Our approach opens to us a fresh scale of values, a new and effective
method of testing the merits and demerits of current policies
and programs. It redirects our attention to the great source and
fountainhead of human life. It offers us the most strategic point
of view from which to observe and study the unending drama of
humanity,--how the past, the present and the future of the human race
are all organically bound up together. It coordinates heredity and
environment. Most important of all, it frees the mind of sexual
prejudice and taboo, by demanding the frankest and most unflinching
reexamination of sex in its relation to human nature and the bases of
human society. In aiding to establish this mental liberation,
quite apart from any of the tangible results that might please the
statistically-minded, the study of Birth Control is performing an
invaluable task. Without complete mental freedom, it is impossible
to approach any fundamental human problem. Failure to face the great
central facts of sex in an impartial and scientific spirit lies at the
root of the blind opposition to Birth Control.
Our bitterest opponents must agree that the problem of Birth Control
is one of the most important that humanity to-day has to face. The
interests of the entire world, of humanity, of the future of mankind
itself are more at stake in this than wars, political institutions, or
industrial reorganization. All other projects of reform, of revolution
or reconstruction, are of secondary importance, even trivial, when we
compare them to the wholesale regeneration--or disintegration--that is
bound up with the control, the direction and the release of one of the
greatest forces in nature. The great danger at present does not lie with
the bitter opponents of the idea of Birth Control, nor with those who
are attempting to suppress our program of enlightenment and education.
Such opposition is always stimulating. It wins new adherents. It reveals
its own weakness and lack of insight. The greater danger is to be found
in the flaccid, undiscriminating interest of "sympathizers" who are "for
it"--as an accessory to their own particular panacea. "It even seems,
sometimes," wrote the late William Graham Sumner, "as if the primitive
people were working along better lines of effort in this direction than
we are... when our public organs of instruction taboo all that pertains
to reproduction as improper; and when public authority, ready enough to
interfere with personal liberty everywhere else, feels bound to act as
if there were no societal interest at stake in the begetting of the next
generation."(1)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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