What a great and wonderful humanitarian. No wonder she is honored and loved over the whole planet. This may seem innocent now but at the time it risked a lifetime in jail.
"Birth Control will prevent abortion. It will do away with the practice of taking drugs and poisonous nostrums to end undesired pregnancies. It will put an end to the tens of thousands of illegal operations to which women resort in despair. Mothers will not submit to the murder of unborn children when they can control conception"
"The home is the backbone of the state, and upon it depends the whole social structure, and the future of the race. But the home is built upon monogamous marriage and this institution is feasible only with Birth Control. Let humanity but rid itself of false and impure mental associations with the idea of sex, and the truth will appear that love is the greatest of all forces for good in the world and that its full expression through marriage is ethically sound. Such expression, however, is only possible through Birth Control which will, when we have learned its lessons, be the best bulwark of marriage and the most efficient guardian of happiness within the family that mankind has yet known.
Birth Control means liberation for women and for men. It means freedom and happiness. It means gifts and blessing for the family and the nation.
It will give the mother the right and power to have children only when she feels that her health and strength will allow her to give them the care and attention that they need and ought to have.
It will give the young wife the possibility of recovering her strength before she embarks on the great adventure of motherhood, if she has worked hard and long hours before her marriage. No woman should become pregnant when exhausted by fatiguing or unwholesome labor.
It will give the mother time to know her children and to devote herself to the needs of each one as she brings them up. It will give the woman a chance to develop mother-love, instead of being an irritable drudge, overwhelmed by the demands of too many children, a broken-spirited, harassed slave of excessive motherhood.
Birth Control will give the husband courage. He will no longer be intolerably harassed and driven to desperation by the claims of a family too large for his wages or salary to support. It will preserve and develop his domestic life, his love for his wife and children, and his pride in the home.
Birth Control will prevent abortion. It will do away with the practice of taking drugs and poisonous nostrums to end undesired pregnancies. It will put an end to the tens of thousands of illegal operations to which women resort in despair. Mothers will not submit to the murder of unborn children when they can control conception.
It will wipe out the disgrace of our high rate of maternal mortality. Many mothers die because they are not in a fit state of health to stand the strain of pregnancy and childbirth.
It will reduce enormously our infant mortality rate. Thirty-five thousand babies die every day on the day that they are born, and nearly seventy thousand more within the first month of their lives. The passing out of most of these babies is due to the physical condition of their mothers. Had the mothers known how to control conception a very large proportion of them would never come into existence. During their short lives, they have drained the mother of her remaining strength, aggravated the physical conditions which made their survival impossible, exhausted the narrow financial resources of the family into which they have come, and probably caused privation and distress to other children, probably little more than babies themselves.
Birth Control will also check the mortality rate of the 100,000 babies who survive the first month but die within the first year of their lives. The death of many of these babies is caused by poverty, over-crowding and lack of proper care from mothers too burdened with many children to attend fully to any one of them.
Birth Control will prevent child labor. Child laborers come largely from overcrowded homes with more children than can be fed and clothed out of the father’s wages.
Birth Control will prevent prostitution. Young people will be able to marry early, knowing that they can wait to have children until they are in a position to stand the expense. Married men will not be driven to prostitution because they are denied their wives, whose love for their husbands has been destroyed by the haunting fear of pregnancy. When a woman is set free from this fear, she will not hesitate to give full expression to her love for her husband, an expression which is necessary if love is to be kept alive and in bloom. Thus husband and wife will be held together, and many a marriage which under present conditions would be a failure, will be made permanently happy and successful.
Birth Control will thus make of the home a place of peace, harmony and love. Then man will return to it from his work with contentment and rejoicing. The woman will find in it her happiness and development; the children, well nourished and carefully educated, will grow up in it to be the greatest assets of the nation." |
