Debate on birth control. Margaret Sanger and Winter RussellSanger, Margaret
History
Debate on birth control. Margaret Sanger and Winter Russell
Sanger, Margaret
Birth control -- Moral and ethical aspects
Then, just think of the logic of her position. Oh, there are some beasts
in the marriage tie and they can’t be self-controlled. What is the logic
of it all? Is she going to have the young people filled up with this
knowledge and are people of her kind going to have full sway over their
lives—over their life of sacrifice and consecration to the welfare of
humanity—over those going through life single and should they have
compulsory marriage because they don’t have the joys of marriage? If she
says that they suffer the physicians will tell you it is because they
don’t have children, and if they do suffer, it is because they have to
pay that penalty.
Of all of the sickly stuff I ever heard of is this matter of
tuberculosis and heart disease and kidney trouble. If a man has got a
wife that has tuberculosis and heart disease and kidney trouble, and he
is such a beast that he can’t control himself and can’t consecrate
himself to the sick wife, the law should step in. Should we say that we
will surrender her to this beast? Half of them do not know the law of
health and development, and strength and energy comes from that very law
of self-control.
Then this matter of child labor. Why of course I would protect and we
are protecting them in other States, and we are looking after it. But it
is better to have these children born, terrible as it is, than not to
have any children at all.
Then they say that this matter of venereal disease—Good Lord—apparently
she wants to give them a certificate of an endless playground for the
rest of their lives. Feeble-minded, of course the law should step in
there and devote a little intelligence to prevent this crime from going
on.
Now as to this matter of health—in the first place—we know that the
children are not being born. The statisticians of every life insurance
company in the entire United States are pointing out that the American
stock of today is dying out, that they are not being born, and then this
matter of the children that are born. Let us begin with them. Why, a boy
or girl that is born in a family of one or two, in the first place,
loses about one-tenth of a natural life because it has not the
association with children that it should have. I know one child in a
family that had quite a number of friends and their selfish and natural
attitude is “none of this one child stuff for me.” Those kids will grow
up and become nothing—those one or two children in a small family are
worthless. I will give you the facts.
They talk about going to colleges and universities. We are manacled
today by the fetishes of paper respectability. I have seen a lot of
these patriots. My grandfather’s mother had 13 children in a log cabin,
and I don’t think any of them died young. They all lived to a good old
age. That old patriot—he never saw the inside of a college, but he knew
more than half the graduates of Yale and Harvard. He knew the facts of
life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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