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
Mrs. Sanger: Mr. Chairman, and ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Russell and I
seem to agree on some of the points of this argument at least, but as
usual with most opponents of birth control, they have absolutely no
intelligent argument. (Laughter.) They always barricade themselves
behind the Bible or the terrible vengeance of an offended nature. That
is exactly what Mr. Russell is doing now.
Now, friends, I want to say let us get down to fundamental principles.
Let us get together and look at life the way it is now, not as it might
have been had Nature acted thus and so, not as it might be had God done
thus and so, but as we find ourselves today. We have a few principles of
life by which we must live, and I claim that every one of us has a right
to health, to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness. I say furthermore
that birth control is an absolutely essential factor in our living and
having those three principles of happiness. (Applause.)
By birth control, I mean a voluntary, conscious control of the birth
rate by means that prevent conception—scientific means that prevent
conception. I don’t mean birth control by abstinence or by continence or
anything except the thing that agrees with most of us, and as we will
develop later on, most of us are glad that there are means of science at
the present time that there are not injurious, not harmful, and all
conception can be avoided.
Now let us look upon life as it really is, and we see society today is
divided distinctly into two groups: those who use the means of birth
control and those who do not.
On the one side we find those who do use means in controlling birth.
What have they? They are the people who bring to birth few children.
They are the people who have all the happiness, who have wealth and the
leisure for culture and mental and spiritual development. They are
people who rear their children to manhood and womanhood and who fill the
universities and the colleges with their progeny. Nature has seemed to
be very kind to that group of people. (Laughter.)
On the other hand we have the group who have large families and have for
generations perpetuated large families, and I know from my work among
these people that the great percentage of these people that are brought
into the world in poverty and misery have been unwanted. I know that
most of these people are just as desirous to have means to control birth
as the women of wealth. I know she tries desperately to obtain the
information, not for selfish purposes, but for her own benefit and for
that of her children. In this group, what do we have? We have poverty,
misery, disease, overcrowding, congestion, child labor, infant
mortality, maternal mortality, all the evils which today are grouped in
the crowd where there are large families of unwanted and undesired
children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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