Sanger made the following remarks during the session on the "Differential Birth Rate" at the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference in New York City. Papers read at that session include: Francis B. Sumner's"Is Voluntary Birth Control of the Human Population an Idle Dream?" Walter Wilcox, "Decreasing the Birth Rate in the United States," Ellsworth Huntington, "The Effect of Overpopulation on Chinese Character," Malcolm Bissell, "Some Neglected Aspects of the Population Problem," J.O.P. Bland,, "Race Suicide Fallacy," and Binnie Dunlop, "Small Families and Willing Work.". For the text of these papers, see Library of Congress Microfilm LCM 122:105.
CHAIRMAN PEARL: If there is no further discussion, I would like to ask Mrs. Sanger to say a few words. (Applause)
MRS. SANGER: I would just like to make a point on Prof. Sumner's paper. He spoke of the Catholics. I want to say that our information from our Clinical Research Department shows that as far as the desire to have information to restrict or control the family runs at 33 per cent of the people who come to us are Protestants and 32 per cent Catholics, 31 per cent Jewish. So it seems to me that there is not quite the fear of alarm; that these women have just the same desires, the same economic standards that they want to uphold in the Catholic families as the Jewish and Protestant.
I think as we have our facts there that it will dissolve any theory that the Catholics are going to out-number the others, if they so desire and will restrict their families in the face of opposition and in face of the laws that are here. It seems to me when we get to them the freedom we are trying to get, especially the restrictions out of the way, there will be absolutely no reason why they should not go along even better than they are.
There was also a point raised about the Federal and State Laws. I want to point out that the reason the American Birth Control League has not gone in for Federal Legislation is because of our experience and our knowledge of the facts. The question of practical contraception still is in the almost experimental state and we believe we can get far better results if we confine our work to state restrictions, or rather state legislatures, where we will have the benefit of the doctor or the members of the medical profession in personal contact in giving personal advice to the individual. We believe that the medical profession should give the proper information, and that the average physician would not use the mails to prescribe to a patient. We believe that personal contact and personal instruction is going to give us far better results than the best kind of a book that could be written.
We know both sides. We know pamphlets have been written. There was one out some years ago. I have never felt, even with thousands of them, that they were going to be as effective as the individual instruction to the woman herself. The more we get on with this work in our Research Department, we are positive that is the right attitude.
Many of these women we are trying to reach cannot read at all. We know to follow even the plainest sort of instructions that it would be difficult for her. She comes to us and she is tired, and she is weary, and she can’t understand what she reads, and we can instruct her and examine her, as our physician does, and teach her. It only takes a few minutes for her to learn what to do, while a whole book could be written and she would not know what to do. We contend we are going to get better results by having personal instruction.
There is no question but what the Federal Law needs to be changed. We certainly come up against it when we want scientific information. Still, I think the laws we want changed in the Federal way need to go along consistently with the policy of the American Birth Control League. We think they should be changed at the present for the medical profession.
On the other hand people say, “What are you bothering about the medical profession for when they don’t stand for you?” The principle is the same and we are going to fight for it. We say we are going to make the public clamor at the doors of the medical profession until they take up this work and do it for us. (Applause)
Sanger introduced Owen Lovejoy at the Sixth Anniversary dinner for the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, held at New York's Plaza Hotel. Related documents are her Opening Remarks and her introductions for Henry Pratt Fairchild and Frank Hankins. For another version see LCM 129:750. Handwritten corrections by Sanger.
The Many critics of the Birth Control movement have failed to recognize how closely the well-being of children is related upon to the well-being and happiness of their mothers. To protect the children we must also protect the Mothers. It is now my great honor to introduce a man who has fought long and bravely for the rights of American children born in America to be free, and who has the insight and the courage to recognize that their first inalienable right is the right to be well-born. It is my pleasure to introduce and the leader in the long fight against Child Labor--Mr. Owen Lovejoy.
Handwritten at bottom half of page
Thousands of women have already been grievously wounded in the battle of life-- Emergency measures are all they ask--& all they are allowed to receive. Week after week, day after day & hour after hour they come to us, appealing & praying for help. Some of them come looking furtively about, hesitant wondering how they shall be received.
They have run the gauntlet of various organizations & been denied the information they sought.
They come to us troubled, inarticulate, like doomed souls crushed beneath the force of a cruelly prolific nation.
These are the Martyrized Mothers of America. They ask for help--for the right to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness.
Temple of Motherhood.
Sanger released a statement and sent a telegram to President Calvin Coolidge from the Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference held in New York City.
President Coolidge has been appealed to by the Birth Control League through its President, Mrs. Margaret Sanger, to appoint a commission to study the question and formulate recommendations. Medical societies, as well as the American Medical Association, were called upon at a meeting of about 1,000 physicians to inaugurate a movement in all the States to promote contraceptive methods.
Announcement of the plans were made yesterday at the Sixth international Neo-Malthusiasm and Birth Control Conference, in progress in the Hotel McAlpin since Tuesday.
So many physicians sought to attend that an overflow meeting was held at the Waldorf.
The resolution adopted is as follows:
"That this meeting on contraception, consisting of members of the American medical profession, affirms that birth control, being a very important and complicated problem requiring scientific study and guidance, comes properly within the province of preventive medicine, and that the subject should not only be given a place on the program of county and State societies and of the American Medical Association but also become a part of the work of suitable clinics, hospitals and other medically supervised organizations engaged in the scientific study and prevention of disease and crime."
Mrs. Sanger, in her telegram to the President, said:
"It is imperative, Mr. President, that as a Nation the United States must meet this problem of an uncontrolled birth rate. As an American citizen, I respectfully suggest that you, as Chief Executive of the United States of America, take steps toward the formation of a Federal Birth Rate Commission."
"I suggest that this commission be composed of impartial scientists drawn from the fields of economics, biology, sociology, genetics, medicine and philanthropy, and should have free access to all facts and statistics to all customs and conditions now menacing the racial health and economic well-being of our country."
"The formation of such a commission would, I am sure, win for you the eternal gratitude of all American citizens who carry in their hearts a deep and disinterested love for this country and concern for its future. I believe that all patriotic American citizens, including yourself, Mr. President, must agree with me that our Chief Executive can not willingly or consciously evade problems, upon a solution of which depends the fulfillment of our high destiny in the creation of the future."
No lay delegates were admitted yesterday to the contraceptive conference, not even Mrs. Sanger. Among the doctors were seventy women. Dr. John B. Solley jr. presided at the regular meeting in the McAlpin, while Dr. John C. Vaughan was the Chairman in the Waldorf.
Dr. James F. Cooper, medical director of the clinical research department of the American Birth Control League; Dr. Aletta Jacobs of The Hague, who established the first birth control clinic in Holland; Dr. Norman Haire of England and Dr. Hannah M. Stone addressed both meetings.
This is the final article in a five-part series. For parts I to III see July 1923, Aug. 1923, and Sept. 1923.
Bound up with this illuminating and suggestive idea of joy and sorrow as the natural guides to the understanding of health and disease, is Drysdale's inspiring yet thoroughly well based comprehension of woman's nature and needs. His feminism is not based upon sentimental chivalry or romantic ardor. His defense of women is the logical outgrowth of his penetrating understanding of sexual science and human nature. Just as the age-long ignorance and stupidity concerning sex have held men's minds in bondage and subjected their bodies to pain and disease, so their waste of the great creative power of women has hindered their own mental and physical development. Mankind, wrote Drysdale, can never have a comprehensive view of any subject until the mind of woman, equally with that of man, has been brought to bear upon it. He foresaw the danger of attempts to lessen or minimize constitutional differences in men and women. The two sexes have different points of view, different thoughts, feeling and modes of judgement; and no theory of life, nor of any part of it, it was his contention, can be complete until the distinct views of each have been formed on it, and mutually compared. In enslaving and degrading woman, in limiting her sphere of activity, men in ages past just as surely enslaved and degraded themselves. Freedom, for Drysdale, is its own reward; and if men could only be brought to realize how much they would benefit by freeing women from ancient bondage, there could be no opposition to political, economic and psychological emancipation. " No religion, no moral or physical code, proposed by one sex for the other," Drysdale wrote, "can be really suitable; it must work out its laws for itself in every department of life." Much of our contemporary propaganda defeats itself or remains purely superficial, because it confines its activity to methods devised by men. Women, as Drysdale says, must work out the laws of their own nature in every department of life. Women continue to regard themselves and the universe through men's eyes, Drysdale pointed out. They have developed their own natures most imperfectly. The great need is for them to discover their own moral, intellectual and physical relations to all parts of nature. While there is no subject which man has conceived or shall conceive and pursue that shall not be open to woman, nevertheless into all these fields she must bring her own individual and feminine power. "Innocence, purity, chastity, delicacy–-let us rather read, ignorance, morbidity, disease and misery! How long shall these symbols of moral character hang about the neck of woman?"
Drysdale's vision of the new woman, the creature of a new and healthy race, was first of all as person in the deepest sense of this word, and individual of dignity, liberty and independence; and, as such, equal companion both of men and of children. He protested as vigorously as anyone who has since written or thought on the subject, against the terrific waste of women's lives and energy. Generations of women enslaved by education and tradition, by the crippling idea of chastity and female decorum which bound them like a chain wherever they moved, and prevented them from daring to think, feel or act freely or impulsively! "She must not do this. She must not study that. She has nothing to do with a knowledge of her own frame or its laws. She must not read the works nor acquire the knowledge that is open to men. She must not sport, not play boisterously, nor go out unattended, nor in the evening walk along the street, nor travel alone, nor make use of a thousand and one privileges which are open to the more fortunate sex." Customs have surely changed in the sixty-six years since these words were written; yet in the deepest, most important phases of women's lives, women have not yet attained the essential and all-important freedom. Drysdale at least saw that no true feminine morality could be based on an existence spent in hiding from the inevitable–which, in spite of convention, meets us at every step through life. By their enslavement to man-made conventions, he saw sorrow and mental disease blighting the young women of his time. Of the slow, wasting tortures endured for centuries by humanity there was none more painful for George Drysdale to contemplate than those endured by generation after generation of women.
He saw everywhere the same poignant tragedy; everywhere happy young girls, full of life and hope, entering womanhood–-and year after year condemned to an aimless existence without any outlet for the expression of their passions and affections. He saw their natural beauty and enjoyment of life in innumerable cases droop and fade, replaced by uneasy, discontented and unnatural restraint. He saw fretfulness and capriciousness take the place of buoyancy and health. He saw hysteria and all the gloomy train of sexual disease claim these women as their prey. He saw their short-lived dream of romance and poetic love converted into the dull reality of a monotonous and unhappy existence. He saw the iron of their invisible chains eat into their very souls.
He saw women doomed to the futile attempt of animating and making real the meaningless "virtues" imposed upon them by men, when they should have been filling their birthright of expression and creation. He wanted to substitute for this shadowy sentimentality and other-worldliness "a healthy and happy worldliness." "Here is the scene of all our human joys and sorrows, our real trials and triumphs," he was led to exclaim, "not for women only, but for all of us is Mother Earth our paradise, our everlasting abode, our heaven and our infinity! It is not by leaving it and our real humanity behind us and sighing to be anything but what we are that we can become ennobled or immortal. Is this our gratitude for all that has been done for us, for the grandeur and sublimity with which our life is surrounded?"
"We cannot be happy," Drysdale cried to the men of his time, "unless women be happy, and it is impossible for women to be so if they cannot study and reverence their relation to all the rest of nature."
The great thing for women, as well as for men, to realize was, according to this Victorian heretic, that nothing can come to us from another. Everything we have we must owe to ourselves. Our own spirit must vitalize it. Our own heart must feel it. We are not passive machines–-women any more than men–-who can be lectured, guided, molded this way or that. We are living beings with will, joys and comprehension to be exercised for ourselves at every step in life.
All the sciences, all the arts, wait at present woman's hand and thought to give them new life and impulses, and none solicits her attention more imperatively than medicine. We are just beginning to realize the deeper truth of this statement of Drysdale's. But he did not, we must emphasize, believe that woman's freedom, physical as well as mental, could ever be attained merely by political action, by the exercise of suffrage, or any of the other steps that have since been publicly taken. Women, he knew, must awaken themselves, must voice and create new demands and new interests. He saw that after the first flame of self-reliance and independence had been kindled by her intense feelings there usually ensued a period of doubt. Irresolution, long passive habits, and traditional attendance upon the opinions of others usually reassert themselves after a short and agonizing struggle. Even the woman who has asserted her freedom often falls back into the accustomed beaten tracks, and her noble aspirations for the unknown and untried are dissolved like melting vapor. Man has been for ages shaping his model of the female, physically and psychically, dwelling upon and endeavoring to elevate and perfect this ideal, as it appeared to him, instead of permitting woman to develop and express her own inherent nature.
Just as we can only arrive at a true and complete understanding of our psychic nature through a complete understanding of sex in its most unpleasant as well as its sublimest forms, so woman can only attain complete understanding of herself by facing the realities of life. Drysdale thought that the study of medicine would be of the greatest advantage to women. The mysteries of the body with its thorough study of its decays, its putrescences, all of these subjects from which woman's uncultivated imagination had hitherto shrunk in alarm or disgust, would be, he realized, with great spiritual insight, the surest and most complete way to break down the wall of restraint and inhibition which had bound her.
Woman must learn to shrink from nothing and from no human being; she must learn to regard all with love and reverence, totally irrespective of their actions, for in this consists the true character of the physician of the soul or the body–-not to hate and reproach any, but to love and succor all.
Many of Drysdale's ideals are already well on the road to becoming realities. He was one of the earliest Victorians to protest against the system of education which prevailed in those days for girls, and which was derided, as we know, by most of the great novelists. He knew that this educational system must be scrapped. The first essential, he thought, for girls and young women was that their bodies should be strengthened, just as those of boys and young men, by active sports and exercises such as all young people delight in. "They should be taught that physical strength, courage and blooming health are as excellent and desirable in women as in men, and they should learn to take as much pride in the physical as in the mental virtues. It is not for themselves alone that they love their bodily powers, but for their future offspring also. Pale and sickly mothers beget pale and sickly children." He protested against the ignorance and spurious delicacy artificially created and fostered in women, and which necessitated the same deplorable qualities in men. Freedom is the dynamic motive in everything that Drysdale advocates, and he comes back again and again to the necessity for absolute freedom in the discussion of sex. Woman, he emphasized, must be able to discuss the great central facts of life equally with man, because to her they are more essential than any other. It is imperative that woman's point of view must be considered more predominantly than man's. If girls are thus trained, in possession of a powerful and healthy frame, a healthy mind invigorated by sound knowledge for their guidance in life, they will enter upon womanhood with the fairest prospect of happiness, development and self-expression.
It is not necessary to interpret Drysdale's championship of Birth Control and neo-Malthusianism, except in so far as he reveals it as a method of individual physical and psychic emancipation. This phase of his work is full of suggestion and anticipates our modern point of view, but throughout the nineteenth century, beginning with Malthus and John Stuart Mill, men and women were thoroughly in the habit, in dealing with this subject, of thinking and speaking in the terms of politics and economics. They spoke of the "population" question that stemmed from Malthus and the Malthusian doctrine; and whatever interest they had in individual and feminine emancipation was rather with the object of making the Malthusian theory workable and adaptable than of approaching the idea of Birth Control from the point of view of inherent human needs and deep-rooted desire.
Drysdale himself was perhaps not thoroughly conscious of the immense advance he himself had made over his predecessors and contemporaries; yet throughout his book there is ample evidence that he realized the futility of purely political action or even economic and industrial action in preventing and curing widespread poverty. He fully realized the futility of organized charities or the Christian virtues in meeting this growing and complex problem of the human race. It is useless to narcotize any others with the opiate of Christian resignation. We cannot dissolve the realities of human misery, and steep ourselves in emotional idealism–-"we may form wild dreams of socialism, universal brotherhood, red republics or inexplicable revolutions. We may struggle and murder each other; we may persecute and despise those whose sexual necessities force them to break through our unnatural moral codes. . . we may break our own and our neighbors' hearts against the adamantine laws that warn us, but not one step, not one, shall we advance till we acknowledge these laws, and adopt the only possible mode in which they can be obeyed."
Drysdale foresaw the danger of the proletariat's attempt to shift the blame of its own distress to its environment or to the external industrial structure. He saw that it is useless to blame the low rate of wages, to accuse the community for its tardy and scanty assistance, to decry the avarice of the rich, and, in short, to get into the injurious habit of looking upon itself and its too numerous family as the victims of external circumstances. In this way, as Drysdale realized, the working man develops an unhealthy and debilitating spirit. "The last person he would think of accusing is himself, on whom, in fact, the principal blame rests, principally because in bringing a too numerous family into the world he is following the advice given by the very people he holds responsible for his miseries."
Drysdale foresaw as keenly as most advanced thinkers today that political efforts, however firmly based they might be upon social idealism, are inevitably foredoomed to failure if they seek to realize themselves in a milieu of over-population and fluctuating masses of humanity. It is because of this, he pointed out, that free governments tend constantly to their own destruction, that so many efforts in the cause of freedom have failed, and that almost every revolution, after a long and bloody struggle, has ended in military despotism. When an established government has been destroyed and a new political constitution has been set in operation, the poor, finding their evils unabated, turn their resentment against the new conquerors of political power. Political remedies, according to this point of view, have too often been based upon a short-sighted optimism, upon the belief that there is some self-adjusting power in nature or some merciful guiding providence by which human ills all work for good, and are ultimately, by the blind chance of evolution, to be overcome. There is hidden in our natures, a pernicious belief with which we console ourselves, that the human constitution will gradually undergo a change in our favor. These optimists bid us to wait helplessly till the stream of misery has flowed past us. Then we shall enter the promised millennium. We might as well expect, George Drysdale warned us, that the river will return to its source, or that the seas cover the mountain tops, as that the fundamental character of the human frame will alter. However little we may expect of human progress, our first necessity is to base our efforts upon an understanding of human instinct and human behavior, not as these express themselves under special and favorable conditions, but as the inherent and dynamic mainsprings of all human activity.
In ignoring the physiological and psychical aspects of life, socialism, he found, was not less short-sighted than other claims of progress. The socialism of this time, we should remember, confined itself to various methods of increasing the products of human industry and of equalizing distribution. But in ignoring the fundamental factor of overpopulation socialism failed to recognize that its aims were foredoomed to inevitable cancellation.
In short, the reader of the "Elements of Social Science" will discover that George Drysdale sought to justify the principle of Birth Control, not merely upon the ground of economics and politics, but essentially as a physiological and psychological necessity of the human race. This phase of his work has been forgotten or neglected; and even the defenders and exponents of family limitation continued practically until our own century to defend it solely in the terms and language of economic and political policy. Unlike most of those who preceded him and followed him, Drysdale possessed a keen perception of the fundamental fallacy of looking for advance upon the basis of any program which confined its endeavors to religious or political action or to economic and industrial panaceas.
Whatever amelioration or revolution we may expect or hope for, he has taught us that it must be based not upon propagation of any single doctrine in the political or economic field, but must be the outgrowth of the direction, the control, and the development of our deepest interests and desires.
The peculiar error of the socialists of Drysdale's time was that they attributed to the constitution of society and to competition (as politicians do to forms of government and theologians to man's original sin) the evils which really spring from unchecked and uncontrolled breeding. Socialism, as he saw it, fell into the inveterate and almost universal error of ascribing the chief ills of mankind to human institutions, instead of to uncontrolled instincts. "It urges the adoption of a complete change in our social fabric, but to what end? After all this trouble there would not be one of the great human difficulties removed."
Not that Drysdale was in any sense a pessimist or a reactionary. He was as intransigeant and as relentless a critic of society as any of the earlier or later sociologists, but he had a deeper and more widespread knowledge of human nature. He saw that all those celebrated Victorian poets, writers, statesmen, orators and moralists were themselves suffering and limited by the inhibitions of tradition. "We ask for bread and they give us a stone, for love and they give us a futile or religious shadow of it. Poetry, painting, architecture, fine writing, oratory, religion, to a world plunged in population worries are like music in the ears of a drowning man. They may dazzle our judgment and they may gild, but they cannot cheat our miseries. It is the necessaries of life; it is food, love and leisure that are at present for every human being, man or woman, necessaries; it is of little avail to talk of luxuries."
For a similar statement, see ""Statement on Japanese Trip," Aug. 9, 1952.
LONDON, Sept. 5.--
"They talk war and nothing but war in Japan."
This was the lasting impression left on the mind of Mrs. Margaret Sanger, who has returned to Europe en route for America after an extensive tour in the East under the aegis of the International Birth Control association.
Mrs. Sanger traversed the East propagating an unknown and very delicate subject and was accompanied only by her twelve-year-old son. She returns to Western civilization proud and happy with her accomplishments.
None of the old pioneers had been beset with the difficulties that have hampered the progress of Mrs. Sanger. In the first place the Japanese Consul at San Francisco, acting under instructions from Tokio, declined to grant Mrs. Sanger her vise to enter Japanese territory. Nevertheless, this did not prevent Mrs. Sanger from boarding the ship sailing from San Francisco bound for Shanghai, which was going to make Tokyo en route.
Happily aboard that ship was the Japanese delegation from America returning to Japan from the Washington conference. To Baron Kato, chief of the delegation, she made her complaint, and the latter, after consulting with M. Hani Hari, decided to listen to a speech from the plucky little American lady on the extremely delicate subject which she intended to propagate among the people of the East.
So convinced were they after the address that they immediately wirelessed their government and suggested that it should let Mrs. Sanger into its country without restriction. The reply was that it would allow her in providing she did not give any public address. She took a chance and gave the undertaking.
Then Mrs. Sanger's friends became annoyed with her, for on her arrival at Tokyo all the reporters from the whole of Japan boarded the vessel not with the intention of interviewing the returning Japanese delegation on their impressions of Washington, but to interview her on the question of birth control.
On arrival she was again warned by the authorities that she would be debarred from addressing a public meeting. Yet immediately she was asked by scores of independent societies to address their members on the subject. Naturally she complied. She was also obliged to bar the topic of birth control, but she circumvented that by renaming her subject "Population and War."
"I thought when I was able to stand up before a Japanese audience that my greatest difficulty was over, but I discovered it had just begun," said Mrs. Sanger.
"Every one of my speeches had to be interpreted item by item, and in Japanese it takes exactly four times as long as in English. Therefore a speech in English lasting exactly one hour took four hours to transpose into Japanese, and I had to stand throughout the whole translation, as it would have been discourteous had I sat down. So at the end of every lecture I was in a state of complete exhaustion."
"I found them most interested in the subject. At first they were skeptical. I had to grope my way to find what angle of the situation most appealed to them. It was different from the American."
"You know in America the American husband is just a big baby where the health of his wife is concerned, and therefore it was easy to get the sympathy of every American when it was pointed out to them that the health of their wives was impaired if they bore over three babies."
"That angle was lost on the Japs. The health of their wives was nothing to them. They were listless when I played on that point. They still have the old Eastern idea that the women are merely created for their pleasure and the reproduction of their species."
"But on the question of economics they were all agog. It is just as expensive to rear and educate a large family in Japan as it is in New York, and the matter of cost aroused the Oriental conscience to a great degree."
"Then they became most interested in the subject. They questioned me on all angles of the problem. The most delicate points they wanted discussed to the most academic degree. With me they were very frank, but never objectionable, and afterward when I convinced them that our methods neither meant the taking of life nor demanded husbandly restraint they were with me to a man."
"The result was that before I left Japan we had formed an association, with branches in every big city, and clinics were in the process before I left. In addition, I addressed a meeting of the Peers club. All who attended were from the aristocracy, and they displayed the greatest interest in the subject. Count Kara Tara presided, and at glowing terms. That was the most enjoyable lecture I delivered, because they all understood English."
"The only opposition I encountered was from the high military castes, for they still look upon the common population as so much cannon fodder, and the more Japanese bred the more lives they have to play with in the securing of military advantages."
"Everybody talks war in Japan, and everybody regards it as inevitable. The poor people hope to avoid it, but the rich and the manufacturing classes look forward to it."
"My own impression is that war cannot be avoided; the Japanese population is too crowded, and they must have an outlet. Adequate outlet at the moment is not available, and hundreds are starving through overcrowding."
"The military caste is not overlooking that opportunity to preach war in order that the Japanese Empire may be extended to accommodate their excess population. So plausible a story do they make of it that the hitherto pacifists are convinced that war is inevitable, and they are prepared for the worst."
"The military caste is cynical as to the outcome. Even if they do not conquer fresh territory, at all events they will have disposed of a good deal of their surplus population."
"Whether it can be avoided is doubtful. In the days gone by we sent out our Christian missionaries to preach the Gospel of good will, but it would have been a much more efficacious step toward peace had we a couple of generations ago sent birth control missioners, who would have convinced these Easterners that an overcrowded population means war and then to have taught them our remedy against over-population."
Portions of this article not found. This is the conclusion of Sanger's article which was part of a series on "Prudence and Purity in Sex Matters." For her other two rticles see, Aug. 23, 1919 and Oct. 4, 1919. Additional articles in the series were written by different authors.
Yes, but how about the unfit,--the mental defectives who ought most of all to avoid offspring,--would they know enough to use the knowledge if it were given to them?
The great majority of mental defectives are not in institutions, but are at large in the community. No defective can produce normal offspring. These people are therefore a serious menace to community health. Experts such as Dr. H. H. Goddard of the Vineland Training School for the Feeble Minded, have expressed the very definite opinion that large numbers of defective people are capable of understanding and acting upon contraceptive information, and that they should be taught. The institutions for feeble-mindedness and insanity are increasingly overflowing. The supply of defectives should be cut off at the source. Mere governmental economy demands this,--even if there were no other reasons. To use public funds needlessly for the care of the unfit instead of for education and opportunity for the normal is criminal stupidity.
The same reasoning applies to the vast sums given with such warm-hearted emotion by the rich to charities every year. A substantial part of charitable relief could be eliminated if the poor were taught how to avoid over-population in their own families, how not to be submerged by their mere numbers. Which is more sensible,--for the charity-givers to contribute $50,000 to our League for the repeal of the wretched laws forbidding the knowledge by which the poor can help themselves and control their own destinies,--or to spend a thousand times that amount in trying endlessly to patch up the wreckage of humanity after the misery has been needlessly produced?
Yes, but Abraham Lincoln was one of many children. Suppose his parents had practised family limitation and left him out?
True, many great men beside Lincoln have been born in large families, and likewise many great people have been born in small families. It proves nothing. Notice that we never heard anything of Abraham Lincoln's brothers and sisters, for they, not he, were the natural product of hardship and ignorance. They were the rule, he the exception.
Any country is grateful when a few great souls develop and hold ideals aloft for others to follow, but the real test of a country's greatness is whether it will provide conditions which will produce many instead of a few great souls,--whether it will increase health, education and opportunity so that the average person can be a fine specimen.
If anyone sincerely believed that poverty and hardship produced the best results, he would deliberately choose them for himself and his children. But no one does. Health, happiness and opportunity are unquestionably a benefit to humanity, otherwise we should not be justified in struggling for them.
If we look after the well-being of the average children, the Lincolns will look after themselves and there will be more of them for us to admire.
Yes, but ought not the country to encourage births now, to make up for the loss of life in the war?
The deliberate speeding up of the birth rate without regard to economic conditions and health is nothing but disastrous. All efforts of this sort have failed.
A notable instance occurred in France shortly before the war. In response to public action against the decreasing birth-rate, various rewards were offered to parents of large families and bonuses were given to those who had children in rapid succession. This did increase births, but alas! it also increased the baby death rate, so the number of survivors was less and the parents were needlessly depleted.
If the war loss of life could be replaced by an increase of births in the families of those who have remained prosperous in spite of the war, or those who have become prosperous because of the war, it might, perhaps, be a good thing. And yet, to enlarge profiteering families might not be a real asset to the country!
At any rate, to ask the mass of people to repopulate when the cost of living is still high, wages going down and unemployment increasing, is simply to invite disaster. The war-industry worker who has lost his job or the returned soldier who has not yet found his job, is not the man who ought to undertake parenthood. He will be a better "patriot" if he postpones his family till times are more propitious.
It must never be inferred that advocates of family limitation are necessarily urging small families as such. It is true that relatively few parents can give successful care to large families, but all who can ought surely to have as many as they want.
two years, it could mean ten children! So as a method of family regulation that sort of self-control is hardly useful.
If by self-control you mean entire abstinence from the marital relation, that is not considered ideal by most normal people. They do not find it conducive to health or happiness. The old idea, born of certain religious tenets, that sex relations are a concession to weakness and at best a compromise with the lower nature, is giving way to the newer idealism, fostered by some of the best sex psychologists that there is a dual function for the human sex-relation, unknown to the lower orders of life,–namely, that it is to produce children and also to increase well-being, and that both functions, under right conditions, can be superlatively fine; both are essential parts of the richness and beauty of life. Enlightened people are coming to understand that the sex impulse, instead of being a thing to be repressed and disciplined out of existence, is something which should produce invaluable reactions,-–physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
As to abstinence, please note that for two reasons, it has no place at all, in the eyes of the law. First, according to the precedent of common law, a wife is supposed to give her "services" in exchange for her "necessaries." Services are interpreted to mean household services and sex relations. If she withholds her services, it is in some states, a cause for divorce on the ground that she has "deserted" her husband. Second, abstinence is a method of preventing conception, and therefore those who advocate it are literally breaking the law, quite as much as those who advocate other methods.
The law therefore does not sanction abstinence, except among the unmarried. Oddly enough, however, there are not prosecutions of the "purists" who commend abstinence, but in view of the common law provision, they should be prosecuted,-–if the law is to be enforced.
Yes, But How About Abortion?
Contraceptive knowledge will do more than anything else to lessen the shocking number of abortions. No one can give accurate statistics as to the number of abortions, as most of them are illegal and secret, but Dr. William J. Robinson estimates that there may be a million annually in the United States. It is well known that they are fearfully frequent among the rich, who can command the services of skillful operators and have the leisure to devote to safe recovery; also that the desperate poor resort to bungling, dangerous, amateur operations with terribly fatal results. Mere preaching can not correct this appalling situation, but the perfection and simplification of contraceptive science will go farther than anything else to improve it.
Yes, but how about the Opposition of the Catholics? Don't they consider contraception as wicked as abortion?
Yes, the general influence of the church is against contraception, and on the ground that it destroys life. But there is no rule of the church against it. There is merely precedent. And many Catholics are slipping away from church influence in this particular, because they realize