Family planning

“ In the coming weeks, my Administration will initiate a fresh conversation on family planning, working to find areas of common ground to best meet the needs of women and families at home and around the world. ”

“ To promote public health and welfare by expanding, improving, and better coordinating the family planning services and population research activities of the Federal Government, and for other purposes. ”

“ The state shall take the necessary measures and establish the necessary organisation to ensure the peace and welfare of the family, especially where the protection of the mother and children is involved, and recognizing the need for education in the practical application of family planning. ”

“ Poverty-stricken households that practise family planning shall be given priority in terms of poverty-alleviation loans, relief through work and other poverty-alleviation projects, and social assistance. ”

“ Where the only child of a couple is disabled or killed in accidents, and the couple decides not to have or adopt another child, the local people's government shall provide the couple with necessary assistance.
Article 28 Local people's governments at all levels shall help rural households that practise family planning to develop economic undertakings by giving them support and preferential treatment in terms of funds, technology and training. ”

“ Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life. By furnishing the means to limit the size of families, which would otherwise be excessive, it confers the greatest benefit on the family and especially on the mother. ”

“ The diminution in the number of the children renders it possible to bestow a greater amount of care on each child. Moreover, the better economic position of the father, due to the smaller number of individuals he has to support, makes it possible for the family to live under improved conditions as regards nourishment, hygiene, and comfort. ”

“ If a mother, in average financial condition, has the "three and one-half children" eugenists demand of each family, and does her duty by them in private family life, how much of her time and strength must go into the housemother's service and for what period of years? ”

“ For most families in average condition that person is naturally the housemother. If the husband and father is the chief or only wage-earner in "gainful occupations," then his health and strength are of primary concern to all the family and must be secured by adequate and healthful provision of food and clothing, and the home must give him what he vitally needs for maintaining power of economic service to his family. ”

“ With the economic soundness of this view others are better fitted to deal, but no economic considerations would outweigh the importance of child life inspiring the homes of the land, and if the number and sequence of children can be regulated by the parents’ circumstances, these homes will increase in number, will start when parents are younger and confer greater benefits alike on the family and the State. ”

“ In no instance where we have prevented the disintegration of the family because of poverty have we had reason to regret our decision. Of course, the ability of the mother to maintain a standard in the home and control the children is a necessary qualification in any general recommendation for this treatment of the widow and [125] orphan, and competent supervision is essential to insure the maintenance of these conditions. ”

“ How best to circumvent family complications is the burning question of the hour with the average young wife, and a satisfactory solution of this problem would be a boon to society and prevent untold suffering. ”

“ They point to the fact that in many families in which intelligent modes of Birth Control are favored, and in which the size of the family has been limited to a few children, the children are, as a rule, better cared for and provided for, better reared and better educated, than in the case of families in which children are brought into the world without thought or reason, and without the possibility of proper care and rearing. Birth Control, say its advocates, will not do away with children, but will merely regulate their number to rational limits, and at appropriate intervals between births. ”

“ It is the mother’s sphere to take motherly care of her children. It is the father’s sphere to take fatherly care. Neither can leave his duties to the other without danger. The family system is a combination of the solar and the binary systems. ”

“ Where there is a family of children more than large enough to make good the parent's share in life's ongoing stream, or where physical, mental, or moral peculiarities demand special attention to one child or more, or where aged, delicate, or incompetent members of the family circle call for special consideration, or where the environment does not provide, or the income cannot pay for elaborate aids to domestic comfort from without, the average conscientious housemother must give the best of strength and the most of time in the service of the private family for many years of life. ”

“ Some way must be devised to recognize as economic assets of society the special sacrifice and service of the housemother in her function of life-giver for the coming generations and yet not ignore the father but rather bring him nearer to competent fatherhood as social conditions make it easier for him to bear his part of the family load. ”

“ The prospective and nursing mother should receive especial consideration. It should be known and recognized that her requirements for wholesome food, and above all wholesome surroundings, are necessary for the normal development of her child and for her own physical safety. How can she,—perhaps already a mother of several children, have the needed rest and time to read or walk in the fresh air, unless the family co-operate with her? It is so easy for the husband to direct the children at these times and at all times, as to the care the mother is deserving. ”

“ How is it possible for the average unmarried mother to find the sum asked by the foster-parents? Those who, as foster-parents, assume the charge of an illegitimate child, cannot reckon on the child’s remaining permanently in their care, and ultimately becoming a useful member of the family. ”

“ The recognition of some of these needs of every child has been more general and intelligent than that of others. For example, the equal guardianship of the father and mother, their mutual responsibility for financial support when financially competent, their equal control over the family life and their common pledge 167to the community of parental care—this has not been recognized until recently, is not now in many of the States of the Union and perhaps not perfectly in any one. ”

“ Every Child Should Have a Competent Mother.—The second demand of child-life is for a competent mother—competent in health, that the baby may get really born alive, competent in nursing and household skill, or in power to secure that skill from others, in order that the baby may be sure of that first long start of two or three years toward physical, mental, and moral sanity and strength. ”

“ Physicians claim that early marriage with knowledge to control birth would do away with both. For this would enable two young people to live and work together until such time as they could care for a family. ”

“ The reason why the relationship of mother and child was able thus to lead the way toward social organization for the common good is obvious. The intimate physical tie, the easily understood claim of the child upon its mother, the prolongation of human infancy instituting a habit of continuous service of the young and hence a tendency toward a settled home and peaceful industries, all made it easy for woman to become care-taker of children. ”

“ So far the physical and affectional needs of children and youth, and of husbands and wives, and of fathers and mothers have not been met by any substitute for the private home. And in the private home, under any plan, there must go on certain processes which have to cost some one member of the family a great deal of thought, much personal effort and constant attention. ”

“ If the physician had to doctor himself, the preacher preach to his wife, and the teacher teach his own children, their professions might be in as much confusion as the housekeeping profession is. The efforts to do away with these difficulties by having families live together, [65] eat together, or do anything else in a wholesale way, have not succeeded and have led in a wrong direction. What is wanted is a way to preserve the separate family and the separate family home, not a way to make them into something else. ”

“ Since we believe that every child has the right to grow up in a secure, loving family and that this experience lays the foundation for a happy, productive adulthood, we commend the growing numbers of Americans who are building families through adoption. ”

“ But, apart from these latter considerations, is it not most plainly, clearly, incontrovertibly desirable, that parents should have the power [29] to limit their offspring, whether 117they choose to exercise it or not? Who can lose by their having this power? and how many may gain! may gain competency for themselves, and the opportunity carefully to educate and provide for their children! How many may escape the jarrings, the quarrels, the disorder, the anxiety, which an overgrown family too often causes in the domestic circle? ”

“ Now the household remains so long childless that it is very common to find the wife's mother a permanent member of the household, being retained for companionship! Even the mature family contains but few children, and this in the best agricultural parts of the country. ”

“ The hard conditions attaching to both unmarried motherhood and unfathered childhood, often in the past wholly cruel and unsocial, have been much ameliorated during the last fifty years and largely through the efforts of those who held firmly to the value of legal marriage and the accepted 25family system in general. ”

“ In the grade of economic condition above that in which it is a dire struggle to make both ends meet for the husband, wife, and their little children, there are to be considered five ways in which the care of the aged can be made adequate and not too great a burden upon those of young and those of middle life. ”

“ Economic Aspects of the Father's Competency.—The death-rate of babies in families in which the mother has to earn outside the home under factory conditions of labor in order to secure absolute necessities is so high that it is seen to be not socially thrifty to thus place a double burden upon mothers. ”

“ Then follows a period of banishment from the parental presence, for most likely he is placed with a nurse in the country dur- ing his infancy, and upon his occasional visits to mamma he may recognize her but prefer his foster-mother. Even after his return to his parents the bond be- tween the two is kept up, and a certain patronage expected by his foster-broth- ers through life.
The youth, if he be the eldest, is early impressed with his future responsibility as head of the family. ”

“ In so far, however, as the school contributes through its attitude toward the parent to a breakdown in family discipline, and in so far as it tries or does not try to instruct the foreign-born housewife in the art of housekeeping, it is concerned with problems that are primarily family problems. ”

“ The adequate care and guidance of the family which he has founded is a man’s business in life. Farming, preaching, and shopkeeping are secondary matters, to be regulated according to the needs of the family. The family is not to be regulated by their requirements. ”

“ The family, as we have inherited it, is so far the central nursery and school in this development. So far in the history of the race or in its present social manifestation no rival institution, even the formal school, offers an adequate substitute for the family in this beginning of the educative process. The intimate and vital care and nurture of the individual life still depends for the mass of the people upon the private, monogamic, family. This intimate and vital care of the children of each generation has so far in human experience cost women large expenditure of time and strength ”

“ When widows or men with children apply, the Board offer to take part of their family into the house, and though this plan was first introduced in order that the children of widows should receive an education, or in the case of sick men that the ventilation of his home should be improved by lessening the numbers, yet it has proved, rather to the surprise of the guardians, a most efficient test of destitution. ”

“ The same considerations make it evident that especial care should be paid to those children who, for one reason or another, are unable to enjoy the advantages of normal family life—care to ensure that they should have available suitable substitutes for the parents of whom they are deprived and that they should receive the due quantity of love which their moral and psychological development demands. ”

“ Baby-farming is distinguished from the care of foundlings only by the fact that in the former the children are entrusted to foster-parents by their relatives instead of by the local authorities. (b) The various systems for the care of foundlings tend to become continually more similar. The general tendency in every case is to have recourse to a system of family care supervised by the same administrative authority. (c) There is a tendency to assimilate the upbringing of neglected and of criminal children, and to adopt for both the same methods of family care and the same kind of supervision. ”

“ This leaflet can only be issued, however, to persons over twenty-one years of age who are either married or about to be married, and who declare their conscientious belief that family limitation is justifiable on personal and national grounds. ”