Birth control

“ The question, then, is not whether family limitation should be practiced. It is being practiced; it has been practiced for ages and it will always be practiced. The question that society must answer is this: Shall family limitation be achieved through birth control or abortion? Shall normal, safe, effective contraceptives be employed, or shall we continue to force women to the abnormal, often dangerous surgical operation? ”

“ The choice of a means of birth control, although a highly personal matter, is also a health matter in a very real sense, and I see nothing arbitrary in a requirement of medical supervision. [3] It is generally acknowledged that contraceptives vary in degree of effectiveness and potential harmfulness. [4] There may be compelling health reasons for certain women to choose the most effective means of birth control available, no matter how harmless the less effective alternatives. ”

“ Once more, careful distinction needs to be made between the use and the bad effects of the abuse of birth control. That its abuse produces harm I fully agree—harm to parents, to families, and to the nation. But abuse is not a just condemnation of legitimate use. Over-eating, over-drinking, over-smoking, over-sleeping, over-work do not carry condemnation of eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping, work. ”

“ I think it is critical to understand that the underlying issue here is about affordable access to contraception--something that is basic to women's health. Birth control is something that most women use at some point in their lifetime and something that the medical community believes is essential to the health of women and their families. Research shows that access to birth control is directly linked to declines in maternal and infant mortality, that it can reduce the risk of ovarian cancer, and that it is linked to overall good health outcomes. ”

“ There is here no desire to exaggerate the importance of birth control. It is not a royal road to the millennium, and, as I have already pointed out, like all other measures which the course of progress forces us to adopt, it has its disadvantages. ”

“ If they are used to render unions childless or inadequately fruitful they are harmful. There are grounds for thinking that unrealisation of maternity favours sterility.
Generally speaking, birth control before the first child is inadvisable. On the other hand, the justifiable use of birth control is to limit the number of children, and to spread out their arrival in such a way as to serve their true interests and those of their home. ”

“ Birth Control means simply the teaching and practice of certain methods whereby men and women may indulge their sexual appetites, in or out of marriage, without incurring the liability or risk of conception and child-bearing. The average person does not stop to consider that such teachings and practices do not constitute "Birth Control" at all, but are, rather, merely the theory and practice of Birth Prevention, desirable only to those who seek sexual indulgences without being called upon to shoulder the responsibilities attached by Nature to the physical sexual union of men and women. ”

“ It is possible that by further research a suppository, physically harmless but of certain action may be discovered, in which case, from its practical and sociological aspect, the problem of birth control will be greatly simplified. ”

“ If a woman wants contraception for either birth control or other health purposes--and most women use it for other health purposes--it is up to that woman, not her employer. That is the bottom line. The vast majority of Americans, men and women, agree with that statement. ”

“ Before I proceed further I wish to say that it is the terrible prevalence of the abortion evil, with its concomitant evils of infection, ill health, chronic invalidism and death, that more than any other single factor urges us in our birth control propaganda. And those who want to forbid the dissemination of any information about the prevention of conception are playing directly into the hands of the professional abortionists. ”

“ To understand the more clearly the difference between birth control by contraceptives and family limitation through abortion it is necessary to know something of the processes of conception. Knowledge of these processes will also enable us to comprehend more thoroughly the dangers to which woman is exposed by our antiquated laws, and how much better it would be for her to employ such preventive measures as would keep her out of the hands of the abortionist, into which the laws now drive her. ”

“ The problem must [40] be met through the woman who, unlike the man, has to put up with the discomfort and the pain of repeated pregnancies, and has to shoulder the main burden of large families. Were it not for this elementary human fact all attempts to teach Birth Control to the very poor and destitute would fail completely.
Essentially, contraceptives which the woman can use are of two sorts, and involve two principles—namely, a mechanical or occlusive, and a chemical or spermicidal principle. ”

“ No form of birth control could ever have solved the problems of over-crowding and starvation and war as well as the games. You should know! Without work like yours, Doug, just think what the whole world could be like! There'd be the problem of enforcing the birth control laws again, knowing that every time they were violated the threat of unbalance would grow a little more. ”

“ It is clear that the implications of Birth Control, or, rather, what is generally, though not logically understood [2] by the term, of the practice of contraception, are far reaching. It profoundly affects the life of the individual; it reacts upon the internal economy of the community ”

“ When we remember that millions are being spent by the Ministry of Health and by Local Authorities—on pure milk for necessitous expectant and nursing mothers, on Maternity Clinics to guard the health of mothers before and after childbirth, for the provision of skilled midwives, and on Infant Welfare Centres—all for the single purpose of bringing healthy children into our midst, it is truly amazing that this monstrous campaign of birth control should be tolerated by the Home Secretary. ”

“ This must mean an added burden of responsibility on both physician and patient, and one extremely difficult to meet under existing conditions. A reliable means of birth control used in such cases would place the problem in women on a par with that in [Pg 129] men, and give the physician's insistence on a complete cure for the woman a reasonable prospect of being needed. Where his advice is disregarded and a pregnancy results, the woman should be efficiently treated while she is carrying the child. ”

“ 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 possible to assert, without fear of contradiction, that no ordinary decent man or woman approaches or begins the practice of artificial birth control without experiencing at first unpleasant feelings of uneasiness, hesitation, repugnance, shame, and remorse. ”

“ ARHP Brief 34-35. Other contraceptive methods that may prevent implantation include "morning-after pills," high-dose estrogen pills taken after intercourse, particularly in cases of rape, ARHP Brief 33, and the French RU 486, a pill that works "during the indeterminate period between contraception and abortion," id. at 37. Low-1evel estrogen "combined" pills -- a version of the ordinary, daily ingested birth control pill -- also may prevent the fertilized egg from reaching the uterine wall and implanting. ”

“ Birth-control applied only by the responsible classes of the community combined with indiscriminate fecundity among the irresponsible masses, must inevitably lead to the lowering of the general average in character, brains and physique. It is a form of reverse selection—the responsible being out-bred by the irresponsible. What is wanted is the general application of birth-control by voluntary contraception, and the particular application of voluntary and compulsory sterilisation of the feeble-minded and unfit. ”

“ And, moreover, if this harmful restraint succeeds in preventing conception there [23] eventuates the inevitable prevalence of sex excitement followed by abortive and half-realised satisfaction, and the enhanced risk of the man or woman yielding to outside sex temptations.
No—birth control by abstention is either ineffective, or, if effective, is pernicious.
The Home’s True Interests.
I will next consider Artificial Control. The forces in modern life which make for birth control are so strong that only convincing reasons will make people desist from it. ”

“ For, there cannot be any doubt about it, just as all those who work for birth control are diminishing the frequency of abortion, so every attempt to discourage birth control promotes abortion. We have to approach this problem calmly, in the light of Nature and reason. We have each of us to decide on which side we shall range ourselves. For it is a vital social problem concerning which we cannot afford to be indifferent. ”

“ If one watches the woman with one child and all maternity finished before thirty, and compare her at forty with the woman of the same age who has had, say, four children at proper intervals, who usually has the advantage in preservation of youth and beauty? Not the former.
On the other hand, it must be admitted that baby after baby every year or eighteen months wears and often exhausts a woman’s strength. The inference is that the use of birth control is good, its abuse bad. ”

“ 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. ”

“ President, I thank my colleague from New Hampshire.
For millions of American women, reading the news this morning was like stepping into a time machine and going back 50 years, seeing the headlines and the photos of this all-male panel in the House talking about a woman's right to access birth control, and no women on the panel. It turns out the chairman of the House oversight committee decided he was not going to allow a young woman who had been asked by the minority to testify and tell her story--actually of a friend who had lost an ovary because of her lack of contraception coverage. ”

“ Margaret Sanger, the acknowledged world leader of the Birth Control movement and President of the American Birth Control League, has the answer for this most momentous problem of womankind. Every married woman knows only too well the tragedies resulting from ignorance of birth control. ”

“ One of the most distressing features of the popular prejudice against Birth Control, arising from a total misconception of the subject, has been the widely spread and popularly accepted notion that Birth Control is practically analogous to abortion—or, at the best, but a more refined and less repulsive and less dangerous form of abortion. ”

“ And while we would not be so unscientific as to deny for a moment that it would be better for every woman to get her advice and instruction concerning the use of contraceptive directly from a doctor, nevertheless it is impossible to overestimate the help men and women could give each other were the free exchange of information on methods of birth control legal instead of illegal.... ”

“ No recommendations of limited intercourse or of self-restraint according to the dictates of reason or of affection are to be found in the writings of birth controllers. Unrestrained indulgence, without the risk of consequences, is their motto. To this end they advocate certain contraceptive methods, and the reader should note that these methods require precautions to be taken solely by the woman. If she fails to take these precautions, or if the precautions themselves fail, all responsibility for the occurrence of conception rests on her alone ”

“ The advocates of Birth Control seek to place upon a scientific basis, under cover and protection of the law, a subject which heretofore has been but imperfectly known, and more imperfectly practiced in some form by the majority of married couples, and which has heretofore been under condemnation of the law so far as concerned the actual dissemination of information concerning methods of contraception. ”

“ It was also the one method of birth control countenanced by the ecclesiastics. Women are learning from experience and specialists are discovering by investigation that the "safe period" is anything but safe for all women. Some women are never free from the possibility of conception from puberty to the menopause. Others seemingly have "safe periods" for a time, only to become pregnant when they have begun to feel secure in their theory. Here again, continence must give way, as a method of birth control, to contraceptives. ”

“ THE CASE FOR BIRTH CONTROL
By Margaret H. Sanger (The following is the case for birth control, as I found it during my fourteen years’ experience as a trained nurse in New York City and vicinity. It appeared as a special article in “Physical Culture,” April, 1917, and has been delivered by me as a lecture throughout the United States. It is a brief summary of facts and conditions, as they exist in this country.)
For centuries woman has gone forth with man to till the fields, to feed and clothe the nations. She has sacrificed her life to populate the earth. She has overdone her labors. ”