I found that the women of the working class had emphatic views on the crime of bringing children into the world to die of hunger. They would rather risk their lives through abortion than give birth to little ones they could not feed and care for. For the laws against imparting this knowledge force these women into the hands of the filthiest midwives and the quack abortionists—unless they bear unwanted children—with the consequence that the deaths from abortions are almost wholly among the working-class women. No other country in the world has so large a number of abortions nor so large a number of deaths of women resulting therefrom as the United States of America. Our law makers close their virtuous eyes. A most conservative estimate is that there are 250,000 abortions performed in this country every year. How often have I stood at the bedside of a woman in childbirth and seen the tears flow in gladness and heard the sigh of “Thank God!” when told that her child was born dead! What can man know of the fear and dread of unwanted pregnancy? What can man know of the agony of carrying beneath one’s heart a little life which tells the mother every instant that it cannot survive? Even were it born alive the chances are that it would perish within a year. Do you know that three hundred thousand babies under one year of age die in the United States every year from poverty and neglect, while six hundred thousand parents remain in ignorance of how to prevent three hundred thousand more babies from coming into the world the next year to die of poverty and neglect? I found from records concerning women of the underworld that eighty-five per cent. of them come from parents averaging nine living children. And that fifty per cent. of these are mentally defective. We know, too, that among mentally defective parents the birth rate is four times as great as that of the normal parent. Is this not cause for alarm? Is it not time for our physicians, social workers and scientists to face this array of facts and stop quibbling about woman’s morality? I say this because it is these same people who raise objection to birth control on the ground that it _may_ cause women to be immoral. Solicitude for woman’s morals has ever been the cloak Authority has worn in its age-long conspiracy to keep woman in bondage. When I was in Spain a year ago, I found that the Spanish woman was far behind her European sisters in readiness or even desire for modern freedom. Upon investigation as to the cause of this I found that there are over five thousand villages and towns in Spain with no means of travel, transportation and communication save donkeys over bridle paths. I was told that all attempts to build roads and railroads in Spain had been met with the strongest opposition of the Clergy and the Government on the ground that roads and railroads would make communication easier and bring the women of the country into the cities _where they would meet their downfall_.