Debate on birth control. Margaret Sanger and Winter Russell — John Shaqi
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
I hate and abominate the principles that I am fighting, but I trust that
you will take the sting, fumigate it, take the anti-toxin, if you will,
because I don’t want any allusions to personality to be taken from any
of the statements that I make.
Another thing I want to say about my opponent, and I hope she will say
the same about me, is that I want to bow in sincere respect and
admiration for what I conceive to be her utter and absolute sincerity,
and to her devotion to the cause which she advocates. I question that in
no degree. I hope she will give me the same consideration.
We are going to deal with these principles. I am not going to concern
myself much with authorities. I suppose she can quote from Dr. Robinson
and apparently Dr. Knopf (he says he isn’t an authority,) and others as
authorities. I could quote from Lamb and Roosevelt and the Bible—the
great religions of the earth—scriptural authority that comes from the
very depths of the spiritual, and what I believe to be the very mouth of
God itself—of Nature—if you do not like to admit the existence of
Providence.
I am not concerned with Scripture or authorities. I am going to deal
with this question with what I believe are the cold, inevitable facts of
life as we know them, and meet them every day.
Now I am going to admit in the first place that there are many families
with too many children. It would be foolish to gainsay that. They are a
burden to the mother. They are a hardship to the father who tries to
provide for them. They make conditions unfair and unjust for the other
children. The question is, and I hope that she will admit it also, that
there are thousands of homes in the United States of America that are
too lacking in children—although I think she has once stated that the
most immoral thing a person can do is to bring a large family into the
world—so we have thought, for example—and the question is, how are we
going to meet it?
I propose that we should meet this problem by the measure of
self-control. I believe by that means that we can solve the problem
thusly, and at the same time we gain one of the greatest advantages that
you can possibly win on the face of the earth. Sex control is the best
path to self-control and to self-discipline. It is the key to wisdom. It
is the key to power. It is the key to intellectual and mental
development; indeed, she has once stated that only those people who are
mentally developed are capable of self-control and I want to say that
they got a large measure of their mental development by self-control.
She is looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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