the birth rate.
The period between 1914 and 1921 in the United States was one of militant agitation and widespread publicity, partly as a result of several convictions of persons active in the movement for challenging federal and statelaws. In New York City in 1914, Mrs. Margaret Sanger began to advocate contraception on feministic and libertarian grounds,coining at that time the term “birth control.” The interest awakened in the whole question of contraception resulted in 1921 in the foundation of the American Birth Control League and of the Voluntary Parenthood League; also in the publication of a monthly periodical, the Birth Control Review, edited by Mrs. Sanger. The two organizations were subsequently combined under the name of the former.
Activities of the second period of the American movement, from 1921 to 1925, included the organization of local leagues, the education of public opinion, and campaignsfor the amendment of statutes which class the practice of contraception with obscenity and criminal abortion. During the third period, 1925 to the present, advocates of birth control have concentrated upon the establishment of clinics and research bureaus, and upon enlisting the interest and activities of physicians,biologists, biochemists, and social scientists generally. Results of these efforts are seen in the fact that no less than 55 clinics and bureaus are now operating legitimately in the United States (covering 23 cities and 13 states), dispensing contraceptive information to all persons legally permitted to receive it. InNew York State it is given to married people for the cure or prevention of disease. In California there are 12 clinics; there is one each in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Newark,New Haven, and Philadelphia; there are six in Chicago; and New York City has eight in hospitals and one operating independently. In addition, a branch for colored women has recently been established in the Harlem section of New York City by the Clinical Research Bureau.
The year 1929 was marked by the establishment of 27 new clinics. The successful operation of such clinics and research bureaus, under medical direction, makes possible the scientific analysis of individual cases, and also statistical studies.Through the latter material is being developed for the replacement of untested theory with impartial analysis. Social agencies are beginning to cooperate with suchclinics. Owing to the widespread change in public opinion, physicians are more willing to give advice in private practice. Over 10,000 of them have expressed willingness to do so.
The birth control movement is exerting a noticeable influence upon eugenics and giving a new direction to programs for race-betterment; it has resulted in renewed consideration of the problem of the legal sterilization of the unfit; and has influenced programs for the control of the dependent, delinquent, and defective groups in society. It has been given consideration by many social agencies seeking to decrease maternal and infant mortality rates, particularly by the Committee on Maternal Health of New York City. Financial support of the birth control movement has been from independent and anonymous sources, with the exception of temporary support from the Brush Foundation of Cleveland. During 1929 a study of 10,000 cases was made by the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, and a study offertility and sterility by the Committee on Maternal Health.
No laws on the subject were passed during the year. Bills to amend the laws which prohibit contraceptive instruction were defeated in New York and Connecticut.
Sanger took the oppportunity to visit her brother, Bob Higgins, Hall of Fame Penn State football player and coach.
]]>Sanger spoke at the Schwab Auditorium at Penn State College onNovember 15, 1932, the first in a series of talks sponsored by the Penn StateChristian Association. The speech was not found, but quotes were taken fromreports in the Daily Collegian.
Sanger took the oppportunity to visit her brother, Bob Higgins, Hall of Fame Penn State football player and coach.
"Birth control is not a panacea for all the social and economic ills in the world butat least it is the most important immediate help which can be applied as a solutionto the present problems of millions of men and women here and now," Mrs. Margaret Sanger said at the opening Forum of the year in the Auditorium Tuesday night.
Mrs. Sanger cited several definite reasons for the practice of birthcontrol. Contraception, she believes, should be used in the case of communicable diseases, where the mother is physically weak and incapable of bearing children,and where the parents produce sub-normal offspring. The practice is also valuable to the spacing of children in a family, protecting adolescent married couples from having children too soon, and also in the case of poverty stricken parents.
"Birth control will give women a chance to develop and to express themselves; it will, above all, mean happier marriages," Mrs. Sanger stated. "Instead of the customary single child in families of the higher classes, and ten or eleven in the poorer classes, birth control will usher in a new era of families with three or four children. This will constitute the American family of the future," the speaker believes.
Mrs. Sanger left the College yesterday afternoon. In addition to her open lecture, she addressed a women's club meeting Tuesday night. While here, anumber of teas and luncheons were held for her by her sister-in-law Mrs. Robert A. Higgins and several faculty members.
Draft of Sanger acceptance of the American Woman's Asssociation medal. Handwritten additon and changes by Sanger. For the final version see Address at the American Women'sAssociation, Apr. 20, 1932.
Friends:
My heart is too full to express my gratitude in words.
I have been sitting here listening to all these beautiful tributes, but I have had to ask myself: "Is this only a dream or am I fully awake?"
After nearly twenty years of Indictments, suppression, patrol wagons, raid, courts, jails, persecutions and ridicule,it is hard to believe that I would receive any reward beside except a warrant!
As I press this medal in my hand, I shall always prize this medal it seems to me much more than a reward. It is your action--your gesture--that I value so much more than the recognition of my efforts because it symbolizes the public recognition by a representative group of the enlightened women of America this country of the basic importance of Birth Control as a necessary instrument in the making of our civilization.
In expressing your belief in me, you are joining the battle for Birth Control. That is the important thing! This medal will go with me into the thick of the fight! In moments of fatigue or discouragement, it will reassure me, whisper to me: “You are not alone in this fight. Intelligent and courageous women are standing behind you, standing with you in spirit!”
I am just back from five months on the firing line in Washington, five months,--if I dare say so without disrespect--in the Congressional trenches; five months at the head of a valiant little band of shocktroops, trying to get a bill through Congress which will enable women of America to have free access to scientific knowledge of their own bodies.
These last, busy, hectic five months have taught me one thing: beliefs, convictions, ideas mean nothing unless they are brought out into the open, enunciated boldly, expressed challengingly, and courageously. Passive acceptance is not enough. It is just as unhealthy to hoard an idea as to hoard dollars--much more so, in fact. Put your ideals convictions into circulation, or they wither and die.
Just as the organs of our body atrophy if not exercised, so our belief in a right an ideal must be actively expressed, if it is to mean anything to ourselves or the world. If you are ashamed of your belief, if youare afraid to express it in public--it will fester and rot and die miserably --and so will your own spirit!
In presenting this medal to me, who less than twenty years ago was denounced andindicted and run out of this great free enlightened country as a representative of the devil himself, you are acting with courage and independence. You are championing a cause that is still unpopular, that is still denounced and blocked at every step by its bitter and fanatical enemies.
I am not Exaggerating.
While the intelligent and enlightened elements in this country content themselves withremarking casually: “Of course I’m for Birth Control--everybody is!” our opponents are active in blocking our every move. Don't think for a moment that their opposition is a Passive one.
Let me tell you something of our fight in Wasginton.
We arrive there to find the very air surcharged with the great problems of the day: war debts, moratoriums, reparations, unemployment relief, the peace conference, the war in Manchuria and China: new tariff walls: sales taxes, soaking the rich, the budget to be balanced, beer and Prohibition.
The mind of each Representative, each Senator, was like a busy telephone switch board with his or her secretary the telephone operator. All the wires are busy. How to plug in with a subject like Birth Control-- To the busy legislator, it comes like a message from Mars or some planet even more remote.
One morning I called upon forty Congressmen and succeeded in obtaining interviews with only two of them. But that was a good day’s work. But in the past five months, we have interviewed no less than two hundred and twenty representatives and forty-five Senators. These gentlemen for the most part expressive a polite, passive Sympathy. But they are dominated by Fear--fear of their constituents, fear of public opinion, fear of prejudice, fear most of all of the opponents of Birth Control. For these opponents are skilled in the tactics of blocking all progress. They may be--undoubtedly they are--in a minority. But by the tireless activity, they give the impression of being twice as strong as they actually are. While the adherents of Birth Control may on occasion come to our aid, the opponents spring into double and intense activity, knowing that they must exercise eternal vigilance to prevent the freedom of women.
One Senator finally confessed: “If I sponsor this bill, I’ll make enemies: if I do not sponsor it, it will make no difference to my popularity.” Thus, though the passive supporters of Birth Control measures may be actually more numerous, they never protest against this type of refusal. They acquiesce; they forget at the next election. We can stir them into sporadic activity; but they their attention, is easily distracted, and led astray by other problems which seem on the surface more pressing, but actually are not so.
We were told by our political advisors--we women are of so trusting a nature--that our Bill would come before the Judiciary Committee. We spent months interviewing, persuading, educating the twenty-five members of that Committee. Finally, after the Bill was introduced in the House--and that was in itself a strenuous, collossal task--it was referred to the Ways andMeans Committee. All that work gone for nought--and yet we refuse to be discouraged.
Once I asked the advice of a Congresswoman. She was popular, well-liked, intelligent apparently. Yet she exclaimed to me bitterly: “For God's sake, don't send any of that Birth Control literature to my office! My stenographer is bitterly opposed to Birth Control, and any day, any of this Birth Control matters comes in the day’s mail to my desk, she goes up in the air--and makes it too hot for me the rest of the day.” I found out that secretaries and stenographers wield a vast unseen power behind the scenes in Washington--and the Congressman, already dominated by fear and afraid to ruin his own political futures--dare not act contrary to the advice of the secretary.
Another Woman Congressman said to me: “For Heaven’s sake, don’t ask women to touch this bill! It’s too controversial!”
Opponents of Birth Control have use only the negative tactics of protest, but because they are so diabolically vigilant, even blocking our moves before we have had time to complete our plans. Yet in spite of these odds, we have accomplished much. Our bill is introduced. But we need your support. We need ammunition. We need reserve troops.
It has been active, dynamic public opinion, concentrated, focused, mobilized, that has brought produced this desired result. Few American citizens have realized that the Federal Laws concerning the transportion of preventives do not merely concern the use of the United States mails and common carriers. Do you realize that Section 312 of the federal Penal Code makes it a crime punishable by two years imprisonment and a fine of $2,000 even to have in your possession any article or information designed to prevent conception?
It was this that aroused the people of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We sent workers there, and aroused the determined support of the enlightened voters of Representative Frank Hancock’s constituency. They made him “Birth-Control-conscious” in a week’s time. Their dynamic, determined, persistent activity, courageous, challenging , expressed in letters, phone calls, visitors, could not be turned away with any conventional polite dismission. Of Representative Hancock, they demanded point blank: Would he introduce this bill? And knowing their earnestness he replied that he would. And he has.
We have since been working to get the Bill in the Senate. The hearing before the Ways and Means Committee is set for . . . .
Most of the economic and social muddles which the Congress is trying to clear up have been the results of mistakes of the past. Clean them up, we all cry; but in doing so, do not neglect the great, basic, problems of humanity--the problems of Motherhood and of Childhood. Therefore we are convinced that it is our right and our duty to compel Congress to erase from the Criminal Code of this Country those Sections 211, 245 and 312, which are an insult to American Womanhood and a disgrace to the Country which permits them to remain there to block our path to freedom and realization.
I accept this medal as your pledge that you are with me in this battle to the bitter victorious end; and that as. Your gesture has been a public one and a courageous one. It is likewise a challenge to the opponents of Birth Control. Let your interest continue in the Active Tense, not the Passive. Join me in the is glorious battle for American womanhood and childhood, in the creation of a newer, better civilization for to-morrow. You will thank me then, as I thank you now--for Life active, dynamic, fighting crusading for a cause, I assure you, is more joyful and thrilling than life passive, inhibited, fearful. I have been in for twenty-years, and this medal gives me the inspiration to go on for twenty-years more, but I hope that Women will be freed long before that. Help us to make that hope become a fact. I thank you.
No final version of this speech was found.
Two danger spots in the world today are threatening peace, Mrs. Margaret Sanger, birth control advocate, said in an address to 500 members of Oklahoma City Town Hall, Junior League lecture series,today in the Biltmore Hotel.
Japan has already burst her bounds and taken Manchuria. The next will be Italy, which is boosting its birth rate just as Japan did, she said.
“Within 10 years,” Mrs. Sanger said, “Italy will march into Europe to prove that ‘might makes right.’ Population explodes just like steam in a boiler. Uncontrolled there is no way in the world to prevent revolution and war.”
“Our world today,” she said, “is in the same condition in reference to its ignorance of birth control as was the old-fashioned quack who tried to cure cancer by burning off the top. We are not striking at the roots, and until we curb our ever increasing population, we can never hope to find national recovery.”
Sanger spoke to reporters after her application for a visa to lecturein Japan was denied by the Consul General in San Francisco.The text below comes from the New York Tribune, with additional portions taken fromthe Oakland (CA) Tribune and thethe San Francisco (CA) Chronicle.
San Francisco, 17 Feb. 1922
The Japanese Consulate here late to-day announced that instructions had been received from Tokyoto refuse a visa to a passport of Mrs. Margaret Sanger, of New York, of the Birth Control League, who is in San Francisco preparing to start on a tour of the Far East. Lack of the visa will prevent her landing in Japan, it was said.
The Japanese Department of Home Affairs, through the Foreign Office, issued this order according to Consul General S. Yada. He said Mrs. Sanger would be allowed to book passage upon a Japanese steamship, but that she could not set foot on Japanese soil.
Mrs. Sanger to-day, not having the proper passport visa, was refused a ticket on the Japanese steamer Taiyo Maru, sailing from this port February 21. Mr. Yada indicated to-night there was no objection to the steamship company selling her a ticket.
Mrs. Sanger announced that she intends to sail aboard the Taiyo Maru whether her passport is vised or not, and take chances of being able to effect a landing in Japan.
"Without a doubt the Japanese government feels my lectures in their universities would be in direct opposition to their theories of militarism which they have fostered in the past and still continue to foster," Mrs. Sanger said.
Consul General Yada asserted that the Japanese government for some time have been opposed to propaganda "of the sort Mrs. Sanger is reported to spread." He said he presumed that was the reason he had been ordered not to vise her passport.
A few days before departing for San Francisco Mrs. Sanger gave out a statement here in which she said the Japanese government had decided to take steps against "the yellow peril" by instituting a national birth control policy. Mrs. Sanger said she had been in conference with Dr. Kato, chief of the Department of Medical Affairs of the Japanese government,who had been making a study of the birth control movement in the United States, England, Holland, and Germany.
"Dr Kato told me," Mrs. Sanger said, "that the Japanese government is convinced it must establish birth control as a nation-wide movement or at once fight a war of aggression on the next generation. Dr. Kato points out the population of Japan is now 57,000,000 in an area the size of California and that it is increasing at the rate of 800,000 a year."
"For more that a year I have been receiving visits from representative of the Japanese government sent out to study birth control. There have been twenty-five of these visits in all, representing various departments of the Japanese government."
"Dr. Kato told me last week that the majority of the Japanese government were nowconvinced of the wisdom of birth control and that it only remained for the principle to be intelligently communicated to the Japanese people. It has been recognized that over-population is the basis of 'the yellow peril.'"
[Additional quotes from the Oakland (CA) Tribune.]
The Kaizo, an organization of young Japanese thinkers, modern to their very finger tips, invited me to visit Japan. They are the same faction that invited Bertrand Russell here. They realize as I do that Japan with 67,000,000, as opposed to our 110,000,000 has her most serious menace in over-population.
This tremendous population is crowded into a country about the same size as California. Added to this handicap, their increase far out totals their death rate. Such advanced thinkers as Baroness Ishimoto, who have sponsored my teachings in Japan and who have asked me to lecture to the Japanese social workers, realize just what this over-population means. It means war, nothing more or less.
[Additional quotes from the San Francisco (CA) Chronicle]
"'The entire circumstance of that government refusing to allow me to visit their country has arisen through misunderstanding. I feel quite sure,' the lecturer said, and when the real aim and underlying purpose of my teachings are understood by the Japanese I am certain that my tour will not be interrupted."
"At any rate, I shall sail on schedule time and if I am not allowed to land in Japan I can at least go to China and India and present my lectures there," she continued. "Those governments have placed no obstacles in my path, but signed my passports this morning."
Sanger gave testimony on behalf of the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control before the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of S. 1842. The following excerpt includes only Margaret Sanger's testimony and the questions she answered. The chairman of the meeting was Senator Marvel Mills Logan.
Mrs. SANGER. Mr. Chairman, this bill, S. 1842, concerns, in my estimation, the 32,612,792 women of child-bearing age in this
I have had the privilege of coining the term by which this bill is likely to be known, "birth control" legislation. I would like to say that birth control means the control of the birth rate, by means that prevent conception. It does not mean that it interferes with the development of life; it does not mean that it interrupts the process of life nor that it takes life. The prevention of conception is not any more an interference with the process of life than remaining single or living in continence or celibacy. In the control of the birth rate we do not mean that we must limit the birth rate. It means to control the size of the family, but it does not mean limit it to 1 or 2 or to any specific number of children. We want the first consideration to be of the health of the mother; then the consideration of the health of the children that are already here; then consideration of the father's ability to earn a living for his family and the standard of the living that the parents wish to maintain for the cultivation and the education of the family. I would just like to make that definition clear for that is what we are talking about in using the term "birth control," as it may be used by other speakers.
Some years ago as a trained nurse, I found that I could not discuss this question with mothers; that I was unable to get information to assist them, even after they had been told by the doctors that another baby would cost them their lives. We found that the main thing in the way of doing that was
Mr. Chairman, in looking over the record and the history of that law and the way it was placed upon the statute books, I contend and believe that Congress at that time never intended that persons should be deprived of knowledge by which they could reasonably rear and care for their children. The whole law and all the discussion around it at that time, as we find it in the record, has relation to obscene literature coming to this country that was being circulated among young people. The intention of the law was to stop the circulation of indecent literature, and the prohibition of information to prevent conception never was intended in the sense of its rightful use. I cannot believe that any Congress then or today would want to deprive mothers of knowledge they rightfully should have for the benefit of the family and really for the benefit of the community and the country.
The law as it is set forth in sections 211 and 245 makes no exception. It does not exempt the medical profession or permit them to use the mails or common carriers. It make no exception for scientific or medical literature, to permmit such to go through the mails or by common carriers. We feel that the
I have here, Mr. Chairman, the laws to which this bill pertains and a small leaflet that we brought forth on Federal interference with the administration of State laws, with which we contend this law does interfere; and also a brief summary of the State laws which allow an exempton to the medical profession and a general exemption in certain cases. In
If you will permit it, I would like to place this in the record, as indicating what has been done in the way of Federal interference with the administration of these State laws.
Senator Logan. You may do so.
(The statement of the present law and summary of the State law referred to was marked "Exhibit B"; and the pamphlet entitled "Federal Interference with the Administration of State Laws," was marked "Exhibit C"; both of which appear at the close of the statement of this witness.)
Mrs. Sanger. Because of these State laws and under the authority and the right of State laws, people who are interested in this subject and are connected with social and civil work in the communities have established over 150 of what we call "birth-control clinics" throughout the country. Those are legally established centers, but they have to bootleg their supplies from New York and
Section 211 also makes it a crime for anyone to tell anyone else where such information may be obtained. In other words, these clinics that are legally established in various States not only have to bootleg their supplies but also bootleg any proper modern information than concerning contraception. Many of the doctors have no more information than the people had 40 or 50 years ago, which should belong in the ark. In order to get any new, scientific information, they have to bootleg it. Most physicians do not like to put themselves in that position.
Mr. Chairman, I have had a million letters from women in this country, from the time I began this campaign of education up until about 4 years ago. I have had a million personal letters about the hardships of some of these women. I have had to jeopardize my freedom, run the risk of a $5,000 fine and five years in prison for violating section 211, by telling these women where in their own States they could obtain that which they were legally entitled to under their own State laws.
That is what we are fighting for. We want to do away with this bootlegging. Representative
Senator Logan. That may be incorporated in the record.
(The document referred to was marked "Exhibit I", and is printed in full at the close of the statement of this witness.)
Mrs. Sanger. There is no particular avenue or direction for these people to go in which to get the right information. They have to go to the drug store and have it whispered over the counter that this or that will do. And we know from our recent research that many of these products are not effective. We have purchased 100 so-called "contraceptives" and put them through scientific tests. We put them through laboratory tests and had clinical tests, and submitted them to physicians, and we found that 43 out of the 100 were practically of no use whatever. Purchasing those things has caused many women serious injury. We have not gone into that very thoroughly yet, because we have just tested them as to their efficaciousness, and 43 out of 100 were of no use. It means a fraud is being perpetrated upon the public. This is a brief statement of the results of our research that I would like to have go into the record.
Senator Logan. That may be incorporated in the record.
(The document referred to was marked "Exhibit E", and is printed in full at the close of the statement of this witness.)
Mrs. Sanger. If I may stress this, by way of a little explanation when we talk about the question of preventing contraception we claim there are three methods of preventing conception. The first is continence. No one objects to continence. We have no objection whatever to certain religious orders claiming that is the only method the church can sanction. There is nothing in the law against it. They may practice it, and we say that this is their own affair, their own individual right.
The next is sterilization. Sterilization is for people who have to responsibility toward parenthood or toward children. It is becoming more and more prevalent, as you know from reports from
Then there is the chemical or the mechanical means of contraception, which is one that places in the hands of the parties involved the legal right to use means to prevent contraception, and it is around that group that most of the discussion seems to be centered.
There is nothing mandatory about this bill. We are not imposing any method upon anybody. We are not claiming that every family must obtain this information, but we do say for those who wish to use some means they should have the legal right to do it, and those who wish to use one particular means or no means at all should not have the right to impose that upon the whole community. We claim that we have a perfect right to use such method as our Physician indicates is the right one for the individual.
As we have stated, we are making no claim that any one means or method is a panacea for all. Various women differ. They differ as to the number of children, and their physical conditions become different. The economic situation is also different. We want to place the giving of information in the hands of those who can disseminate it properly, so that those desiring it may receive instructions and necessary scientific advice from those who are qualified to give it. It is just the same as the 10-cent pair of glasses in a 10-cent store. That is no way for people who need to have them to have glasses fitted. We want this subject removed from the 10-cent store and the gasoline stations and placed in the hands of those who are qualified in every way to explain the relations of parenthood properly.
Mr. Chairman, we have had to go through many difficulties in connection with this subject since 1914. Some of us have served time in jail, We have been arrested time and again, just because we wished to exercise the right of freedom of speech and help educate those who were in need of help. We have been able to get some decisions from the courts that have in a way interpreted these laws in different ways, especially in the States. Members of Congress have said to us:
You will never get anything through Congress. Why do you not go to jail and get your court decision?
I say Congress should be ashamed to compel us to go to such extremes and to resort to such methods for our laws. Why should we have to go to the courts to have our laws made? That is what Congress is for. People have a right to look to Congress and to bring these questions before it. We should not have to go to the expense of lawsuits and go to courts to have our laws made. I think you will all agree with that.
Now, then, as to the clinics: There are 157 birth-control clinics in this country. I have a statement here of the number of those clinics and the location, but I do no know whether I can put that in the record or not. There may be some question of a violation of section 211.
Senator Logan. That may be filed with the committee, and we will treat it as a privileged communication.
(The document referred to was marked "Exhibit F", and is filed with the committee.)
Mrs. Sanger. I want to talk a little about the waste of life, a fact which brought me into this cause more than anything else. First, I was to refer to the terrific number of abortions that are going on, which is a colossal number. I think we can show from the record that it runs over a million a year, and that does not begin to tell the story. There is the waste of women's lives, the waste of child life, and the terrible suffering of women. No woman can keep her health and continue to go through these operations with increasing pregnancy every year, especially when it is done surreptitiously. The condition of those nervous and unhealthy women is something really beyond our belief or understanding, and it is terrible that we should have to make it necessary for the women of America to go into these dangerous conditions and live under those conditions which I would call an underworld of suffering. It seems to me to be a state of barbarism.
In homes, for instance, where the average number of persons per room is less than 1, the infant death rate is 52.1; where it is 2 or more persons per room the death rate is 135.7. Furthermore, in families where the per capita income from the father's earnings was less than $50 the infant mortality rate was 215.9, as compared with a rate of only 60.5 where the per capita amount averaged #400 or over. These figures clearly and strikingly indicate the influence of family over-crowding upon family well-being.
I would like to read this little thing about Jimmy. Nobody wanted Jimmy, but he was born anyhow, and died three weeks later. His mother was sick with worry before he came. Childbearing in 1925, 1927, 1929, and 1931 had left her in miserable health, with bad varicose veins. his father was a $25-per-week mechanic working part time. Which of us, under such circumstance, would look forward to the birth of Jimmy? The community did not want him.
Yet this community gave his mother prenatal care, which amounted to $6.75. A social agency boarded his 4 brothers and sisters over 13 weeks, at a cost of $170.50. His mother was in the hospital 20 days, at a cost of $80. The layettte for the baby cost $7. He contracted meningitis at home and was given medical care and nursing by the city, at a cost of $15.25. He died and was buried free by the community, which cost $30. So his short and painful life cost the community $309.50.
Ask yourself, was it fair for Jimmy to be born at this time, with no chance for a happy childhood? Was it fair to his brothers and sisters when the father made enough money for food only, with no money for rent or clothing? Was it fair to the community which is now supporting over 70,000 families?
We believe that a child's first right is to be wanted. We believe that hunger and fear cannot create a wholesome home for a baby. We believe that during this crisis the community cannot now keep in health and decency the children who are here.
I also have some interesting statistics submitted by Prof.
In Weld County,
The county estimated that there are about 200 such cases yearly, making a total cost of $10,000 per year. For $300 it was possible then to save $10,000.
We wish to point out, however, since this clinic is a branch of
I have just two or three letters here that I would like to call you attention to. The first is from
you will only tell me I will do anything in the world for you I can.
PleasI read your address in the Evansville Press, and I wonder if you could help me any. I have two children. My mother has 10. I am only 20 years old, I live in fear all the time for I never know when I will get that way again. My oldest child is hairlipped and we want it fixed; part of it has been fixed but haven't the money to do any more. My husband only makes $10 a week so you see it is all we can do to live. I will never forget it if you will tell me how to keep from having children. I will tell my mother; her youngest child is younger than mine. It is terrible; ife.
Yours truly.
This woman could have been sent to
Here is another letter from
In regard to Birth-control bill S. 1842, how I wish all those people, priest and all that are so bitter against birth control, had to have babies every 9 months and know what it is to see little children hungry and cold, not to say anything about the slave life the poor mother is living and the suffering she goes through. I will do all I can for the cause. I haven't any money--we are sure having a struggle these days to make ends meet. Only hope the bill goes through for we poor women need help if anything or anybody does.
I worry so much. I have such a hard time. Oh, I don't want any more babies--am half crazy - am half tempted to leave my husband, but then how would I get along, and there are the children, and we all love one another, and he doesn't want any more babies either, so write my, dear unseen friend.
Here is one from
I have been married 10 years and during that time have given birth to 5 children: 3 girls and 2 boys. After the third one was born, I suffered a severe breakdown in health. It weakened my heart and stomach to such an extent that I am unable to do a big day's work. Whenever I do, I am so tired and exhausted I cannot sleep for hours. I have lain awake many and many a night, so tired my heart just pounded and thumped. Oh, but it is terrible. No one knows what it is like unless they have it to go through with. The children are so close together. They are all just like babes yet and are so noisy and fight and fuss till I am almost crazy. The oldest one died, so I have only four living but that is enough. I did not act right when the last one was born. I just had to gasp for breath and had such a strangled feeling. If we had lots of money I might get along better than I do, but my husband is a laboring man and there is no money to pay expensive doctor fees and laundry bills, and so forth. If I could do something harmless to keep from raising any more children my husband and I both would consider it a godsend. e cannot take proper care of the ones we have, let alone any more. My baby is 2 months old and I want to find out something to do before I have the chance to get pregnant again.
Miss Sanger, if you know of anything to help me stop all this, please inform me, for I am getting desperate. I have been tempted to commit suicide many a time. If I had good health, it would not be so bad but I wish you could see me. I married when I was 16. I will be 27 my next birthday and I look older than my husband and he is 35. And I feel older than I look. Everybody speaks about how tired I look and I am tired. So tired, nervous, and worn out I feel like I could drop in the floor and die without a single shudder.
What would this law do? In the first place, it would place the proper responsibility for the giving of information upon the medical profession and hospitals where women go to have their babies, and to these maternal wards in the hospitals. It would give the poor women, who are unable to go to the hospital, the opportunity to go to some member of the medical profession, who has a right to judge such matters. If she could go to the hospital to have her baby, she should be able to get proper information there. It gives the poor woman the right that only the well-to-do have had.
We should like to do more than this law asks for, and I hope before long we can ask for more an appropriation for this work in various States, especially in mountainous sections where women have a difficult time getting to a hospital. We would like to have regular Federal birth-control clinics, maternal-health clinics, where these women may get advice and where they may get proper attention. We hope before long that we may ask for just such an appropriation from the Federal Government.
In closing, may I saw there are many aspects of this question that are beyond our scope to deal with today. in my estimation, the placing of information in the hands of qualified persons and permitting them to give out such information would be very beneficial. I would like to see such information given out, regardless of whether there is overpopulation or underpopulation; regardless of whether there is a high birth rate or a low birth rate; regardless of whether there is going to be more or less baby carriages or baby bottles sold.
Regardless of all these commercial and material interests, I would like to see the mothers themselves receive consideration, and we must trust the mother that she is, going to use that advice, not only for the benefit of her child and her family but for the benefit of the community and the country. I believe that we should consider, under the Constitution of this country, that every woman should have the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and I ask you favorable consideration of this legislation. [Applause]
Senator Logan. Thank you, Mrs. Sanger.
Mrs Sanger. Mr. Chairman, I would like to cover just one point of rebuttal and, if you will allow me, I would like to have
Mr. Chairman, there seems to be a good deal of confusion concerning this law and the amendment that is proposed. As
All the conditions our opponents claim would happen in case this bill or this amendment passes are taking place with the law as it is now and as it has been for over 60 years. All that we ask is that this amendment exempt the medical profession, hospitals, and clinics from the penalties of the law. The amendment is simple, it is comprehensive and it is in plain English, so it seems to me any one should understand it.
Now, the reason, in my estimation, that there is this confusion and all the conflict going on that none of us like to see is because there has been such confusion between the State and Federal laws. Forty-seven States allow the physician to give the contraceptive instruction for the "cure or prevention of disease;" other States do not mention the physician at all or do not mention or limit the giving of information to the physicians; and other States allow the medical colleges to instruct.
And so it varies in all of the States. In 24 States they have no restriction whatsoever. We claim that the licensed physicians, hospitals, and clinics are proper sources of information in every State, and we are trying to educate the public accordingly.
All that we are trying to do, I repeat, is to pass this amendment, which affects only the United States mails and common carriers in regard to physicians, hospital and clinics all licensed by their respective State laws. It does not affect these circulars and these things that are already in existence and that have already been forwarded through the mails. We all are opposed to these objectionable things. But one of the reasons they are circulated is because there is no control over this particular kind of literature.
No physician is going to give contraceptive advice on the telephone nor is a physician going to use the United States mails to instruct a patient. It is absurd to even think of it. What the physician is going to do, is to get through the mails and common carriers better instruction and information himself, as well as necessary supplies, which he has not been able to have because of this law. As we have shown in the hearing, medical publishers will not publish articles in medical magazines nor in books, nor will they print textbooks on contraception for the medical profession, because of this law. they will not distribute copies or circularize copies of their magazine which might get them into a row by publishing something that is against the law. The consequence is that the medical profession has not, so far, had the advantage of obtaining up-to-date contraceptive information that is freely permitted them in other countries. Not only that, we know from our experience in clinics and our studies and research that advice alone is not enough, there must be some device, either a mechanical or medical means to carry out the doctor's instruction for the patient as he prescribes.
I don't know anything else I can say about these laws. This bill will not permit information to be given indiscriminately, to make it more clear and definite. We must go back to the States and place the responsibility squarely up to the States as to the physician who misuses the law. We will have nothing to do with that. That is a matter for the physicians themselves, to control, and, as the bill states, he must be a legally licensed physician to practice medicine. Now, if the State or Territory is going to license that physician, it is supposed to find out what kind of a doctor he is, and if they give him the right to practice medicine within the proper limits of the law then certainly he should have the same right to use the mails and common carriers.
We have already put into the record the laws, so I won't discuss them in detail, but bear in mind that they have already been admitted. They have gone into the record to show exactly what the State laws are.
The confusion seems to be that because there are obscenity laws in the various States, that they must include also the prohibition on contraceptives, which is not true. We are placing the information in the hands of physicians who are licensed to practice under the State laws. I wish we could get that clear, because I think it is very much to the advantage of all to understand this point.
The other day there were a good many questions asked about the other countries. I think it might be of interest to state that there are two other countries in the world that have laws concerning or prohibiting the dissemination of birth-control literature -
The same may be said about England. Very recently there was a bill before the
Senator Hastings. I suppose it is you contention, Mrs. Sanger, that freedom in England has not destroyed the morality of the youth of the nation?
Mrs. Sanger. That is my contention. It is the same with
There are one or two points which I would like to include, among which are the following:
Here is a book that has been brought out entitled Sex Rhythm published with "ecclesiastical approbation" by the
Question. Are all Catholic doctors in agreement as to the serious physical consequence of contraception?
Answer. Very few have had the occasion to express themselves on this subject in print. Probably the majority of Catholic practicing physicians would subscribe to Dr.
And so on. I would like to include that, if I may. It says:
"Hence, however great our forebodings as to the physical evils which may be associated with birth-control practices, we cannot decently initiate an active medical campaign against them, and remain inactive and silent where a much greater evil obtains."
Then, under the heading of procreation in the same book it says:
"Question. Are married people obliged to bring into the world all the children they can?
Answer. Far from being of obligation, such a course may be utterly indefensible. Broadly speaking, married couples have not the right to bring into the world children whom they are unable to support, for they would thereby inflict a grievous damage upon society."
I would also like to include that.
I would also like to present a statement by Dr.
Senator Neely. You may do that; you may put them all in.
[The statement by Leo Wolman was omitted by the MSPP editors.]
Senator Neely. Your time is getting short; 15 minutes has gone.
Mrs. Sanger. I have 20 minutes?
Senator Neely. Yes; but you have used 16 minutes now.
Mrs. Sanger. I only have a little more.
Here is a ruling from the Post Office Department for a booklet called Contraceptive Practices addressed to
Mrs. Sanger. Thank you very much. Those are some of the various statements [handing papers to Senator Neely].
The patient is a white woman in late middle life who gives her age as 43, though her physical characteristics are those of a woman at least 10 years older. She states that she hs given birth to 12 children and has had two miscarriages.
I find it goes on to tell the condition of this woman, and the doctor says:
"I have seldom seen such a deplorable pelvic condition in any woman. Unquestionably it is due to her too-frequent bearing of children."
Mrs. Guthrie must be, without delay, subjected to extensive pelvic surgery. Above all things her precancerous condition must be remedied at once. In addition to her rectocele should be repaired, her uterine support reestablished, and a surgical sterilization should be performed in order that the bearing of more children may not undo this extensive work of surgical repair.
Here is a woman who came here to testify on behalf of the other miners' wives, and she was found to be in such a deplorable state of condition. We have a letter from this woman today, who pleads for the support of this bill, and concludes her letter as follows:
As the mother of 12 children I will have to close and get ready to go to the hospital, asking the prayers of every religious person. As I believe in
Mrs. L. R. GUTHRIE"
Father Ryan stated:
"I call attention to the obvious fact that unemployment and depression could not be attained to any appreciable extent through birth-control practices for 15 or 20 years."
He overlooks the factors of human distress and mental anguish of millions of mothers living in constant fear of pregnancy, which could be immediately removed by the passage of this bill. Furthermore, families who are at present on the relief rolls of this country, of which there are approximately 4,000,000 today, and those now on the border line, who would be placed on relief if another child were born into that family, could secure immediate relief, if able to go to public-health care clinics and secure information to limit the size of the family during this period of depression and unemployment.
To quote further from the book Rhythm, by
"Burdens that test human endurance to the utmost limit and to which all too many succumb will be lightened. I speak of economic burdens, the burden of poverty, of inadequate income, of unemployment which make it impossible for parents to give their children and themselves the food, the clothing, the housing, the education, and the recreation they are entitled to as children of God."
Father Ryan says:
Every well-informed person is aware that the change in the Penal Code proposed by this bill would not substantially increase the knowledge or the use of birth control by any class of the population. Prof.
I quote the passage referred to:
"I do not believe that keeping the laws as they are will have any appreciable effect in preventing the decline of the birthrate. * * * I regard contraception as one of those great movements toward human freedom and the rationalization of life. * * * If the Members of Congress could only be made to feel the inevitability of this great movement toward human freedom they would certainly not oppose it."
Obviously there is nothing in Professor Thompson's statement to warrant Father Ryan's assumption.
When Father Ryan stated that there was a decline in the birth rate from 1921 to 1932 he failed to mention that during these very years the population increased nearly 20 million in the United States. As the population grows larger, the rate of increase must slow down. This has been true for the last 100 years. He should take into consideration the decrease in the general death rate and the infant-mortality rate, lessening human suffering and waste of human life.
Father Ryan challenged the statement that the general practice of birth control would stimulate the birth rate in the educated classes. We reply, it has been shown in the cities of northern and western Europe that the democratic practice of birth control has stimulated the birth rate of the educated classes, and they are now having more children per family than the poorer classes (
Father Ryan criticized our criticism of
Yes, we do contend that self-respecting people "poor" or "near poor" prefer to help themselves and keep free from public or private charity, by bringing into the world only the number of children they can decently provide for. The practice of birth control through the passage of S. 1842 will enable such families to live normal sex lives. It will make possible the natural relations of family life by bringing a family of 10 or 15 children to become a public charge on the community often becoming inmates of prisons, insane asylums, almshouses, or public institutions.
When Father Ryan claims that a change in the law now would be tantamount to a public declaration that the long-established legal attitude and policy were wrong, he made the weakest point in his long chain of weak arguments. We believe that it was never right to couple contraception with abortion, indecency, and obscenity. Congress made that blunder 60 years ago. It will amend this law as it repealed the eighteenth amendment, when public opinion demanded it.
Finally, Dr. Ryan says:
"We oppose any change in the law which we believe and know to be intrinsically and profoundly immoral--the natural law which forbids contraception."
To what law does he refer? It is a natural law for man to use his reason, his intelligence, and "inborn" intuitive faculties, drawn from Nature herself. It is natural to desire children. It is natural to desire only the number of children one can decently provide for. It is also natural for people endowed with a sense of responsibility for their children to use their natural intelligence to apply scientific knowledge to their problems, for the welfare of their children, the community, and the country as a whole. Intelligence is a part of nature as well as the animal function of reproduction.
She stated that she had borne four children in 6 years. For 20 years she has had an ophthalmic goitre, and has had no further pregnancies, her physician having advised her how to avoid further childbearing. How selfish and hypocritical to oppose the granting of similar information to other mothers. Mrs. Gibbs is fortunate to live in
Canon Chase infers the
If there is a good moral reason why the way of abstinence should not be followed, we cannot condemn the use of scientific methods to prevent conception * * *
First, it will give the doctors, hospitals, clinics, dispensaries, public, State, and county health agencies the right to order and receive, through the mails and common carriers, the articles needed to protect the health of these women who need such protection.
It will place the giving of this information in the hands of qualified persons who will be responsible for its dissemination.
The opponents did not refute nor can they refute the scientific facts, medical and economic, as presented by the proponents of this bill. They did not deny that maternal health is jeopardized by too many births; that abortions are the result of too frequent pregnancies,; that physicians should have the legal right to give contraceptive advice when necessary.
They admit that 47 States allow the dissemination of contraceptive information.
They admit that the laws as they stand today are violated on a wholesale scale.
They admit that the whole subject is out of control of the law, contraceptive articles being scattered promiscuously, regardless of their need or proper use.
On all major facts we are in agreement.
To the proponents it is a question of national health, economic responsibility, and individual liberty.
The opponents have thus far not produced a distinguished scientist, either economist or sociologist, eugenicist, or population authority, at any of these hearings, nor have they had representatives of any non-Catholic organizations, except Mr. Ralph Burton, their chairman.
While non-Catholic individuals have opposed this bill, they each and every one have proclaimed they represented no organization. Mrs. Rufus Gibbs; Dr.
We could respect and understand, though profoundly disagree with, our opponents, if they came here and said:
This is our conception of morality. It is our religious belief that birth control is wrong. We cannot concede to any interference with the laws of Nature and we prefer slums, overcrowding, disease, filth, maternal, and infant mortality, child labor, prostitution, illiteracy, unemployment, crime, imbecility, national decadence, and wars to any change in these laws--
But we cannot respect the attitude, the loose thinking, and the hypocrisy of those who oppose birth-control practices and offer no practice alternative to take its place.
They base their entire case on Catholic morality, and would impose this upon the American people, which is an arrogant assumption of authority.
I wonder if Dr. Wilson would tell us something of the medical conditions, or the consequences.
[Statement of Dr. Prentiss Wilson, M.D. was excluded and not transcribed]
Mrs. Sanger. Dr. Cattell mentioned in his letter the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, as to their stand on birth control. Here is a pamphlet that was brought out by the Committee on Marriage and
Senator Neely. If it is in the record, we will not duplicate it. It apparently seems to have been lost. Is that all, Mrs. Sanger?
Mrs. Sanger. Yes.
While the Federal Government will give you a truck load of information on how to raise pigs and chickens, they will give you give years in Atlanta and a fine of $5,000 if you even tell anybody, through the mail, about birth control clinics operating legally in Virginia, Mrs. Margaret Sanger, founder of the modern birth control movement, told a large audience here last night in protesting against what she said was discrimination against mothers and children.
Because more than 1,600 Richmanders came early to the Egyptian Building of the Medical College, for the lecture, the meeting had to be moved to the old First Baptist Church at Broad and Twelfth Street.
Mrs. Sanger set forth many arguments why birth control information should be made readily accessible, but gave no information on how to accomplish such control. Dr. Fred Wampler of the Medical College of Virginia presided and presented the speaker.
Summarizing the case, Mrs. Sanger gave seven reasons why birth controlshould be practiced. They were: 1. By parents who have transmittable disease. 2. In cases of women who have tuberculosis, heart disease or some temporary ailment. 3. Where parents, though normal themselves apparently, already have brought into abnormal and defective children. 4. Adolescents. Early marriage, she said, was desirable, but the young should not become parents. The girls should be 22 year sold, the boys 23 for complete development. 5. For the purpose of spacing children so there will be two or three years between births. 6. The economic side of the question; the father’s earning power. It is unfair, she argued, for parents to have children they can do nothing for or for older children to have to stunt their youth working to feed their brothers and sisters, “their parents’ children.” 7. What she said was the necessity for young people after marriage to postpone at least two years after marriage the having of any children because they need the time for mental and spiritual adjustment. Premature parents, she said, found it harder in modern times to get along. Therefore contraceptive information should be available to young married people because individuals should be able to say what size their families should be.
Birth control, Mrs. Sanger said, can be accomplished in three ways, one, continence or celibacy, the method approved by the Catholic Church. This method, however, should not be forced on most people as religious dogma, particularly, she said, because psychiatrists have found continence was not good for most people. The second method was through sterilization by radium or x-ray, a method approved by Virginia and thirteen other States for epileptics and other persons who would transmit their physical and mental handicaps to children.
The third was by chemical or mechanical contraceptives, the description of which now is classed by Federal law as “obscenity.”
She stressed the advantages of small families–-the longer school terms possible; better nourishment, and lessovercrowding, low wages and unemployables. Birth control information, she found was generally denied the poor even when accessible to more prosperous people.
“No matter what laws we may make or what we may do, there will always be some kind of child labor in large families,” she said, telling of 3-year-olds seen in Colorado and California beet fields.
Only Chile has a worse maternal mortality rate than this country, although in 1929 we spent nine billions on maternal and child health. About 22,000 mothers a year die of preventable causes usually resulting from pregnancy and more than 200,000 infants die as a result of poverty and neglect.
She quoted studies by the Children's Bureau in Washington which found fathers' wages and spacing between children potent factors in the matter of survival of childrn. The second born has a better chnce than the fifth in a family and 60 percent of twelth children everywhere are doomed at birth.
The Hoover child health conference reported ten million handicapped, six million at least partly due to undernourishment.
"They will not attack the problem at the root,” she said. "Children should have passports to give every child a sound body and mind. Our immigration laws forbid idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, psychopathic and insane or diseased persons, prostitutes and so on. Why should the same types come in through the birthrate?"
Discussing the larger view of population control she quoted John Maynard Keynes, the English economist, the the effect that there can be no peace without such control and explained her belief that Japan's warlike gestures and conquest of Manchuria are die to the fact that she has 85,000,000 population in a territory smaller than California. Italy she found faced with somewhat the same problem.
A portion of this draft appears in "Woman of the Future," but no published version was found.
[Notes on Sexuality and Feminism]
It is strange though true that the woman’s movement for emancipation has kept itselfapart from any cause which advocated sex reform, sex hygiene, or even birth control. For it is just that difference of sex--the fact that the biological burden of childbearingrests on her--that is mainly the cause of less efficiency in woman andconsequently her unequal position in society.
We have to recognize that there are two sexes, man and woman. Both lead a separate and different sexual life. But the importance of the functions that fall to each arebasically different, and woman’s inequality are is based solely on the biological task ofchildbearing. Consequently, until that function is under her complete control she can never hope to accomplish equal rights with man. The woman who is constantly in the condition of pregnancy, or who is submerged in fears of pregnancy can never be equal in economic or social efficiency to man. Even with great exceptions of wealth and care, she can not keep step with him under these conditions. Therefore, the foundation of the Feminist or Woman’s Movement should be how to augment the efficiency of woman, how to release her sexual bondage of child-bearing and place it on the plane of a voluntary and conscious undertaking in order to be approximately equal to man. Upon this foundation only she can strive for equal rights. Are there any women anywhere in political life with large families? No! Nor in industrial or commercial or professional leadership. Iti s only because they have had child-bearing in complete control that they have been able to rise to any heights in modern life.
The leading women in the Feminist Movement, while accepting the practice of birth control for themselves, have been adept in cloistering the views which their ecclesiastical fathers handed down to them, thus that virginity or motherhood were the only two states of respectable womanhood. Sex as such was akin to sin, shame, and only the bearing of a child sanctioned its expression. With such ideas the Feminists should have parted at the beginning, and it has been left tosuch men as Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, August Forel, Krafft-Ebing and others, including the newer school of psychoanalysts--Freud, Jung and Adler (all men)--to awaken and arouse the public interest in the beauty and power and magnitude of sex, and to dissociate it from indecency, obscenity and pornography. All through the ages, in Religion, Politics, Education and Social Institutions, it was woman’s place and honor (her destiny) to serve and to suffer. The same hindrance to full intellectual development was her sexual inequality.
The whole field of Sex Psychology is forging ahead hand in hand with other advanced ideas. A newly awakened interest was ushered in about the time of the radio, the airplane, discovery of the atom and radium. It links itself up with a higher phase of consciousness, and will, in the opinion of many advanced students of occult phenomena, be the ladder by which the human race will advance and evolve.
There are many links to the chain, many spokes to the wheel, but I think it reasonable and sound to insist that proper instruction in methods of birth control be of the first consideration in any plan or program; enlightened opinion on sex instinct; an understanding attitude in regard to sex self-discipline; the ennoblement of love based on sexual attraction and communion; the rightness to apply scientific knowledge and contraceptive methods to life’s experience in her long march to Perfection.
The question of abstinence is one on which opinions differ, and I consider it important to review this aspect of the question as briefly as time will allow:
First, the day has passed to consider that the sexual urge has procreation as its primary purpose. Rather is this the result and not the purpose of the urge. It is difficult to find any man or woman who thinks of desire for offspring or race preservation at the time sex desire is at work. The whole moving force of the sex urge is consciously for Oneness--for union, for satisfaction, and fornothing else. This frank and scientific attitude must be faced and accepted before we can go forward in any attempt to evaluate sex behavior.
The sexual instinct is universal in animals and man. It is one of the basic requirements of man’s nature. In the lower stages of man’s development it surges alone, while in his higher evolution it motivates the mating instinct or urge. With his tendency toward courtship, marriage, parental care and affection, it moves into still higher realms of love. Love, according to Ellis, is a new phase of sexual development.
I do not regard child-bearing and rearing as the end and aim of woman’s existence. Nor do I consider the first duty of the married couple to be the perpetuation of the species. In fact, in many cases I regard it as man’s patriotic duty to refrain from such a crime against posterity.
Plato is said to have observed that “the second coming of Christ is rightly symbolized by a Cross”--the eternal bi-une sex principle in action. The Christian Church has taught that sex is a physical function only, thereby keeping the race from seeking the higher areas of spiritual consciousness. Lack of physical vitality has erroneously been estimated as spirituality, ignorance asinnocence, restraint as chastity, until the very word “spiritual” makes a normal, healthy person reject (shudder).
People have been and are as ignorant and confused about the subject of Sex as they are of God. We must clarify the former in order to understand the latter. Civilization cannot rise to its highest possibilities while the mental attitude toward the basic function of life is one of shame or sin.
The history of marriage reveals a long drawn out life of tragedy, of misunderstanding of the spiritual function of sex. Many persons today are advancing the physiological and hygienic side of the sex subject. This is a good foundation. It is for those who know the value of Sex as a Creative Principle to help carry on, to help the world realize the importance of sex as the basis of regeneration upon which the kingdom of love shall be founded.
Our civilization is founded on the suppression and sublimation of the sex instinct. This foundation is basically wrong, and often results in mental disease. The building up of a new civilization on radically different principles, would lead us to real mental health.
“Every form of religious worship from prehistoric time down to and inclusive of the present century, among all races, savage and civilized, has been founded upon Sex--the inevitable, the unviolable, the unescapable and the unfathomable mystery of Creation.” (by Ali Nomad)
Age after age has shown woman taken from her lofty heights, where she was referred to as a Creative Deity--Giver of Life--Divine Mother--and placed on the level of the nurse-maid, permitted to care for man’s offspring--allowed to compete with his animals as pack-horse.
A summary of an interview Sanger gave before speaking at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.
Present economic conditions and unemployment coupled with the fact that the loss of private fortunes will throw the major burden of philanthropic work on county, state and federal governments, will make birth control clinics throughout thecountry a necessity, believes Mrs. Margaret Sanger, pioneer birth control advocate, who arrived in Richmond earlier today to give a public lecture in the Egyptian building of the medical college tonight.
“It will not be long,” said Mrs. Sanger, “before federal and state governments will come face to face not only with the waste of life caused by the fact that birth control information is not legalized, but by the increasing burden on the taxpayer to maintain the unfortunate and often malformed children which are the result of lack of information on the subject.
"Virginia, which is one of the most progressive states in the Union in her wonderful eugenic laws, and which has accomplished a remarkable achievement in increasing her birthrate while decreasing the death rate, will undoubtedly I believe shortly establish birth control clinics in her borders.”
The slender, auburn-haired, grey-eyed little woman with the soft voice, to whom birth control is "like a religion" for which she sacrificed a famiy and friends in the early days of her campaign when the subject was taboo, has at last lived to see the day when "public sentiment is overwhelmingly in favor of it," she said.
"Only one state in the Union, Mississippi, will not legally allow a physician to give out information onthe subject," she declared. “All the other states have some leeway in the matter.”
"The great need is for the federal birth control laws to be so amended that information may be sent through the mails or sent bypublic carriers,” she declared.
At present birth control information is undoubtedly widely disseminated throughout the country, and there are more than 135 legally established clinics. However, all the literature and supplies are literally “bootlegged” into the states under existing federal laws.
“Birth control belongs with science, preventive medicine, public relief and public health work. It should be treated with dignity andtaken out of the class of things which is practiced only surreptitiously,” she announced.
“Where clinics have been established, prosperity has increased, the death rate, particularly as regards infant mortality, has been cut, and general conditions have been bettered.”
Mrs. Sanger said that she was much surprised to read in yesterday's News Leader of the attempt of the Catholic Layman's League to prevent her talk here.
“The Catholics block our plans wherever they can,” she said. “However in places where public sentiment is firmly established they can do little. Moreover sentiment among Catholic women I find is changing in favor of birth control, and many individuals in the church are seeking information on the subject.”
The action of the Virginia Federation of Labor, Mrs. Sanger pronounced one of the most progressive things they could have done.