To add to the mess, the laws link contraceptive knowledge so closely with instructions for abortion that in some of the statutes there is not even a comma between the two. In California the prohibition of contraceptive information occurs in a statute entitled “Advertising to produce miscarriage.” Of course the two ideas are actually separated by an abyss that has no bottom. To control the inception of life must forever remain a fundamentally different thing from the destroying of life after it exists. Abortion may be birth control, but birth control is not abortion. Just here it may be well to state precisely what is meant and what is not meant by the term birth control in its modern application. _It means the conscious, responsible control of conception. It does not mean interference with life after conception has taken place, but consists solely in the use of intelligence and scientific hygienic knowledge to determine the wise times for conception to occur, and to limit the possibility of conception to those occasions._ It seems unfortunate that the term birth control was ever popularized, for the more correct term is conception control. However birth control has now become an accepted part of the language, and it is less and less misleading as time goes on. Another extraordinary factor in our laws regarding this subject is that (with the absurd single instance of Connecticut) the act of controlling conception is nowhere declared a crime. It is only _finding out how_ conception may be controlled that constitutes the crime. To regulate the incidence of parenthood and the growth of one’s family is a perfectly lawful procedure. Having once secured the knowledge, which act is unlawful, one may then lawfully utilize it ad infin. The preposterousness of such a principle as a basis for law is satirically set forth in an article in the _Birth Control Herald_[2] (Jan. 12, 1923) from which the following is quoted: The futility as well as the hypocrisy of standing for laws that make it a crime to secure knowledge which it is not a crime to use after it is secured, shows up beautifully if one applies the idea to some other phase of scientific knowledge than that concerning the control of conception. Take for instance the principles upon which the mechanism of the automobile is based. Fancy some obfuscated back-number in Congress, with a violent personal prejudice against the whole notion of automobiles, and who might love to make eloquent speeches about how man was intended by God to be a horse-drawn creature, that come what might, he himself would go about in his own victoria behind his own span of noble steeds; and that moreover he would do his utmost to see to it that everyone else should likewise adopt what he considers Nature’s true plan for transportation,—the horse.