Margaret Sanger

“ It is needless to insist how intimately that secondary end of marriage is bound up with the practice of birth control. Without birth control, indeed, it could frequently have no existence at all, and even at the best seldom be free from disconcerting possibilities fatal to its very essence. Against these disconcerting possibilities is often placed, on the other side, the un-esthetic nature of the contraceptives associated with birth control. Yet, it must be remembered, they are of a part with the whole of our civilized human life. We at no point enter the spiritual save through the material. ”

“ The more that children work, the lower the father’s wages become; the lower the father’s wages become, the more the children must work. So we evolve the vicious circle. The home becomes a mere rendezvous for the nightly gathering of bodies numb with weariness and minds drunk with sleep. No fine spiritual relation can exist between parents and children where the children are an economic asset to the parents. There are people who approve this state of affairs, but no one can who really cares for the welfare of children. We fight this condition with Child Labor Laws. ”

“ But what is forgotten is that by concerning ourselves almost exclusively with human ruins, the results of our social abuses, we gradually weaken the force of the healthy portion of the population. By attacking the roots of the evil and limiting the procreation of the unfit we shall be performing a work which is much more humanitarian, if less striking in effect. Formerly, our economists and politicians hardly have considered this question, and even now very few are interested in it because it brings no honors, nor money, as we do not ourselves see the fruits of such efforts. ”

“ Branded with ignominy from the moment of conception, a burden to society, and a still greater burden to its parent, or parents from the moment of its birth, with no systematic endeavor on the part of society to prevent its growing up a criminal, a drunkard, a pauper, a prostitute, or a physical wreck, what wonder that many a poor woman’s fingers become too tightly entwined around her offspring’s neck. ”

“ Picture a woman with five or six little ones living on the average working man’s wage of ten dollars a week. The mother is broken in health and spirit, a worn out shadow of the woman she once was. Where is the man or woman who would reproach me for trying to put into this woman’s hands knowledge that will save her from giving birth to any more babies doomed to certain poverty and misery and perhaps to disease and death. ”

“ Local diseases and pathological conditions in the woman (at times in man also) within wedlock, may render parturition and immediate danger to the life of the mother or of the child, or of both together. Surely in such cases it is the bounden duty of the physician to intervene and counsel against, nay absolutely forbid impregnation. Well, how is it to be done? Must husband and wife who love each other be separated? It would be unnatural, in fact it is quite impossible. Or should they abandon sexual intercourse altogether and live like brother and sister? ”

“ In this way we deteriorate the general quality of life in the next generation, except insofar as our improvement of the environment may enable some to remain fit, who under less favorable conditions would join the unfit. It is now possible for us to realize how the way lies open to the next great forward step in social reform. On the one hand the progressive movement of improvement in the conditions of life, by proceeding steadily back, as we have seen, to the conditions before birth, renders the inevitable next step a deliberate controlled life itself. ”

“ Until she has the time to think, neither the suffrage question nor the social question nor the labor question will interest her, and she will remain the drudge that she is and her husband the slave that he is just as long as they continue to supply the market with cheap labor.
Let me ask you: Has the State any more right to ravish a woman against her will by keeping her in ignorance than a man has through brute force? Has the State a better right to decide when she shall bear offspring? ”

“ Here is the real danger of that race suicide so vigorously condemned by Ex-President Roosevelt and others; for while the man of virtue and strength is deterred from propagating his kind because of the jeopardy in which his children would stand, the vicious and the ignorant, the physically unfit and the discouraged are not deterred by any such consideration, but, regardless of consequences, continue to propagate their kind and swell the proportion of those who will be from birth to death a heavy liability against society. ”

“ Have we realized that every feeble-minded girl is a potential prostitute? Have we realized that feeble-minded mothers give birth to large numbers of children doomed to mental deficiency? Have we realized what this will ultimately mean in deterioration of human stock and in the complication of social problems? To stop the stream which is bringing into prostitution large numbers of mentally deficient girls and women, we must safe-guard these girls and prevent them from having offspring. ”

“ My work has been to arouse interest in the subject of birth control in America, and in this, I feel that I have been successful. The work now before us is to crystallize and to organize this interest into action, not only for the repeal of the laws but for the establishment of free clinics in every large center of population in the country where scientific, individual information may be given every adult person who comes to ask it. ”

“ It is then that we have what may properly be termed Birth Control. That is to say that a process which had before been working slowly through the ages, attaining every new forward step with waste and pain, is henceforth carried out voluntarily, in the light of the high human qualities of reason and foresight and self-restraint. The rise of birth control may be said to correspond with the rise of social and sanitary science in the first half of the nineteenth century, and to be indeed an essential part of that movement. ”

“ Of course our present civilization has put up a barrier against all this. Yet for that very reason, the blind and thoughtless propagation of degenerate, tainted and enfeebled individuals is another atrocious danger to society. But then the sexual appetite cannot be legislated out of existence, or killed by repressive measures. We can but consider all legislation and all police measures which are intended to regulate the sexual intercourse in the human family as absolute failures, as inhuman, in fact as downright detrimental to the race. ”

“ Our good stock is multiplying very slowly. Our poor stock—the lowest strata of society—multiplies in what might really be called a brutal ratio. If civilization is to advance, our best people must replenish the earth. I think it should be a part of our religion to replenish the world with good, clean people.
We need to know vastly more than we know to-day before we can give definite answers, except in the case of marriage between two feeble-minded persons. Now, that being the case, the argument that I want to make to you is: the propagation of the feeble-minded is going on at an enormous rate. ”

“ Even in the more progressive countries, however, birth control has not been established without a struggle which has frequently ended in a hypocritical compromise, its principles being publicly ignored or denied and its practice privately accepted. For at the great and vitally important point in human progress which birth control represents, we really see the conflict of two moralities. The morality of the ancient world is here confronted by the morality of the new world. ”

“ It is thus clear that the birth-rate combined with the death-rate constitutes a delicate instrument for the measurement of civilisation, and that the record of these combined curves registers the upward or downward course of every nation. The curves, as we know, tend to be parallel, and when they are not parallel we are in the presence of a rare and abnormal state of things which is usually temporary or transitional. ”

“ This is the natural outcome of an awakened social conscience, which is in keeping, not only with humanitarianism, but with law and order and national efficiency. Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to Society, and not solely to the individual who carries it. Humanitarianism demands that every individual born be given every opportunity for decent and effective life that our civilization can offer. Racial instinct demands that defectives shall not continue their unworthy traits to menace Society. ”

“ As long as a community can rest content in the belief that a large infant mortality is the natural method of reducing the race of the unfit, the doctrine of laissez-faire can be accepted with complaisance. If, however, it seems probable that the influence of environment must be reckoned as a greater cause of infant mortality and of physical unfitness than the influence of heredity, it may be wiser for society, as it certainly will be easier, to preserve the lives and health of the children born, than to stimulate an increase in a birth rate now diminishing. ”

“ Any one who like myself has worked among the people and found on one hand an ever-increasing population with its ever-increasing misery, poverty and ignorance, and on the other hand a stationary or decreasing population with its increasing wealth and higher standards of living, greater freedom, joy and happiness, cannot doubt that birth control is the livest issue of the day and one on which depends the future welfare of the race. ”

“ If it were necessary to choose between the task of getting children educated and the task of getting them well born and healthy, it would be better to abandon education. There have been many great people who never dreamed of national systems of education; there has been no great people without the art of producing healthy and vigorous children.”
Newman, the distinguished author of the work on “Infant Mortality” declares that the problem of infant mortality is not one of sanitation alone, or housing, or indeed of poverty as such, it is mainly a question of motherhood. ”

“ Here we have been spending enormous enthusiasm, labor and money in improving the conditions of life, with the notion in our heads that we should thereby be improving life itself, and after 70 years we find no convincing proof that the quality of our people is one whit better than it was when for a large part they lived in filth, were ravaged by disease, bred at random, soaked themselves in alcohol, and took no thought for the morrow. ”

“ What can man know of the fear and dread of unwanted pregnancy? What can man know of the agony of carrying beneath one’s heart a little life which tells the mother every instant that it cannot survive? ”

“ The total result was that the nature of “prosperity” began to be transformed, instead of being, as it had been at the beginning of the industrial era, a direct appeal to the gratification of gross appetites and reckless lusts, it became an indirect stimulus to higher gratifications and more remote aspirations. Foresight became a dominating motive even in the general population, and a man’s anxiety for the welfare of his family was no longer forgotten in the pleasure of the moment. ”

“ We regard the family—one father, one mother, a group of children to be fed, clothed, and educated during the years that precede maturity—as the fundamental institution of our civilization and the glory, thus far, of all social evolution. ”

“ We know now that education has not done all the dreadful things to women that its opponents predicted were certain to result. And so shall we find that knowledge to control birth, which has been in the hands of the women of wealth for the past twenty-five years, will not tend to lower woman’s standard of morality.
Statistics show us that the birth-rate of any given quarter is in ratio with and to its wealth. And further figures prove that in large cities the rich districts yield a birth-rate of a third of that of the poor districts. ”

“ They would rather risk their lives through abortion than give birth to little ones they could not feed and care for.
For the laws against imparting this knowledge force these women into the hands of the filthiest midwives and the quack abortionists—unless they bear unwanted children—with the consequence that the deaths from abortions are almost wholly among the working-class women.
No other country in the world has so large a number of abortions nor so large a number of deaths of women resulting therefrom as the United States of America. Our law makers close their virtuous eyes. ”

“ Where there is tuberculosis or any other serious transmissible disease in one or both of the parents, or there is danger that it may be transmitted to the offspring, it should not only be the right but the sacred duty of the physician to prevent the conception of any physically and mentally handicapped offspring destined to become a burden to the community. ”

“ Reckless abandonment to the impulse of the moment, and careless indifference to the morrow, the selfish gratification of individual desire at the expense of probable suffering to lives that will come after, this may seem beautiful to some people, but it is not civilization. All civilization involves an ever-increasing forethought for others, even for others who are yet unborn. ”

“ Am I to be classed as immoral because I advocate small families for the working class while Mr. Roosevelt can go up and down the length of the land shouting and urging these women to have large families and is neither arrested nor molested but considered by all society as highly moral? ”

“ For instance, I have in mind a woman who was discharged from the insane hospital. She had three children and had been three times insane. What chance in life has a child born between two attacks of insanity, whose mother is mentally defective? Even sane women, if they are nervous and emotional, should never bear children against their will. It is foolish to talk about making people have children when they do not want them. It’s bad for the woman and bad for the child. It is very bad for a child to be born into a home where he is not desired. ”

“ The hope of the future lies in the slow development of those habits, those social instincts arising inevitably out of the actual facts of life, and deeper than science, deeper than morals. The new sense of responsibility, not only for the human lives that now are, but the new human lives that are to come, is a social instinct of this fundamental nature. ”