[University of Chicago Liberal Club Speech Notes]

Date

1925-01-30

Spatial Coverage

Source

Margaret Sanger Microfilm Edition, Sophia Smith Collection, S70:1058

Description

Sanger used these notes for a speech at the University of Chicago Liberal Club; she also likely used for a speech at Columbia University on December 3, 1925.

Identifier

Text

There are few subjects which have so large a practical significance & at the same time cut so deeply into the foundation of social evolution as B.C.

There have been few other questions of equal importance left so long in equal obscurity, & none perhaps which can show so unequaled a leap in our social vista as B.C. has done in so brief a period of time.

Ten years ago the words were a crime.

Today Yale Divinity School, Bryn Mawr, Harvard, Columbia

The youth of today will must recover the blunders of prejudice & ignorance & keep us to face the facts of life.

B.C. has become the mark of a superior source of moral responsibility.

What is B.C.?

Conscious control of birth rate, means prevents conception of human life.

Why prevent control population birth rate.

Because civilization is confronted with two problems that of pressure of population on food supply, that of reconciling humanitarianism with race improvement.

The conscious control of the birth rate is the key to both.

Population can be controlled by increasing death rate or decreasing birth rate.

History supports the fact that death rate controlled populations. Natures method, disease, famine, pestilence war operated to settle the question.

Barbarianism, savagery, early civ--infanticide abandonment foeticide

Plato, Aristotle, Seneca} infanticide--foeticide

Middle Western Europe middle ages to end of 18 infanticide prevalent.

B.C. will wipe out practice of foeticide & infanticide as foetus, infanticide.

Natures methods can not operate--

Consequently civilization is menaced by the increasing hordes of diseased unfit.

Dr Prof Meyers statement-- 105-85.

Two groups--large family + small

Kallikak & Jukes--

8 Billion in 4 D's.

Inf. mort. 200,000

Maternal mort. 20,000