The Case for Birth Control: A Supplementary Brief and Statement of FactsSanger, Margaret
Science
The Case for Birth Control: A Supplementary Brief and Statement of Facts
Sanger, Margaret
Birth control; Eugenics
Johnstown has three or four comparatively high-grade apartment houses,
and in several office buildings rooms are rented to families for
housekeeping. These are generally taken by native families.
In one of these office buildings the two lower floors are used for
business purposes and the two upper floors are given over entirely to
tenement purposes. From 40 to 50 families live here, many of whom have
but one room. To serve the 20 or 25 families on each floor there is one
bath and toilet room for men and another for women. Adjoining the toilet
rooms is a small room containing garbage cans and trash receptacles for
the use of the tenants.
The sanitary conditions in some of the best tenements or apartments,
however, are not up to the standards of other cities, and in those
occupied by the poorer people conditions are much worse than are usually
permitted to exist in cities having large tenement houses in great
numbers, where a tenement-house problem is recognized as such and active
efforts are made by the municipality to improve conditions.
An absolute measure of the importance of each single housing defect in a
high mortality rate can not be secured from this study. But it is not
without interest to note that in homes where water is piped into the
house the infant mortality rate was 117.6 per thousand, as compared with
a rate of 197.9 in homes where the water had to be carried in from
outdoors. Or that in the homes of 496 live-born babies where bathtubs
were found the infant mortality rate was 72.6, while it was more than
double, or 164.8, where there were no bathtubs. Desirable as a bathtub
and bodily cleanliness may be, this does not prove that the lives of the
babies were saved by the presence of the tub or the assumed cleanliness
of the persons having them. In a city of Johnstown’s low housing
standards, the tub is an index of a good home, a suitable house from a
sanitary standpoint, a fairly comfortable income, and all the favorable
conditions that go with such an income.
The same trend of a high infant mortality rate in connection with other
housing defects is noted in the next table.
TABLE 3.—DISTRIBUTION OF LIVE BIRTHS AND OF DEATHS DURING FIRST YEAR,
AND INFANT MORTALITY RATE, ACCORDING TO HOUSING CONDITIONS.
Deaths during First Year
HOUSING CONDITIONS Live births Number Infant mortality rate
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