How Nature Gets Even

Date

1918-09-00

Source

Birth Control Review, Sept. 1918, p. 13
Margaret Sanger Microfilm Edition, Smith College Collections S70:800

Identifier

Text

HOW NATURE GETS EVEN

By Margaret Sanger

When you have read this page, tear it out and put it into your handbag. Show it to the next crank who denounces birth control as "criminal" or "against nature."

Out of the Queens County (New York) Penitentiary comes a startling reply to the constant question: What has Nature to say about birth control?

Natures answer is just this:

Control your birth-rate in a sane, scientific way in this generation, or in the next I will control it no less effectively, but at an untold cost of money and misery.

Look for a moment at the tragic table printed below. In it you will find summed up in cold figures the misery of several hundred lives.

Thirty-one of those lives are those of women in the Queens County penitentiary. What existence must mean to them is readily guessed by the fact that they have been in prison.

Note that by far the larger proportion of this number came from families that were too large--families denied the knowledge of birth control.

Note that the mothers of the unfortunate thirty-one gave birth to 217 children. Now note also that the thirty-one gave birth to 53 children. Of these 53, only 38 survive. Fourteen of the thirty-one women prisoners have no children.

While the mothers of the thirty-one women prisoners averaged seven children each, the prisoners themselves averaged one and a fraction.

The two generations of these thirty-one families had this choice:

They could control births in the first generation or Nature would control them in the second, while society would send at least one child of each family to the penitentiary in the process.

That is Nature's answer to the argument that birth control is "unnatural." Incidentally, the crime that society committed in preventing the overburdened mothers from avoiding their load of misery, comes home hard to that same society in the cost of taking care of the unfortunate offspring in prisons and in hospitals for the insane. That sordid fact stands out like a frightful signpost from this table: