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
Now let me submit you a little about the practical side of it. Mrs.
Sanger says that I am theoretical, that I deal with the Bible. I do not
care whether or not the Bible has said it. It wasn’t that that makes me
take this attitude. This is the situation.
We have birth control in America today. The only thing is this—except
for two or three groups that to my mind are the very heart and soul of
America and upon which it relies—we have birth control in America. We
have birth control and Mrs. Sanger and the rest of her kind would talk
to the fresh, wholesome people that are coming over who are the hope of
America—she would come to them and not wait as we do make them wait in
order to become citizens. We say “you cannot be citizens until you have
a few years.” She would say, “We will hand you this purely American
doctrine of birth control and you can have that right off.”
I have an opportunity of seeing this through the years. I am going to
give you a picture of the block in which I was born and brought up, that
I have watched for 30 years. Thirty years ago I began to watch the
block. There were 17 families, 34 people at the start; 34 people who
were successful, they believe, in this little town of 3,500 people. It
had a fine school, a State Normal School—one of the foremost in the
State. It had a Boys’ School known nationally, if not internationally,
and they were 34 people in 17 homes.
All were successful and owned their own homes with well-kept lawns and
they were thoroughly American. They believed that they were well
educated people and that they were successful.
Now, take them house by house. The first family was a merchant. They had
one child, a girl, and “Oh, what a girl was Mary.” She was a singer.
There, Mrs. Sanger says, Nature was kind. She was a singer and she
yodeled and warbled over the country and then her parents thought that
Mary was going to be a great singer. No, she did not become one. She
married the station agent. The station agent did not find that there was
much rhythm in music in the home as there was in Mary’s voice and he
went out, and finally he stayed out altogether. He walked in front of
the locomotive and that was the finish of him. Mary lives today in a
little boarding house. That family is extinct. Mary is still living on.
That family is gone.
In the next house, there was a man who was a kind of good-for-nothing
fellow. I suppose the town said he came from far away and that he was a
boomer, but he had a wondrous wife. This wife wasn’t educated, but she
had the most phenomenal energy. She could wash 23 hours a day and she
did. They had three children and she, as Mrs. Sanger has said, she
wanted them to be brought up decent. The boy was sent to Harvard, by
this 23 hours a day wash. It was a fine home. The boy went to Harvard
and became a good-for-nothing, and went out West.
There was another daughter married. She had a son, too, who died. She
married a man in Vermont. They never had children and never will.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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