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Slogans from the Birth Control Review
The Definition of a "Slogan."
A slogan is an attractive or catchy phrase that represents a prepackaged idea or set of ideas. Its purpose is to allow a person to summarize or 'buy into' a particular position without critically examining it or thinking about it.
People unthinkingly accept slogans for two reasons: (1because they do not want to think about the issue they are supporting, or (2because they do not want to be seen as backwards or reactionary by questioning the slogans, even if they do not fully understand them. People also use slogans for two reasons: (1to conceal their ignorance of the topic being discussed, or (2to divert attention away from the topic being discussed because they know that their moral or ethical position is weak.
It therefore logically follows that the density of slogans used by a person or movement is inversely proportional to their knowledge of the topic and the strength of the moral position that they support.
The Anti-Life "Bumpersticker Mentality."
For more than a century, pro-life activists have been debating anti-lifers under conditions varying from a street corner in front of an abortion mill to a fully-equipped television studio.
These debaters have identified a fatal and recurring Achilles heel in anti-life debating tactics. Whatever the position of the anti-lifers, and whatever their philosophy pro-contraception, pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia, pro-infanticide, pro-pornography, or pro-pedophilia they will base 90 percent of their argumentation upon about 30 sloganistic points, each of which is fundamentally flawed.
Through the years, anti-life forces have distilled these ideas into catchy slogans. Every pro-life activist has heard the standard chants, including "Woman's body, woman's choice," and "Keep your laws off my body!" The quotes below show that most of the slogans used by pro-abortionists today were also used by pro-birth control activists eighty years ago.
The Deadly Danger in Accepting Slogans.
Human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. Despite their fallen nature, people are naturally suspicious of undisguised evil and will reject it unless they are insane or particularly weak.
This is why evil must be attractively packaged for general public consumption. If the bare truth behind contraception, abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, and pornography were common knowledge, nobody in their right mind would accept them as societal goods.
However, people will accept these evils if they are 'dressed up' in the pretty and colorful clothes of "tolerance," "nonjudgmentalism," "freedom," and "diversity."
There is a great danger in accepting evil, no matter what its surface appearance may be. If a person 'buys into' enough slogans, he begins to accept the wider philosophy behind them without ever examining its true nature. Eventually someone will ask him to outline or defend his position, and he will respond by using slogans, because he has not thought out the implications of his new beliefs. Once this happens, he has a vested interest in retaining the anti-life position, and begins to construct an elaborate psychological defense system that helps shield him from logic and reality.
1917
"Family limitation seeks to stop this child murder [illegal abortion], which Mrs. Sanger and the rest of us deplore as deeply as Dr. Cadman or any other preacher can. Child murder is effected principally by way of abortion. The prevention of conception when children are not desired would make abortion a useless crime."
Charles Hiram Chapman. "Have we A Son Named Samuel?" Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 3 (March 1917 , page 9.
" ...it is essential to woman to know how to prevent conception. Without this knowledge, she cannot win her moral, intellectual, or economic freedom. It is primarily her fight, and she must be backed in it by everyone who wishes to see her emerge from the sex bondage in which she has been held since the beginning of the Christian era.
"There is still a third major reason why the limitation of offspring appeals to the revolutionist. It would in time make war impossible. International warfare, at all events. Men would be too precious to be conscripted and sent out to slaughter each other. They would be too intelligent to go, even if their rulers were misguided enough to attempt to herd them to the shambles. Birth control is essentially an anti-militaristic philosophy. There is no question in my mind that if it had been universally practiced by the last generation, the present war all Kaisers, Kings, and Presidents notwithstanding could never have been imposed upon the world."
Walter Adolphe Roberts. "Birth Control and the Revolution." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 6 (June 1917 , page 7.
[***] "In this country our stupid and puritanical laws have been the cause of more than fifty thousand annual deaths resulting from abortions."
Margaret Sanger. "Birth Control and Women's Health." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 12 (December 1917 , page 7.
"As a result of my observations, I find that it would be a splendid thing to have a clinic where well-trained attendants could give women, who have not the advantage of an education, the necessary information. Besides, there are the women who are naturally rather dull. These by all means should be helped to limit their families. We need a generation of healthy, vigorous intelligent human beings. Therefore, the inferior strains and stocks should be encouraged to have as few children as possible, so that the average level of racial vigor and intelligence may be raised. This is in accord with the soundest eugenic science. If we withhold birth control information from the worst strains in our population by making it criminal to disseminate this knowledge, and let them do most of the breeding, we shall only be inflicting an irreparable injury on the race; for the more intelligent, energetic and far-sighted will get the information anyway, in spite of the laws."
"In one word, my experience has led me to believe that the great argument for birth control is, that contraceptive information should be especially available to the poorer classes, to prevent dire indigence and improve the average of racial vigor and intelligence."
Meta M. Dekker. "Birth Control in Oregon." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 12 (December 1917 , page 10.
1918
"For only through giving women information as to how to prevent conception, can we avoid the wastage of bearing all these thousands of poor little diseased infants, predestined to die before they are a year old, or if they survive, to become in a majority of cases inmates of prisons, insane asylums, and houses of prostitution, as reliable statistics prove."
Gertrude M. Williams. "A Summons To Our Women Citizens." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 1 (January 1918 , page 4.
"The southern woman is fifty years behind the rest of the women in the country. She has no mind, no individuality, no initiative, and without question accepts all the absurd conventionalities that hedge her about and keep her a charming and useless dependent on her husband."
Bianca Van Beuren. "The Women of the South." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Numbers 2 and 3 (February-March 1918 , page 7.
[***] "Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race ...
"Our laws force women into celibacy on one hand, or abortion on the other. Both conditions are declared by eminent medical authorities to be injurious to health."
Margaret Sanger. "Morality and Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Numbers 2 and 3 (February-March 1918 , page 14.
"Those who advocate birth control are among the foremost to advocate a hardy self-control and mutual consideration in the sexual relationship in order to keep love pure and to translate it into its highest values."
Frank V. Anderson. "Two Views of Love." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 4 (April 1918 , page 11.
"The only remedy for existing social evils is reconstruction of humanity from the bottom; and it is here where the birth control movement fills its place with honor. It aims to mitigate sufferings and increase happiness, it favors children with healthy bodies and minds capable of intellectual improvement, in short it stands for quality and not for quantity. Its advocates are moved by altruistic motives; they see a vision of a grander humanity which shall arise on the ashes of ours."
O. Kihlstom. "A Challenge to Womanhood." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 4 (April 1918 , page 14.
"If only birth would ensure woman's freedom from the recurrence of chance maternity! But it does not. The constant fear, anxiety, dread, and even horror as each month rolls by is something which only those who have been through it can fully realize, and how few women there are who do not know this fear!"
Jessie Rene. "The Waste of Creative Energy." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 7 (July 1918 , page 6.
"... birth control is the highest, most far-reaching kind of patriotism."
Mary Ware Dennett, Executive Secretary, National Birth Control League, quoted in the Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 7 (July 1918 , page 15.
"Ignorance, poverty and vice must stop populating the world. To accomplish this, there is but one way. Science must make woman the owner of herself, the mistress of her person. Science, the only savior of mankind, must put it in the power of woman to decide for herself whether she will, or will not, become a mother."
Robert Ingersoll. Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918 , page 6.
"A generally low birth rate would tend to prevent war."
Editorial. "The Suicidal Birth Rate." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918 , page 6.
"1. The fall in the human birth rate is a world-wide international movement, which has cometo stay.
2. It is not due to diminished natural fertility, but to the adoption and spread of birth control principles.
3. It is not a symptom of national decadence, but a mark of advancing civilization.
4. It is the civilized substitute for those natural checks to population scarcity, disease and war which have always operated in the past.
5. Rapidly growing populations in countries with circumscribed territories are a fruitful pre-disposing cause of political unrest and war.
6. Internationally, a competition in birth rates is compared to a competition in armaments, and both are undesirable.
7. The prosperity of this country is absolutely dependent upon a supply of cheap coal. The more rapidly the population in this country increases the sooner will a commencing exhaustion of our coal fields manifest itself.
8. The birth control movement is a natural ally of the maternity and child welfare movement. A low birth rate is closely correlated with a low rate of infant mortality, and vice versa.
9. Birth control is an essential factor in the campaign against poverty. It is calculated to reduce the supply of unskilled labor, to increase efficiency, to raise wages, and to encourage a higher standard of life.
10. Detailed knowledge of birth control is not readily available for the very poor by whom it is urgently needed.
11. Birth control encourages early marriage by removing the fear of a large family. It is, therefore, an important factor in the campaign against immorality and venereal disease.
12. Properly used, and not abused, birth control is a valuable eugenic instrument, capable, by restricting the multiplication of the least fit, of greatly raising the quality of the race."
"`It seems obvious...that anything that reduces the supply of labor and especially the superabundant supply of unskilled and inefficient labor will tend to raise the wages of labor ... If we could abolish this surplus of unskilled labor it would certainly be a very good thing both for unskilled labor as a class, and for the community as a whole.'"
Dr. C. Killick Millard. "Famous British Health Official Advocates World Wide Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 10 (October 1918 , page 8.
"The church has been powerless and the champions of worn out moral creeds find themselves trying in vain to force all women to become mothers against their wills."
"Dr. Max Hirsch, a famous authority, quotes an opinion that there are 2,000,000 abortions in the United States every year! ... The question, then, is not whether family limitation should be practiced ... The question is now whether it is to be attained by normal, scientific birth control methods or by the abnormal, often dangerous surgical operation.
"... if preventive means are not used and the sperm meets the ovum and development thus begins, any attempt at removing it or stopping its further growth is called abortion.
"An abortion is as important a matter as a confinement and requires as much attention as the birth of a child at its full term.
"`The immediate dangers of abortion' says Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, in his book The Practice of Obstetrics, `are hemorrhage, retention of an adherent placenta, sepsis, tetanus, perforation of the uterus. They also cause sterility, anemia, malignant diseases, displaces, neurosis, and endometritis.'
"In plain, everyday language, in an abortion there is always a very serious risk to the health and often to the life of the patient."
Margaret Sanger. "Birth Control or Abortion?" Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 11 (November 1918 , page 3.
"Are you aware that the high infant death rate is due principally to the family too large to afford proper living quarters, proper food, and proper physical attention? Do you know that each year 300,000 children in the United States die of diseases due to poverty and neglect?
"Do you know that 37,069 persons in the state institutions for the mentally defective came from large families reared in poverty? And do you know that unchecked breeding of these defectives has already overcrowded the state institutions to the extent of 10,000 persons?"
Letter by Margaret Sanger. Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 11 (November 1918 , page 3.
"Family limitation will be practiced. No law has yet been framed that can prevent it. The church has been powerless and the champions of wornout moral creeds find themselves trying in vain to force all women to become mothers against their wills. Abundant evidence of the futility of seeking to impose involuntary motherhood upon women is found in the size of the families of the rich, of the well-to-do and of the wage workers of larger earning capacity. The women of these classes long ago refused to be mere brood animals usually they prefer to be voluntary mothers, determining for themselves the number of children they shall have and when they shall have them. Family limitation for them is an accomplished fact.
"`The immediate dangers of [illegal] abortion,' says Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, in his book "The Practice of Obstetrics," `are hemorrhage, retention of an adherent placenta, sepsis, tetanus, perforation of the uterus. They also cause sterility, anemia, malignant diseases, displacements, neurosis, and endometritis.' In plain, everyday language, in an abortion there is always a very serious risk to the health and often to the life of the patient.
"It is only women of wealth who can afford to give an abortion proper care and treatment both at the time of the operation and afterwards. These women often escape any serious consequences from its occurrence. The women whose incomes are limited and who must continue at work before they have recovered from the effects of an abortion are the great army of sufferers. It is among such that the deaths due to abortion usually ensue. It is these, too, who are most often forced to resort to such operations. If death does not result, the woman who has undergone an abortion is not therefore safe. The womb may not return to its natural size but remain large and heavy, tending to fall away from its natural position. Abortion often leaves the uterus in a condition to conceive easily again and unless prevention is strictly followed another pregnancy will surely occur. Frequent abortions tend to cause barrenness and serious, painful pelvic ailments. These and other conditions arising from such operations are quite likely to ruin a woman's general health.
"While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of [illegal] abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization. I also assert that the responsibility for these abortions and the illness, misery and deaths that come in their train lies at the door of a government whose authority has been stretched beyond the limits of the people's intention and which, in its puritanical blindness, insists upon suffering and death from ignorance, rather than life and happiness from knowledge and prevention. It needs no assertion of mine to call attention to the grim fact that the laws prohibiting the imparting of information concerning the preventing of conception are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year in this country and an untold amount of sickness and sorrow. The suffering and the death of these women is squarely upon the heads of the lawmakers and the puritanical, masculine-minded persons, who insist upon retaining the abominable legal restrictions."
Margaret Sanger. "Birth Control or Abortion?" Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 12 (December 1918 , page 4.
1919
"In the light of the best authoritative information of the day, it can be unequivocally set down that modern birth control methods, properly employed, are not only not injurious but are often positively beneficial to the woman's health.
"Some of the persons who maintain that preventive measures are injurious are so ignorant of the whole subject that they in opposing abortion call it birth control. Still others believe that harmful drugs are given internally as contraceptives. They, of course, confuse abortives with the means of preventing conception. Anyone who knows anything about either birth control or abortion knows that scientific birth control methods would do away with abortions which occur in appalling numbers in America every year.
"It is the consensus of modern medical opinion not only that scientific birth control methods are not harmful but in thousands of cases very beneficial to women suffering from leucorrhea, inflamed cervix, and other local disturbances.
"The assertion that birth control methods induce sterility is equally ridiculous. Many a woman, through the use of scientific contraceptives has so toned up and strengthened her reproductive organs as to become capable of child bearing when she would otherwise had continued barren.
"Scientific birth control is not only harmless but often a direct benefit to the health."
Margaret Sanger. "Are Birth Control Methods Injurious?" Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 1 (January 1919 , pages 3 and 4.
"Woman must have her freedom the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through "the valley of the shadow of death" alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. That right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision."
Margaret Sanger, "A Parent's Problem or Woman's." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 3 (March 1919 , page 7.
"The first right a child should have, and since he can't protest, we should insist upon it for him, is that of being wanted. The second right is that his parents should be educated up to not wanting him unless they are fairly sure they can provide for him decently, until he can look after himself. The only way that this can be done, is by educating the parents, fully, honestly, decently in a knowledge of themselves and their responsibilities, and by allowing them to be taught the means of regulating their families in accordance with their own health and economic resources."
Mary Knoblauch. "Editorial Comment." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 4 (April 1919 , page 2.
"The representatives of religion also encourage the people to follow "God's law" and to multiply continually. But all religions have always considered woman as a breeding machine and nothing else.
"There are harmless means to prevent conception; why should they not be allowed to circulate freely? To be sure, they will not always be successful; but they will be so in the majority of the cases."
B. Liber, M.D., Ph.D. "The Neo-Malthusian Idea." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 7 (July 1919 , pages 6 and 7.
1920
"A knowledge of Birth Control, which is denied to the women of Austria, would, of course, wipe out the practice of abortion."
Margaret Sanger. "Preparing for the World Crisis." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 4 (April 1920 , page 8.
"Abortion, however, must not be confused with Birth Control, which employs contraceptives and thus does away with the demand for abortion."
Editor's footnote to Ella K. Dearborn, M.D. "Birth Control and a Bugaboo." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 5 (May 1920 , page 14.
[***] "It is a noteworthy fact that not one of the women to whom I have spoken so far believes in abortion as a practice; but it is principle for which they are standing. They also believe that the complete abolition of the abortion law will shortly do away with abortions, as nothing else will."
Margaret Sanger. "Women in Germany." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 12 (December 1920 , page 8.
1921
"It is a noteworthy fact that not one of the women to whom I have spoken so far believes in abortion as a practice; but it is principle for which they are standing. They also believe that the complete abolition of the abortion law will shortly do away with abortions, as nothing else will.
Margaret Sanger. "Women in Germany." Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 1 (January 1921 , page 9.
"It is not democratic for a physician to assist intelligent women in regulating their families and refuse to assist uneducated women in limiting their children because he may be punished if the ignorant woman tells. The result of this prohibition is not only class discrimination, but also it is a swelling of our population by a tide of undesirables until it is rising to heights of a national menace today ... We need the establishment of a department of research and the cooperation of scientists alienists, eugenists, and psycho-pathics men who will give us facts as to the breeding of the unfit ..."
Florence Guertin Tuttle. "Suffrage and Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 3 (March 1921 , pages 6 and 17.
"... we all have two choices - (1either the births must be limited, or (2we must at periods kill each other off in order to protect the rest."
Letter to the Editor, Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 6 (June 1921 , page 8.
"The problem that American society must solve is this: Shall family limitation be attained through abortion or through Birth Control? Shall normal, safe scientific methods be employed, or shall women be forced to continue to resort to dangerous, surgical operations, often performed in the most dangerous circumstances? In view of the permanent injuries that often result from abortion hemorrhage, sepsis, tetanus, anemia, malignant diseases, displacement, neurosis, endometritus, there can be but one logical and sane answer to these questions ...
"Incontrovertible figures and statistics, of the most definite and exact precision, drive us to the conclusion that filth, unsanitary conditions, and infectious diseases, are the inevitable companions of large families and numerous children ...
"When one eminent authority informs us that there are at least one million abortions performed every year in the United States of America, and others place the figure even higher, when even the Government of the United States points to an inordinately high death rate among children, we are able to understand that scientific Birth Control, aiming to prevent the dangers and the deaths from this cause, is truly hygienic and eugenic in its aim."
Margaret Sanger. "Birth Control Past, Present and Future." Birth Control Review Volume V, Number 7 (July 1921 , page 6.
1922
"I would like to have the following statement introduced as a permanent plank in our platform: The bringing about of an abortion should never be necessary; can never be moral; and must rarely be legal.
"I see no reason why the interposition of some moral, chemical, or mechanical means to keep the male element away from the female element can be considered immoral, nor why such an interposition should be made illegal. Any means used to keep the male and female elements from uniting is a preventative or contraceptive. But when [sic] once fertilization has taken place, then all the possibilities of a new soul, a new individual, are opened up, and an individual life is started that should be covered by the same protective laws that cover all human beings. The same laws that protect adults protect children. It is no less a crime to kill a baby that it is to kill an adult. Why should it be any less a crime, why should it be more moral or legal to destroy a life in its intra-uterine stages than it is after these stages are over and the baby has been born? And I say again that from the time the ovum is fertilized until the infant passes out of the uterus any destructive interference with it must be considered abortion, and that abortion should never be necessary, can never be moral, and must rarely be legal.
"... But I will take time to state that as long as children brought into the world are throttled by poverty, racked by inherited insanity, snuffed out by inherited diseases, wasted by wars and by our social system, thoughtful mothers choose abortion, when they feel it necessary, unless they are given some better alternative."
John C. Vaughan. "Birth Control Not Abortion: An Address Before the American Birth Control Conference." Birth Control Review, Volume VI, Number 9 (September 1922 , page 183.
[***] "Of course birth control itself is a eugenical measure.
"Birth control is no negative philosophy concerned solely with the number of children brought into this world. It is not merely a question of population. Primarily it is the instrument of liberation and of human development.
"Birth control for the individual, for the nation and for the world. We are fighting for the children of the present generation. we are fighting for the children, the women and the men of
the next generation. We want a world freer, happier, cleaner. We want a race of thoroughbreds."
"Remember that one hundred and fifteen years elapsed after the discovery of the new world before the first English colony was planted here. No one who saw the beginning of these great historical movements could grasp their full import. Nor shall we, who are advocating the cause of birth control, ever witness its culmination. But it is good to remember that the first step towards international peace has been taken; for the idea of birth control has already triumphantly girdled the globe."
Professor E.M. East. Quotes from Margaret Sanger's book Pivot of Civilization. Birth Control Review, Volume VI, Number 10 (October 1922 , page 253.
1924
"Until this (birth control adviceis given, no real progress can be made, for at least half the maternal deaths and two-thirds of the infant deaths are due to conditions which can only be remedied by Birth Control."
Editorial. "900 Women Saved Through Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 1 (January 1924 , page 5.
"The present establishment of government the church, the state, the law and the press are the satellites of the herd instinct, its voice, its slave.
"I must insist upon this point. Men feel what they are told to feel, until they have attained some sense of personality."
Hugh de Selincourt. "The Psychology of Sex." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 1 (January 1924 , page 9.
"She will not, having known the love of a man need to sentimentalize over this little lump of flesh, keen only on the nourishment he is thirstily drinking from her, oblivious of everything but his own comfort ... Look at this baby. He is divine: but a most terrible little monster."
Hugh de Selincourt. "The Psychology of Sex Hunger and Love." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 2 (February 1924 , page 43.
"The selection of one of the leading advocates of Birth Control as the recipient of the award would be of vast importance, for it would mean the recognition of Birth Control as a great forward movement for human welfare."
"The "Pictorial Review" Award." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 6 (June 1924 , page 182.
"Why not be frank and recognize the fact that the majority of citizens undoubtedly do resort at times to one form or another of birth control? Is it wise therefore to brand them as criminals? ... We have too many people already, the entire world has too many. Would you encourage unrestricted breeding, leading surely to crowding, poverty, starvation and all the ills that overpopulation brings? ...
"The affirmative is the only humane answer to this question, and carries with it an obligation not for the suppression, but for the encouragement, and teaching of Birth Control."
"A Protest by A.T McAtee: Virginia Anti-Birth Control Bill." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 6 (June 1924 , page 182.
"When people are faced by facts which show that hundreds of little children at the age of four are forced to spend their days in stuffy tenement rooms, helping their mothers on artificial flowers or other work which they are forced to do to keep themselves alive; when faced by the fact that ninety percent of them are undernourished and never get enough to eat ..."
"News Notes United States (New York ." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 6 (June 1924 , page 184.
"A WAY OUT by May Pierce Guest is the only short story published giving the near tragedy of the break-up of a happy marriage, averted by a knowledge of birth control."
Advertisement in the Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 6 (June 1924 , page 185.
"ARE YOU DISCOURAGED?
You want to see a better world?
You want to banish poverty?
You want happier women and children?
BUT
You pay more taxes
You give more and more in charity
and you see no improvement
STRIKE AT THE ROOT OF THE EVIL
join the
AMERICAN BIRTH CONTROL LEAGUE"
Advertisement for the Birth Control League in the Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 6 (June 1924 , page 186.
One other favorite argument of the opponents of birth control is to make birth control synonymous with abortion ...in such cases it is necessary to point out emphatically the dangers of abortions, both to the life and health ..."
Dr. Rachelle S. Yarros. "Birth Control and Sex Hygiene." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 7 (July 1924 , page 201.
"If a powerful ecclesiastical organization, armed with the vast authority of tradition, can countenance and even encourage an imprudent disregard of the Constitution of the United States, the document which insures to that organization itself the freedom to perpetuate itself and extend its influence, does the fact not set an evil example to any lesser organization or group which sets up shop to interfere in other people's affairs? Public opinion in America, I fear, is too willing to condone in the officials of the Roman Catholic Church what it condemns in the Ku Klux Klan. Today American `purity' is protected by an interlocking directorate of professional meddlers, a bloodless but bloodthirsty tribe, scanning the horizon for any and every outbreak of human passion, galloping post haste to the scene of every such verboten manifestation like a tribe of Indians descending upon a pioneer's wagon. Any Dogberry clothed in brief authority, any psychopathic person with an `obscenity' complex may inaugurate the hunt. I have run the gauntlet in this new American sport and I know how well the new Inquisition is organized."
Margaret Sanger. "The Fight Against Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 9 (September 1924 , pages 245 to 248.
"In almost all the attacks on Birth Control made by Roman Catholic speakers, abortion is confounded with the prevention of conception. The difference between the killing of human beings after they have come into existence and the guarding against the very beginnings of life has been so clear and unmistakable that it looks like deliberate malice rather than abysmal ignorance that the two should be still identified."
"Editorial." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 9 (September 1924 , page 276.
"Venereal disease, and especially syphilis, makes Birth Control by the use of the of the condom obligatory, in order to prevent infection of others, and in order to prevent the infected person from going from bad to worse as most frequently happens with advice of sexual abstinence."
"Birth Control and Medical Practice." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 10 (October 1924 , page 280.
"I doubt very much if Americans generally will ever consent to endure the wretched life which the Chinese masses have brought upon themselves by overmultiplication. Before descending into such a vale of wretchedness, curtailment of the size of the family will certainly become a general practice, but shall such curtailment be postponed until the pressure of numbers shall have wiped out much of the ease and comfort which the exploitation of a virgin continent has spread among us, or shall it be adopted in time to prevent a decline in the American standard of life?"
Edward Alsworth Ross. "The World Crisis of Population." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 10 (October 1924 , page 283.
"`Only one child in four,' he writes, `has a fair physical chance to grow up in this would-be Christian civilization."
Hornell Hart. "Book Reviews: Is Birth Control a Problem of Child Welfare?" Section entitled "Periodicals." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 10 (October 1924 , page 295.
1925
"Birth Control would prevent also 85 percent of the abortions which occur at the rate of a million a year and which have made the United States notorious throughout the world.
"Birth Control for Health and Morals." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 1 (January 1925 , page 10.
[***] "... possibly the jury thought it wrong to convict a mother of murdering an unwanted child. However that may be, no one denied that Mrs. Willard was an unwilling mother. How long will women have to bear children they do not want? How long will the State forbid women to choose for themselves whether or not they shall be mothers? How much longer will society as an institution condemn the race to involuntary parenthood? That depends almost wholly upon women. They must decide."
"Motherhood in the News: Undesired." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 2 (February 1925 , page 52.
"Many people fear birth control because they are told that it will increase extramarital immorality. They do not stop to consider whether if true (which is open to much doubtthis might be a low price to pay for the normal advance gained in avoiding the hideous immorality of enforced maternity and of easing that population pressure which bids fair to be fruitful cause of international discord."
"Population and the Food Supply: National Scientific Bodies Forecast the Future." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 2 (February 1925 , page 53.
"It has been estimated that there are over one million abortions in the United States every year. This is a larger number than occurs in any other country in the world.
"Much nervousness and mental depression in married women is due to the anxiety and dread of becoming a mother when the woman knows that her condition and home circumstances will not permit it. This often amounts to a definite disease which might be called fear of pregnancy psycho-neurosis. You have heard that when poverty comes in at the door love flies out the windows. This may be expressed in another way. When the stork arrives too often the mother loses her charm and vitality ... and often the home is wrecked."
James F. Cooper, M.D. "The Doctor and Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 3 (March 1925 , pages 69 and 70.
"The poor go without, sometimes fall into the hands of quacks, or in many cases go as a last resort to the abortionist who ruins their health and destroys life ..."
Toscan Bennett. "Birth Control, Labor, and the Catholics." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 6 (June 1925 , pages 174, 175, 188 and 189.
[***] ""While we have made a great deal of fuss," said Mr. Williams, "about a child born in a stable 1900 years ago, we are not very much troubled about children born in stables today, and the fact seems just a little out of harmony with the principles of our religion. Mary's child was expected, and wanted, and when it came she was its mother because she had willed it into being. I ask that we seek the benediction of the child by doing whatsoever we may to safeguard the right of every child to be a wanted child just as much as the Child of Bethlehem was wanted. The child has not only the right to be wanted, but it has the right to come into the world with a good body. It has a right not only to a good body but to a good mind as well.""
"M.R." in The Survey, April 15th, 1925. "Up to the Doctors." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 6 (June 1925 , page 183.
"By a curious but everlasting irony of human nature, the people who call themselves the best people and make the most noise about morals have always opposed personal liberty as the chief danger of existence ...
"We can only regard them with equal horror and marvel that any but savages or despots could uphold the barbarism of keeping women in ignorance and in bondage concerning the most perilous and the most precious right they can possess: the right to choose not only the fathers of their children, but the time and conditions of their birth.
"I prophesy that in a few years these over-righteous tyrants will be accepting birth control as the natural and normal condition of life; and using it as a sacred institution with which to combat the next step of human progress.
"Those who endure the martyrdom of abuse and contempt heaped upon the advocates of birth control can rest assured that they are merely running the gauntlet that every benefactor of the race has had to endure."
"Message from Rupert Hughes." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 7 (July 1925 , page 209.
"I plead with you not to consider detached Bible verses as proof against Birth Control. We need a scientific atmosphere for the discussion of one of the world's greatest problems ... Surely in the past six thousand years that command has been amply filled and now the world faces the grave menace of overpopulation."
Rudolph I. Coffee, Ph.D. "The Case for Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 8 (August 1925 , pages 221, 222, 237 and 238.
"Let the aim of the State be not numbers, but citizens of quality physically, mentally, and morally. Let the aim of the church be not numbers, but Christians of quality mentally, morally, and spiritually. As in the great war it was not Germany, breeding like rabbits, that won, but France, a nation practicing Birth Control ..."
"In all civilized societies, the probability that the average woman will die in child birth is immeasurably greater than the probability that the average male will die in battle."
"Citizens and Christians of Quality." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 9 (September 1925 , page 257.
"In the opening of this play the whole panorama of the slavery of motherhood is laid bare in the most vivid and convincing manner.
On a wind swept ranch in Texas, a Polish family, where women folk bear children year after year, cook, clean, feed stock, work in the fields, under the brutal domination of the father and husband, is given dramatic treatment."
"A Review by Anne Kennedy" [of "Hurricane," a play]. Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 9 (September 1925 , pages 259 and 260.
"Marry to get out from under the bonds of slavery to enter into a more and deathlike slavery."
"Death in Life." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 10 (October 1925 , page 286.
"Is it necessary in these enlightened times to point out that one the very reasons urged by advocates of Birth Control for legitimizing Birth Control information is their abhorrence of the all too prevailing practice of infanticide under existing conditions?"
"Periodical Notes." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 10 (October 1925 , page 295.
"On the contrary: Birth Control, as Lord Dawson of Penn so vigorously pointed out to the Bishops of England in an assemblage not unlike the recent convention at New Orleans is one of the first requisites to happy marriage ... And likewise only by Birth Control the instrument which empowers parents to determine when and where and under what conditions they shall bring children into this world can permanent, happy, healthy, wholesome family relations be established. These facts are so "idiotically obvious" that it must bore the readers of the Birth Control Review to find them repeated here. But it is precisely these axioms of racial hygiene which have been overlooked by the high dignitaries of the Protestant Episcopal Church ..."
"Editorials." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 11 (November 1925 , page 307.
"A feeble-minded, hunchbacked syphilitic boy may develop useful habits of work and harmless habits of recreation and may be trained to respond to certain simple social demands ...
"The fact is delinquent children are very often ... unwanted children."
Miriam Van Waters. "The Unwanted Child Comes Before the Court." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 11 (November 1925 , page 313.
"It is at least possible that on balance there would be less irregularity and more happy marriages. But in any case the social mischief resulting from irregular unions not resulting in child births is insignificant in comparison with the hideous evils that follow the production of unwanted babies."
Harold Cox. "The Attitude of Theologians Toward Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 12 (December 1925 , pages 345 and 346.
1926
"IS BIRTH CONTROL ABORTION? Birth Control is not abortion. Abortion is that taking of life after conception; Birth Control is the prevention of conception. Birth Control is the great preventive of abortion."
"Birth Control Primer." Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 1 (January 1926 , page 3.
"For what is more immoral than murder? Without Birth Control abortion will continue to be practiced, and abortion is but another form of infanticide."
"The Town Hall Revisited." Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 1 (January 1926 , pages 14 and 15.
"Many of these mothers become convinced that they should not bear children so frequently and on finding themselves again pregnant resort in desperation to abortion as their only remedy. Many of these are fortunate enough to go through with this not once only but many times without serious consequences to their health. On the other hand there are more tragedies than most of us realize. During fifteen years on the east side I have come to know from personal experience that a very large number die from these criminal measures. But death is not the only tragedy we see. Many others are seriously infected and suffer from the local effects perhaps the rest of their lives. Operation follows operation. Sterility is a frequent sequela of this criminal interference with nature."
Benjamin T. Tilton, M.D. "The Need of Birth Control in Our Crowded East Side." Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 3 (March 1926 , page 79.
"The dangerous and growing evil of abortion can be prevented by the use of these simple devices of contraception."
"Birth Control Primer." Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 5 (May 1926 , page 147.
"Why abortion? asked the nurse. The very idea of it is repellant to most women. It is a frightful human waste. It endangers a woman's life, and even when successful leaves her to face an aftermath of psychological shock and depression that defeated nature demands as payment for her thwarted plans."
Elizabeth Watson. "Speaking the News." Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 6 (June 1926 , page 193.
"One can not fail to wonder why they think abortion is better than Birth Control; no sane person can doubt that it is far wiser, more humane, to prevent frequent child births by the harmless uses of contraceptives, than to kill a forming child, a little life that did not ask to be born. For that is what abortion is: a crime."
Piqui Norton. "Aspects of Birth Control in Latin-America." Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 7 (July 1926 , page 232.
"There is only one practical program of Eugenics. That is Birth Control. A Eugenist, who is not a Birth Controller, preaches a doctrine of despair. Compulsory sterilization, compulsory celibacy, compulsory parenthood of the eugenically fit all these are impracticable and contrary to human nature. If we want to check the multiplication of the unfit, let us put the power of choice into the hands of the Mothers. No woman wants to bear defective children, but so far women have been helpless in the matter. Trust the Mothers, and give them the power of Birth Control."
"Birth Control the True Eugenics: Mothers Who Refuse to Bear Unfit Children." Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 8 (August 1926 , page 248.
"The American Birth Control League, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York City, which I represent in my trip through coast cities, means by Birth Control the prevention of conception. This is very different from abortion. We are bitterly opposed to that as a very definite and dangerous evil ... Illegal abortion is murder and is utterly to be condemned. Contraception prevents the very situations which lead to such illegal operations and so improves our society."
Dr. Percy Clark. "Birth Control on the Air: Part I." Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 10 (October 1926 , pages 303 and 304.
"But what, then, is the answer to this problem of rapidly increasing populations, so that a nation must expand into the territory of some other expanding nation or slowly die of starvation? If the answer is not war of conquest and extermination what is it? Obviously the limitation of population. We are limiting it now by the restriction of immigration. We refuse to admit defectives, weaklings, paupers, idiots, through that gateway. When we get wise enough we shall refuse to admit undesirables through the gateway of birth. "Quality, not quantity," is the slogan for the parents of the future. This will necessitate other changes in human nature. But unless such changes are brought about it will be the same old hell of bloody and brutal war to the end of the hideous chapter."
The Universalist Leader. "Press Clippings." Birth Control Review, Volume X, Number 10 (October 1926 , page 317.
"IS BIRTH CONTROL ABORTION? Birth Control is not abortion. Abortion is that taking of life after conception; Birth Control is the prevention of conception. Birth Control is the great preventive of abortion."
"Birth Control Primer." Birth Control Review, Volume XI, Number 1 (January 1927 , page 3.
1927
"Sexual expression is one of the most profoundly spiritual of all the avenues of human existence, and Birth Control the supreme moral instrument by which, without injury to others, nor to the future destinies of mankind on this earth, each individual is enabled to progress on the road of self-development and self-realization."
Margaret Sanger, quoted in the Birth Control Review, Volume XI, Number 1 (April 1927 , page 121.
"Most of those present know that Birth Control is not abortion. The alarming increase in self-induced abortions among married women in this country is a cause of great concern to all medical men. In the final analysis this practice represents a revolt against an unwanted pregnancy. How much better to place in the hands of these distracted women the means of preventing pregnancy so they will not be driven into practice which is repulsive to all the finer feelings of humanity as well as being a severe threat to the health and life of the mother. Birth Control or Contraception, as we speak of it medically, will prevent abortion."
"A Few Medical Facts About Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XI, Number 1 (April 1927 , page 124.
"Religion, because of its very nature, must take its stand for Birth Control. It believes in cosmos, not chaos, in choice not chance, in free will, not fatalism. It must, therefore, believe in children by choice rather than by chance and this is what voluntary parenthood a better phrase than "Birth Control" really means. Let those who argue that Birth Control "interferes with nature," refuse to weed their garden and permit it to be "natural." Religion cannot evade the challenge of Birth Control because of its interest in the poor. Statistics show how after the third child, poor people can no longer maintain their economic independence, and under-nourishment, maladjustment, disease, poverty and loss of self-respect set in. Religion is concerned with communal welfare. As such, it ought to encourage those physically, mentally, morally and spiritually fit to have more children and decrease the propagation of the unfit, the epileptics, syphilitics, morons, imbeciles, degenerates, etc. The child should not only be well-born but also welcome. Religious interest in the child calls for its sanction of voluntary parenthood. We fought for national "self-determination" in the great war; why should we not be in favor of individual self-determination in peace? Religious interest in morality is an added argument for Birth Control. The child should not be looked upon as a "penalty for sin" but a blessing that was desired. It is a libel upon human kind to say that this "penalty" alone keeps people from promiscuity. Birth Control also receives its support from religious interest in motherhood. Without it, woman becomes a breeding machine as she was in ancient Greece, void of a soul but necessary to produce slaves and soldiers for industry and war. If you don't want visitors unannounced, why not apply this to "little visitors" as well? In barbarism, nature is superior to man; in civilization, man is superior to nature. Birth Control is a product of civilization and an instrument for the further development of civilization."
Dr. Louis L. Mann. "Religion and Birth Control" in "Varied and Powerful Testimony." Birth Control Review, Volume XI, Number 1 (May 1927 , pages 141 and 142.
"The most civilized countries everywhere and the most civilized people in them are those with the lowest birth rate.
"THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION. It is necessary to abolish such obstacles as war, starvation and disease if the nations are to preserve their present civilization. But civilization begins in the home and is destroyed whenever the family becomes larger than the parents can support in comfort. Overcrowded tenements, which give no chance for decency and morality for the growing children, are uncivilized. Child labor and scanty education, necessary when the father's wages cannot support the family without help from the children, destroy civilization. A life of ill-health and hardship for the mother, with no opportunity for recreation or for larger interests, is not a civilized existence. Crowded schools, double sessions, classes of 50 or 60 children for the harassed teachers do not tend to progress in civilization. Civilization is only possible when mother and child are given the opportunity of happy and adequate living. If we desire that civilization shall progress, we must eliminate bad conditions. The best remedy is through BIRTH CONTROL. The mother can then limit her family to the number for whom she can adequately care, and for whom the community offers good education and fair opportunity in life."
Havelock Ellis. "Birth Control Primer." Birth Control Review, Volume XI, Number 1 (June 1927 , page 163.
"Infanticide is, of course, merely the primitive method of limiting families. It is possible that, in countries where infanticide is common, the parent thinks no more of preventing a baby from continuing to live than people in civilized communities think of preventing a baby from being born. In both cases economic necessity or at least economic convenience presses, and for economic necessity men and women will do almost anything. At least, savages and comfortably-off people will ..."
"Primitive Methods of Population Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XI, Number 1 (October 1927 , page 267.
"... the unbalanced over-population of the poorer classes, adds enormously to the complex problems of public and private charities, and ... there is a general consensus of opinion among economists, and sociologists, that over-population in any country is a serious menace to world peace."
"News Notes." Birth Control Review, Volume XI, Number 1 (October 1927 , page 271.
"Society must take its choice between contraceptives and abortion. If knowledge of scientific contraception is withheld, there seems to be no alternative but abortion. No woman should be asked to bear a child unwillingly or at a sacrifice of health or happiness. So far as unmarried girls are concerned, opponents of Birth Control argue that to disseminate knowledge of contraception would simply be to put a premium on illicit amours. They argue that girls are restrained from indiscretion through the fear of consequences. That is nonsense. Love cannot be abolished by legislation. Nor can legislation or social rules eliminate those acts which are the consequence of love. They are fundamental. So long as men and women live on this earth, the sexual act will be performed, legitimately or illegitimately. Moral or immoral, right or wrong, natural instincts will find an outlet. And laws, creeds, and customs might just as well reconcile themselves to it. Which is better, to arm every girl with a knowledge of contraceptive methods and trust to her innate decency to keep herself pure, or to withhold that knowledge and hang over her head the threat of ostracism and disgrace that will drive her to dangerous, illegal operations if she slips? We live in a world of imperfections. When we fail to recognize that fact and adjust our customs to it, we simply put a premium on crime."
Vancouver Daily Sun [British Columbia]. "A Premium on Crime." Birth Control Review, Volume XI, Number 1 (October 1927 , page 277.
1928
"Women's desire for freedom is born of the feminine spirit, which is the absolute, elemental inner urge of womanhood. It is the strongest force in her nature; it cannot be destroyed. The chief obstacles to the normal expression of this force are undesired pregnancy and the burden of unwanted children. Society, in dealing with the feminine spirit can resort to violence in an effort to enslave the elemental urge of womanhood, making of woman a mere instrument of reproduction and pushing her when she revolts. Or, it can permit her to choose whether she shall become a mother and how many children she will have. It can go on crushing what is uncrushable, or it can recognize woman's claim to freedom, and cease to impose destructive barriers. If we choose the latter course we must not only remove all restrictions on the use of contraceptives, but we must legalize and encourage their use."
Margaret Sanger. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 1 (January 1928 , page 3.
"The emancipation of women would be impossible, inconceivable, without the voluntary control of reproduction. The relation of Birth Control to the feminist movement is comparable to the relation which the foundation of a house bears to the superstructure. It is essential, fundamental, not only to the emancipation of women, but to the contemplation of their emancipation. Women cannot be free, cannot develop their potentialities, cannot even begin to plan their lives, as long as they are subject to haphazard pregnancies."
Edith Houghton Hooker. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 1 (January 1928 , page 3.
"Artificial Birth Control will further increase the independence of women, and their opportunities, besides maternity, of effective self-expression."
J. Arthur Thompson. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 1 (January 1928 , page 3.
"Knowledge of how to regulate the size of the family is in the United States a class privilege. The organized movement for the emancipation of women does not demand for wives unhindered access to knowledge of the means of limiting the family. The movement is in the hands of women of the classes, who already have such access. And yet, to hosts of hollow-eyed mothers, release from the bearing of unwanted children would have a thousand times the practical value of access to the professions, or the right to vote and hold office. Until she is rid of bondage to the results of the sexual demands lawfully made upon her by her husband, what is called `emancipation' is a mockery to the wife of the poor man."
Edward Alsworth Ross. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 1 (January 1928 , page 3.
"To create a race of well-born children it is essential that the function of motherhood should be elevated to a position of dignity and this is impossible as long as conception remains a matter of chance."
Declaration of Principles of American Birth Control League. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 1 (January 1928 , page 3.
"`Is not the life of an unborn child as sacred as that of an adult?' A student of history will search long for any evidence of the sacredness of life, either remote or modern. Ancient history is page after page of war, theft and rape, men, women, and children killed, virgins taken captive, and trophies carted away. Modern history is the same. Our daily papers show us that human life is the cheapest thing on the market. Babies are given away or deserted, but dogs, chickens, and pigs are sold, and a pedigree goes with them. No, life isn't sacred, never has been, never will be till Birth Control has taught the world that ideal motherhood means welcome babies. Then and only then, are mother and babe sacred, and home a sanctuary. Forced motherhood and unwelcome children are pitiful and heartbreaking. Forget medieval superstitions go about your city with open eyes and mind go to the police court for three days go to the baby homes to the crowded tenement districts to the factories, then answer the question: Is Birth Control a Crime? If you can see straight and your brain is functioning properly, you will say `Birth Control is an imperative need in world progress and utilitarian civilization.' Scrub stock has been replaced by thorobreds in the barn, now let us do some selective breeding for the human family. `He who is begotten in true love, and comes welcomed into life, is of immaculate conception.' Sterilize those not fitted to propagate, and teach Birth Control, which leads to sacred motherhood and welcome children, and America shall lead the world."
Ella K. Dearborn. "Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 3 (March 1928 , page 88.
"All we are seeking is to promote human happiness and the ennoblement of the human race, and we have no desire to advocate Birth Control if it can be attained in any other way. Our study has convinced us that it cannot be attained without Birth Control, and we have therefore felt impelled at continual personal sacrifice to advocate it; but if the Roman Catholics or anyone else will show us a better way or even an equally good one, we shall be delighted and be quite ready to help them. Let us have open discussion and let the best cause win."
Charles V. Drysdale. "Roman Catholics and Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 6 (June 1928 , pages 177 and 178.
"The Roman Catholics say that Birth Control is immoral. We claim that for us Birth Control is of high moral value. We do not ask to constrain their consciences, let them cease to attempt to constrain ours."
"Editorial." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 6 (June 1928 , page 170.
"What does the World League for Sexual Reform aim at?
"It aims at being the headquarters of a campaign against a false sexual morality, a false morality, to which already endless numbers of human beings have been sacrificed, and which continues daily to demand its victims.
"In this fight we mean to use exclusively those mental weapons and those facts, which sexual science (in the widest sensegives us.
"What is out of accord with the laws of nature and science can never be ethically right or truly moral. Where opposition exists between the forces of nature and of society (as, for example, in the population question one must be at pains to do away with this opposition by using the conscious will of mankind to bring these forces into harmonious cooperation.
"We are unable to recognize as binding the varying rules prescribed at different times by the moment. We can recognize only what is in agreement with the teachings of life and love.
"The following ten points deserve special consideration:
1. Marriage reform. Wedlock must be raised to the position of a living comradeship between two people. This necessitates a reform in the marriage contract, conjugal rights and divorce.
2. The position of women as members of society. Women have not by any means everywhere as yet won the equal rights that are their due in political, economic, social and sexual spheres.
3. Birth Control i.e. greater sense of responsibility in the begetting of children. We believe in making harmless contraceptives known, combat on the other hand both abortion and the penalizing of abortion.
4. Eugenics in the sense of Nietzsche's words: "You shall not merely continue the race, but move it upward!"
5. A fair judgment of those who are unsuited to marriage, above all the intermediate sexual types.
6. Tolerance of free sexual relations, especially protection of the unmarried mother and the child born out of wedlock.
7. The prevention of prostitution and venereal disease.
8. The conception of aberrations of sexual desire not as criminal, sinful or vicious but as a more or less pathological phenomenon.
9. The setting up of a code of sexual law, which does not interfere with the mutual sexual will of grown-up persons.
10. The question of sexual education and enlightenment.
"All these points have in the last fifty years been the subject of lively discussions, which have not only often fundamentally altered the whole conception, but also the whole organization of sexual life. We can in this sense speak of a sexual crisis. The old morality with its terrible sexual misery still has the upper hand, and the human prejudices and condemnation are still heaped higher."
"News Notes." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 7 (July 1928 , page 215.
[***] "It is not by making childbirth safe that women will emancipate herself from her age-long position of subjugation. So long as she is unable to choose for herself whether and when she will be a mother, she remains in slavery to her function of reproduction, even though medical science should succeed in making childbirth not only safe but entirely painless. Only by Birth Control can the woman really free herself. When women are in full control of their own bodies, then the world will honor motherhood and will learn that it is worth while to do everything possible to make it safe and desirable."
"Editorial." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 10 (October 1928 , page 283.
"Civilization depends upon the means of controlling natural forces and the comforts, luxuries, conveniences, opportunities for expanding the mind, satisfying aesthetic needs and increasing physical well-being which raise society above the level of barbarism. For the individual and the family, civilization is reflected in a high Standard of Living."
"Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Preservation of Civilization." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 12 (December 1928 , page 335.
"In the absence of an improbable revolutionary improvement in agriculture, we shall be pointedly confronted with the choice of reducing either our birth-rate or our standard of living. Even if it could be demonstrated that this country could support 500,000,000 by eliminating waste and giving up meat, the standard of living would continue to fall and the problem of numbers continually get worse."
A. B. Wolfe, Ohio State University. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Preservation of Civilization." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 12 (December 1928 , page 335.
"An over-populated nation or an over-populated family can at best simply struggle for survival. A nation or a family whose numbers are intelligently limited can devote itself to adjustments of its outstanding social wrongs and to the cultural advances which alone set off man from the beasts that perish."
Robert C. Dexter. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Preservation of Civilization." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 12 (December 1928 , page 335.
"The most civilized countries everywhere and the most civilized people in them are those with the lowest birth-rate."
Havelock Ellis. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Preservation of Civilization." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 12 (December 1928 , page 335.
"The value of the size of population is to be measured by its effect on the standard of living. There is nothing to be desired in the mere increase of ordinary people. The more of them there are the more ordinary they are. The object of social endeavor should be not the volume of life, but the value of lives."
Henry Pratt Fairchild. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Preservation of Civilization." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 12 (December 1928 , page 335.
"When the majority of men and women are driven by the grim lash of sex and hunger, in the unending struggle, to feed themselves and to carry the dead-weight of dying progeny, when little children are forced into factories, streets, and shops, education is quite impossible; and civilization is more completely threatened than it ever could be by pestilence or war."
Margaret Sanger. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Preservation of Civilization." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 12 (December 1928 , page 335.
1929
"Year by year, in spite of prohibitory legislation, the murder of the unborn child goes on, has gone on until it constitutes the scandal and tragedy of both Europe and America. The Far East more cynical or less insincere permits not only Abortion but Infanticide as the only means it knows of limiting population."
"Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Abolition of Abortion and Infanticide." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (January 1929 , page 3.
"There is one thing which poor mothers will all admit namely, that they have made repeated and frequently successful efforts to procure abortion. I cannot help thinking that we live in a world of sham. Every now and then cases come before the Courts and some person is sent to jail for a long period of years for performing an illegal operation, and yet this is the commonest thing you can think of in these places. The women will all confess it to you, and will tell you that, at the imminent risk of their life and health, they are driven to resort to this as the only means of escape from a state that they find intolerable."
Lord Buckmaster. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Abolition of Abortion and Infanticide." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (January 1929 , page 3.
"Anyone who knows about Birth Control knows that it would do away with abortions, which occur in appalling numbers in America every year."
Margaret Sanger. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Abolition of Abortion and Infanticide." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (January 1929 , page 3.
"Not only has Birth Control nothing in common with Abortion but is a weapon of the greatest value in fighting this evil. With its help we may hope to limit and, I trust, eradicate this criminal practice. It is not generally known outside the medical profession and social workers, how widespread this practice is. It amounts in fact to a national disgrace. I say national because the United States leads all other countries in the number of abortions performed yearly. The laws enacted to suppress it have had but little deterrent effect. The practice is most common among married women, particularly of the poorer prolific classes who already have children and cannot afford to add to their number. These mothers, on finding themselves pregnant again after repeated pregnancies, resort in desperation to this immoral and dangerous means of relief. Some women seek this means not only once but a dozen or twenty times. Some women do not live to seek it for the second time."
Rachelle Yarros, M.D. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Abolition of Abortion and Infanticide." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (January 1929 , page 3.
"Thoughtful people who have studied the subject have pointed out over and over again that information with regard to Birth Control, dispensed by competent and high-minded physicians, would be the most powerful means of decreasing the number of abortions. In my own experience of many years of practice, I have realized more and more what a great influence a physician can exert on women in deterring them such practice. I have had many a woman come to me distracted and almost insane, because of another pregnancy, saying that she is ready to die, if need be, rather than have another child in her already depleted state of health. Yet in many such cases I have been able to quiet these women and bring them back to their normal sense of responsibility to themselves and to their families. In such cases it is necessary to point out emphatically the dangers of abortions, both to life and health, and then offer the women the comforting assurance that, with proper information, they need never have another child."
Alice Hamilton, M.D. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Abolition of Abortion and Infanticide." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (January 1929 , page 3.
"Birth Control is carried on in the tenements all the time, but it is not prevention of conception, that the women do not understand. It is in the form of abortion, which every woman can learn about if she wishes."
Benjamin T. Tilton, M.D. "Ten Good Reasons for Birth Control The Abolition of Abortion and Infanticide." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (January 1929 , page 3.
"Here are the forms which a general denial and disgust with life takes: at one end abortion, which is the destruction of life, at the other an aversion to such life as offers, reaching its height in suicide, which is self murder."
"Editorial." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (January 1929 , page 6.
"The right to produce the men and women of the future should be a privilege based on health, or the ability to care for children properly, or an honest liking for children. People get the notion Birth Control means no children or at the most, one or two children. Properly applied it means nothing of the sort. It goes in for regulation to the extent that children are not born into disease, poverty and unhappiness."
Contributed, Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (February 1929 , page 50.
[***] "The first right of the child is to be wanted to be desired with an intensity of love that gives it its title to being and joyful impulse to live. It should be wanted by both parents, but especially by the mother, who is to carry it, nourish it, and perhaps influence its life by her thoughts, her passions, her loves, her hates, her yearnings ... We are all familiar with the old wives' tale of children `marked' because of a mother's fright or other strong emotion, though we know little concerning the truth or falsity of this theory. Just as little do we know of the effect of fear, hate, yearning or disgust in the mother at the time of conception ... My personal opinion, founded upon observation as nurse and as a worker in the Birth Control movement, is that the mother's emotions have a profound effect upon the child. I believe that the mother's fear of pregnancy has a most unhappy influence upon the life of her offspring; that it is responsible for the timidity, the fretfulness and feebleness of many infants ... Why the great number of feebleminded children? Why the host of infants born too feeble to withstand the difficulties of the first year of existence? Why the weakling manhood and womanhood? ... Science has answered these questions in part, but only in part. I do not believe that they will be conclusively answered until account is taken of the condition of the mind of the mother from the moment of the creative embrace until the child is born. The tragedy of the unwanted child of the accidental child only begins with whatever evil prenatal effect the emotional condition of the mother may have upon it ... Usually it suffers a further handicap by being carried by a mother who is physically ill or overworked. Fear of pregnancy is frequently inspired in the mind of the mother by the burden of too many children or by want or by both. When it arrives, the accidental child usually finds itself in the ranks of the millions of hungry and neglected children. Often it is merely a candidate for an item in the infant mortality statistics ... We hear a god deal of sentimentality about unfailing love. We are told that even these unwanted children have that to protect them in their hard lots. But how few of the poorer women have the time and the strength to let mother love develop and express itself? We make a mistake in assuming that mothers are always kind. We forget that under the stress of caring for many children, under the strain of helping to earn bread for hungry mouths and clothing for bodies clothed in rags, the strongest mother love may turn bitter and cruel ... If you doubt, go for a little while to live among the families whose mothers are overburdened with children, whose bodies and brains are worn threadbare with toil inside and outside the home ... Eugenists do well to insist that it is the first material right of the child to be `well born.' But have they taken into consideration all of the factors? From what deep spring of moral and spiritual weakness arises this huge stream of the cringing, the suppliant, the submissive? Whence come the natures of these millions of human beings who are but timorous pawns moved hither and thither upon the chess board of existence by a few powerful hands? Who can say that it is not because we come into life with the feeling, conscious or subconscious, that we are not wanted that we are accidents? Who can say that it is not because we have graven upon our natures, the fear, the disgust, the loathing, the shrinking of our mothers? Our imaginations are as yet too weak, too uninformed to portray to us the strength, the beauty and the wonder of a humanity yet to be brought into being through children desired and created in the flame of love."
Margaret Sanger. "Woman, Morality and Birth Control" in "Still Another Reason for Birth Control The Right of the Child to be Welcome." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (March 1929 , page 67.
"Far from Birth Control being immoral, it is the refusal of Birth Control that is immoral. For parents to bring children into the world without a reasonable expectation of being able to give them a fair chance in life, cannot be in accord with the will of a God of Love. It is, of course, conceivable that the Roman Catholic speakers had in mind certain obligations imposed on the members of their church, which are not based on usefulness to the community, but on some form of supposed revelation of the will of God. In this case, such duties are purely religious and therefore not a fit subject for legislation ... it is this church, so ready to cry out if its own liberty is touched, that presumes to demand that the members of all other religions shall be forced by law to conform to a religious obligation which they refuse to accept as binding, and even reject as immoral ... How completely the minds of some of the Roman Catholic hierarchy are dominated by religious not ethical conceptions may be more plainly seen by glancing back to the early days of the Birth Control movement ... We look to the rank and file of the Roman Catholic Church to complete conversion of the priests and cardinals. They have done this before. They can and will do it again."
Editorial. Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (April 1929 , pages 99 and 100.
"By the present Declaration of the Rights of the Child, commonly known as the "Declaration of Geneva," men and women of all nations, recognizing that Mankind owes to the Child the best that it has to give, declare and accept it as their duty that, beyond and above all considerations of race, nationality, or creed:
I. THE CHILD must be given the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually.
II. THE CHILD that is hungry must be fed; the child that is sick must be nursed; the child that is backward must be helped; the delinquent child must be reclaimed; and the orphan and the waif must be sheltered and succoured.
III. THE CHILD must be first to receive relief in times of distress.
IV. THE CHILD must be put in a position to earn a livelihood and must be protected against every form of exploitation.
V. THE CHILD must be brought up in the consciousness that its talents must be devoted to the service of its fellow-men."
In The World's Children, May, 1929. "The Declaration of Geneva." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (July 1929 , page 184.
"Women clamor for deliverance from compulsory motherhood. Yet dull witted legislators, both state and federal, refuse to sanction the dissemination of harmless contraceptives to those unable or unwilling to undergo a pregnancy that may be fatal to mother or child ... Whether Birth Control is right or wrong, moral or immoral, a need or a nuisance, one thing is certain. Mothers of ten or of one can no longer by the mere exercise of a function common to all living creatures consider themselves exempt from social responsibility."
Margaret Sanger. "Women and Birth Control: Our Neighbors Say." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (July 1929 , page 204.
"The American Birth Control League is definitely opposed to abortion. As contraceptive knowledge is perfected and made available, the necessity for abortion will obviously be reduced to a negligible minimum."
Editorial Note in "The Ferch Clinic in Vienna." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (September 1929 , page 260.
"Foxes think large families among the rabbits highly commendable. Employers who want large supplies of cheap labor, priests who want large numbers of parishioners, military leaders who want plenty of cheap food for gunpowder, and politicians who want plenty of voters, all agree in commending large families and rapid multiplication among the poorer classes."
Thomas Nixon Carver, Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (October 1929 , page 287.
[***] "The American Birth Control League, from its inception, has put itself on record as steadfastly opposed to abortion."
"Anyone who knows about Birth Control knows that it would do away with abortions, which occur in appalling numbers in America every year."
Margaret Sanger in "The Curse of Abortion." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (November 1929 , page 307.
"He who would combat abortion and at the same time assail contraception may be likened to the person who would fight contagious diseases and forbid disinfection. For contraceptive measures are important weapons in the fight against abortion. The use of contraceptive measures is largely responsible for the fact that the number of abortions does not increase immeasurably."
Max Hirsch, M.D. "The Curse of Abortion." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (November 1929 , page 307.
"The number of abortions performed annually in the United States is enormous. Since all but therapeutic abortions are illegal, exact figures are not obtainable, but it has been estimated variously by experts that somewhere between 500,000 and 2,000,000 abortions are procured annually in the United States."
Hannah M. Stone, M.D. in "The Curse of Abortion." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (November 1929 , page 307.
"Not only has Birth Control nothing in common with Abortion but it is a weapon of the greatest value in fighting this evil. With its help we may hope to limit and, I trust, eradicate this criminal practice. It is not generally known outside the medical profession and social workers, how widespread this practice is. It amounts in fact to a national disgrace. I say national because the United States leads all other countries in the number of abortions performed yearly."
Rachelle Yarros, M.D. "The Curse of Abortion." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (November 1929 , page 307.
"The knowledge of contraceptive measures would be the saving of the lives of thousands of poor mothers who in their desperate efforts to get rid of an unborn and unwanted child resort to violent and dangerous means."
S. Adolphus Knopf, M.D. "The Curse of Abortion." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (November 1929 , page 307.
"Thoughtful people who have studied the subject have pointed out over and over again that information with regard to Birth Control, dispensed by competent and high-minded physicians, would be the most powerful means of decreasing the number of abortions."
Alice Hamilton, M.D. "The Curse of Abortion." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (November 1929 , page 307.
"The bringing about of an abortion should never be necessary, can never be moral; and should rarely be legal."
John C. Vaughn, M.D. "The Curse of Abortion." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (November 1929 , page 307.
"Abortion is life destroying, prevention of conception is life saving. The interruption of pregnancy to destroy a developing ovum entails physical hazards to the woman which often add to the mortality rate. At the same time, this is the destruction of life, feticide, literally speaking, infanticide."
Ira S. Wile, M.D. "The Curse of Abortion." Birth Control Review, Volume XIII, Number 1 (November 1929 , page 307.
1930
"[In Germany] according to very conservative estimates, there are about one million abortion cases a year. Considering the fact that tens of thousands of women die [annually] because of these illegal operations, very often performed by quacks and midwives, it becomes evident to the sensible that more light must be cast on the subject."
Robert Strohmeyer, German Birth Control League, quoted in "News Notes." Birth Control Review, Volume XIV, Number 7 (July 1930 , page 217.
"Attention is also given to the subject of abortion. Reports are submitted of its increasing prevalence and of its dangers, and the means of combating this growing and preventable evil are considered. "The spread of contraceptive knowledge," reads another resolution, "is the best means of reducing the present high incidence of abortions.""
Hannah M. Stone, M.D. "The 7th International [Birth Control] Conference." Birth Control Review, Volume XIV, Number 11 (November 1930 , page 318.
"Birth Control and illegal abortion were the subjects most stressed. Practically every speaker referred to them, and the demand for repeal of the law against abortion was general ... The physicians spoke of the danger to women of abortions performed by unskilled quacks, who are encouraged under the present law ... General recommendations covering international study and instruction in prevention of conception, and state aid for abortion were made ... Dr. [Adelheid] Popp made the following recommendations ... Free treatment for abortions and pregnancies in clinics and hospitals ... Legalizing of abortions performed by doctors ..."
Description of the Fourth Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, by Erna Rieman. "The Vienna Congress." Birth Control Review, Volume XIV, Number 11 (November 1930 , pages 321 and 322.
"He deplores the attempts to stop abortion by legislation and would have it made legal and open ... "When once a woman has got into her head the idea of doing away with the unborn child, she will somehow contrive to carry her intention into effect." If the doctor does not lend his knowledge and skill, it may simply mean the maiming or death of the woman through treatment by ignorant quacks."
Review of Dr. J.H. Leunbach's book Birth Control Abortion and Sterilization, by Annie G. Porritt. Birth Control Review, Volume XIV, Number 11 (November 1930 , page 329.
1931
[EXPANDING THE HARD CASES] "We doctors are afraid of the words "social and economic grounds" for birth control advice. But the father getting mean wages or long out of work or ill, the underpaid teacher with children, the young couple who would marry if the wife could go on working and postpone childbearing a year or two, the couple with all the children they can decently rear are we to sidestep these problems?"
Robert L. Dickinson. "On the Control of Conception." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 1 (January 1931 , page 6.
[***] "Furthermore, every intelligent person knows that contraception is opposed to abortion."
Ira S. Wile, M.D. "Contraception and Public Health." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 1 (January 1931 , page 8.
[EXPANDING THE HARD CASES] "But even the medical limitation need not be as narrow as would appear at first glance, for the range of decision in these cases depends on the breadth and humanity of the doctor's point of view, and runs, Mrs. Robinson tell us, all the way from danger of "immediate death of the mother" to danger that "the child might suffer from malnutrition, mental defect or other predictable malady."
"Mrs. Robinson very neatly states that a major object of a birth control centre is "to prescribe birth control in order to proscribe abortion.""
Mary Sumner Boyd. Review of Caroline Hadley Robinson's book Seventy Birth Control Clinics: A Survey and Analysis, Including the General Effects of Birth Control on Size and Quality of Population. Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 1 (January 1931 , page 24.
"But every abortion is a sign of failure somewhere, and is never anything but deplorable. What proportion of these failures are deliberately brought about is unknown. The meager records now available seem to indicate that from one-half to nine-tenths are the result of deliberate intention of which only a small portion are therapeutic, that is, necessitated by the health of the mother.
"Abortions have an element of danger even when done with the best surgical skill and cleanliness ..."
Frederick C. Holden, M.D., F.A.C.S. "Child Spacing." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 3 (March 1931 , page 74.
"... it is known that in Germany ... a considerable number of the 4,300 cases of suicide by women which occur annually is due to unwanted pregnancies; and that thousands of women perish yearly from the consequences of abortion."
"An International Report." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 3 (March 1931 , page 95.
"More power to the pioneers of this crusade for women's emancipation from man's thraldom, and for children's right to be born when, and when only, they are wanted. Never must they be accidents. The church and the state must keep hands off these most personal affairs. Human lives cannot be so lightly tossed into this vale of tears, because some men still think it is woman's job and her only job. It is quite evident that such men never should have been born. Thank goodness, we are living in a progressive age, not in the monkey age."
Kate Crane Gartz, California. Letter to the Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 4 (April 1931 , pages 126 and 127.
"Here is a situation which may well give anxious thought to those Roman Catholics who remember that they are Americans as well as churchmen. Here is religious intolerance of the most typical nature. The great Protestant Churches the Episcopalians at the Lambeth Conference, the Federal Council of Churches in Christ in America, branches of the Methodist Church of the United States and many member churches have declared for the righteousness and desirability of birth control in cases where true morality points to its need. The Roman Catholics know that in demanding that contraception be considered criminal they are openly demanding something that is contrary to the very basis of Americanism. Instead of separation of church and state with equal rights for all religious denominations, they are asking that the religious tenets of one church shall be by law binding on all the men and women of America, even on the members of those churches which have openly repudiated these tenets. Do these Roman Catholics remember the past presidential election and the outcry that they and their fellow churchmen made over the "religious intolerance" that made an issue of the faith of one of the candidates? If they are wise, such Catholics will dissociate themselves from the opposition to birth control bills. Any good Catholic might well support a bill such as was presented in Massachusetts or Connecticut. It would in no way affect the conduct of any man or woman who was obedient to his church teaching. It would not make birth control obligatory ... Let the Catholic Church guide its own people, but let it not dominate the lives of those who are not in its fold."
"Editorial." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 5 (May 1931 , page 133.
"Repressive legislation seems to have no deterrent effect on women who decide to procure abortions, but it has a detrimental effect on their health. It is no secret that the well-to-do classes in Western Europe, by paying the price, can have abortions performed by excellent physicians, but that the poor classes have to bear the burden of repressive legislation and suffer at the hands of quacks ... The legal complications surrounding the woman who wishes an abortion, and the physician who takes care of her force the entire proceedings underground, into the hands of ignorant quacks. Bearing these facts in mind, Soviet Russia passed a law in 1920, permitting abortions in hospitals for social indications ... By "social indications" is meant a large number of children in the family, or lack of adequate means to provide for the coming child ... The most effective method of fighting abortion is to develop better means of preventing undesired pregnancies. In our instructions for workers in the advisory clinics, we direct them to devote one or two sessions each week to giving advice on the prevention of conception."
W. Lebjedewa. "Soviet Russia Fights Abortion." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 5 (May 1931 , pages 137 and 138.
"One can say of him that he is sincere, forthright, and unafraid; that he is a thorough believer in birth control, and also in legalized abortion in other words, over a woman's right to possession and use of her own body; that in general his views on marriage and on sexual abnormalities are entirely sane; and that he recognizes organized orthodox theology as the greatest enemy of progress in the sexual as in all other fields ... I confess to a fellow-feeling with Dr. Scott in his animadversions on children, in his statement unpopular but, I believe, true that children break up more marriages than they bind, and that for those with important work to do they are an unmitigated liability ..."
Maynard Shipley. Review of George Ryley Scott's book Marry or Burn. Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 7 (July 1931 , page 215.
"It is estimated that one million prospective mothers perform illegal abortions every year, such is their dread of adding to an already crushing burden ..."
Baldwin Anciaux. "The Principles of Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 9 (September 1931 , pages 253 and 254.
"... It is the opportunity to hold up before our youth the ideals of a Christian home. What will those ideals be? We will have to discover them; we do not fully know them yet. But at least we may be sure a Christian home will not be a home in which sex is thought to be naturally a filthy thing. It will not be a place where shame goes hand in hand with physical love. It will not be a place where the mother must bear child after child, some of them unfit to live, until her own health is forfeit. Rather it will be a place where children are wanted and where they are eagerly sought when health and finances permit. At other times it will be a place where physical love need not be burdened with the worry of unwanted pregnancies. Surely a Christian home ought to be at least this."
The Survey Graphic, August 1931, quoted in "In the Magazines: The Churches and the Stork." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 9 (September 1931 , pages 268 and 269.
"The prevention of conception is important, first of all, because it is the only practical measure for preventing or at least lessening abortion. We cannot deny that abortions under all circumstances, even when performed by physicians, are dangerous. On the basis of thirty-five years experience, I am absolutely opposed to abortion. But I am also opposed to punishment for performing abortions, as in most cases only the poor and innocent come in conflict with the law, while the rich go scot free. Moreover the percentage of cases coming to trial is infinitely small, compared to the actual number of abortions. Not the abortion itself, but the discovery is punished.
"... For we have here merely the question of a woman's rights over her own body. Moreover, experience shows that when proper methods are not available wrong and harmful ones are resorted to."
Magnus Hirschfield, M.D. "My Views on Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 11 (November 1931 , pages 309 and 310.
"It is unfair to attribute the act of abortion or its defense to birth control advocates. They not only oppose it, but show that the real friends of abortion are ignorance of and opposition to wise, humane scientific contraception."
George Bedbourough. Review of Edward Roberts Moore, M.D.'s book The Case Against Birth Control. Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 11 (November 1931 , pages 326 and 327.
"Birth control is, from first to last, in favor of the baby, more power to him. Birth control encourages more babies, better babies, healthier babies, happier and cleverer babies, wanted, welcomed, cared-for babies. Such babies will not come through blind chance to unwilling and protesting parents. They will come through the use of birth control for eugenical ends."
"Editorial." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 12 (December 1931 , pages 339 and 340.
"Granting certain exceptional cases, "when there is a morally justifiable reason for avoiding complete abstinence," and recognizing that the relation of husband and wife has a value of its own within the sacrament of marriage, whereby "married life is enhanced and its character strengthened," the Archbishop [of Canterbury] added that the Lambeth Conference was "unable to condemn the use of artificial methods to avoid conception as in themselves sinful. It did, however, insist that their use was permissible only in such exceptional cases, and condemned their use in cases with motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience."
Reverend Eliot White. "Birth Control A Righteous Cause." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 12 (December 1931 , page 346.
"Science must make woman the owner, the mistress of herself. Science, the only possible savior of mankind, must put it in the power of woman to decide for herself whether she will or will not become a mother."
Robert G. Ingersoll, quoted in George Bedborough's review of George Macdonald's book Fifty Years of Freethought. Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 12 (December 1931 , page 358.
1932
"It is incredibly absurd that at present the government itself, medical societies, schools, and journals cannot give out scientific information [on birth control] without being guilty of a crime ... The measure [of birth control] is aimed at reinforcing all the factors which conserve human life and well being, that of mothers, of children, of families. It is aimed at the prevention of abortion which takes such a toll of human life in this country. It aims at substituting the administrations of competent physicians for the activities of unscrupulous quacks."
John Dewey. "The Senate Birth Control Bill." People's Lobby Bulletin, May 1932. Quoted in Birth Control Review, Volume XVI, Numbers 7 and 8 (July-August 1932 , page 220.
"But the coercive attitude of the National Catholic Alumni Federation protest is far more serious, threatening as it does the American principle of freedom of opinion and the separation of church and state. The devious arguments of the Catholic Church on the subject of birth control are all too well known to call for comment ... its apologists find sermons in stones, books in the running brooks and good in everything. Everything but humble common sense, and the fortitude to believe in and observe that freedom of conscience and thought by which the world has escaped from its darker superstitions. The tragedy of the Catholic position on birth control, for communicants and non-communicants alike, is not Catholic doctrine, but Catholic truculence, as revealed by its spiritual intolerance. For whereas no one is attempting to coerce Catholics to use birth control contrary to their principles, precisely the reverse holds true for the attitude of the Church towards non-communicants. The policy of the Church is a confession of fear if not defeat, for it has failed to stem the tide of enlightenment both within and without its confines ... The real issue centers in the Catholic disregard of the principle of freedom of conscience upon which the country was, supposedly, founded."
Editorial. Birth Control Review, Volume XVI, Number 11 (November 1932 , page 260.
1933
"... an uncontrolled birth rate is stupid and suicidal to those living and a cruel unjustice to the unborn."
Letter by Robert J. Caldwell of New York City, New York, to the Birth Control Review, Volume XVII, Number 1 (January 1933 , page 25.
"Yes, we have come a long way from that old world, from that abyss across which we can see dimly the pathetic figure of the young girl who entered marriage knowing nothing whatever of sex, taking it sorrowfully for granted that within a month she would be pregnant, and that thereafter children would follow every year or so and die for the most part before the next little brother or sister arrived."
Miriam Allen deFord. "A New World." Birth Control Review, Volume XVII, Number 3 (March 1933 , page 68.
"Birth Control, today, is recognized not only as a basic women's right, but as an essential factor in family welfare, public health and economic security, as a means of promoting national peace and race betterment."
Eleanor Dwight Jones, President, American Birth Control League. "To Readers of the Birth Control Review." Birth Control Review, Volume XVII, Number 7 (July 1933 , page 163.
"Fought by a religious hierarchy as emotional and fanatical as the most crystallized of the prohibitionists, the birth control movement has steadily made progress even in the enemy's campage. The increasing army of liberated deserters from the antiquated social code of that camp continues to grow by thousands and tens of thousands. The living offshoot of the old religions which demanded a just and cruel God, had to force its way into the heart of a timid humanity; and history is repeating itself. Christians the world over whether they take that name or not are refusing to enlist in the ranks of a God who demands that women shall be bent and broken on the torture rack of ignorance, or who encourages the animal breeding of unwanted and uncared-for children.
"Caught in the logical dilemma of allowing the use of the "safe" period, a scientifically discovered half-truth of physiology, and of forbidding the use of other simple, more certain and hygienic means, the Catholic Church is in an untenable position. Its adherents are aware of that fact in direct proportion to their intelligence. If they are professional members of the hierarchy deriving their living from it, they naturally work their hardest to combat the invincible spread of contraceptive information. If they are lay members of the Catholic Church, they listen to the arguments and then quietly adopt contraception as part of their own family life. When the younger Catholics of the present generation reach positions of authority in the church, progress towards a common goal will be even swifter. The official Church, deep-dyed in Italian nationalism, may not care to admit a change in attitude."
Editorial by C.C. Little, Director of the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Maine. Birth Control Review, Volume XVII, Number 7 (July 1933 , page 169.
"In a Communist state women have a right to social life; in other words, they are human beings who may use their bodies as they see fit and they must not be coerced into bearing unwanted children through ignorance or any other means.
"Birth control has been their [Soviet Russia's] most tangible weapon in reducing abortion."
Alice Withrow Field. "Russia Attacks an Ancient Problem." Birth Control Review, Volume XVII, Number 7 (July 1933 , page 171.
"Only through birth control will women ever gain control of their bodies or develop their souls. Only through knowledge can they ever unlock the great gates to a future in which joy and happiness will prevail. Only through a new consciousness of birth can humanity at large ever extricate itself from the man-made muddle in which it is grounded today."
Margaret Sanger, from her address at the World Fellowship of Faiths in Chicago, September 23rd, quoted in the Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 3 (New Series, December 1933 , page 1.
1934
"The League has had a very active summer. Its energies have been focussed on two points. The first was to find cooperating physicians in every county who would advise women of meagre incomes at clinic rates. The response of the doctors to this need has been prompt and generous. The second was the launching of the Parents' Petition to the Massachusetts Medical Society.
"The similarity between the physical hazards of warfare and maternity are pointed out and a strong plea is made that as the physically unfit man is protected from military service ... so the woman unfit for maternity should not have it forced on her ..."
"What Twelve State Leagues Are Doing." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 1 (New Series, October 1934 , page 5.
"The health of the family depends on several factors.
1. The prevention of venereal diseases. This can only be accomplished by early marriage which will prevent promiscuity and its resultant prostitution, and traffic in women.
2. The complete elimination of abortion as a means of regulating the family. Present scientific knowledge of birth control has reached such a stage that abortion is entirely unnecessary and the abortion rate is mute evidence of the neglect of society to care for its mothers. Knowledge of contraception takes from a woman her greatest fear in marriage, and replaces it with the desire to have children when she is ready and able.
4. Education along sex lines should be such that from infancy through childhood, adolescence and to maturity, the individuals will be able to avoid mental and emotional conflict on this subject.
7. Sterilization of the insane and feeble-minded has become a necessary institution in modern society. Its value in the prevention of the birth of people unable to care for themselves or their offspring and of people who have even no value to themselves is obvious."
"... Abortion as a means of limiting the family must be recognized as an extreme danger to the life and health of your women. Check the death rate from this cause in your own country and visit your hospitals to see the number of women who are fighting for their lives against hemorrhage, fever and infection. Talk with the physicians in your cities who are specializing in women's diseases and learn of the many, many cases they have that are suffering for long years from inflammatory processes in the tubes and ovaries; learn of the cases of sterility where the woman would give learn of the cases of sterility where the woman would give anything to have a child; and learn of the women who undergo a painful and more dangerous confinement due to the previous infection; then you will realize with me the tremendous damage done by abortions. There is hardly a country today where the death rate from this cause is not going up. Even when the operation is legalized and done in hospitals with well-trained physicians, it is still a terribly destructive experience.
"The application of our present knowledge of birth control methods can practically eliminate abortions. The technique is so simple that it can be applied anywhere as long as thorough instruction is first given ..."
Nadina R. Kavinoky, M.D. "A Program for Family Health" (Excerpts from a paper presented at the Third Pan-Pacific Women's Conference, Honolulu, August 1934 . Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 3 (New Series, December 1934 , page 4.
1935
"Birth control is a reform based upon a deep seated conviction concerning the nature of justice. It involves basically a choice between right and wrong. Those who insist it is a fundamental right to exercise choice with the matter of bringing children into the world cannot stop until justice is achieved."
Dr. Eduard C. Lindeman, Chairman, Professor of Social Philosophy, New York School of Social Work. "Lending Their Voices." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 4 (New Series, December 1935 , page 2.
