"We must keep always before us that independent belief, held by your own Thoreau, that the State is the servant of the people, not the people of the State. I recall that famous episode when Thoreau was imprisoned for refusing to pay his poll tax because he believed the Government was spending the tax payers’ money foolishly. Emerson, visiting him in prison, said: “What are you doing in there, Henry?” And Thoreau replied: “What are you doing out there, Ralph?” Margaret Sanger
But why planned parenthood at all? There are five clear and inescapable reasons why:
(1) Parents with transmissible disease should sacrifice their natural desire for children.
(2) Women with temporary physical ailments should use contraceptive means to avoid pregnancy until the disease is cured--diseases like tuberculosis, heart and kidney diseases and several others are disturbed and the cure delayed by pregnancy.
(3) Parents seemingly healthy themselves who have a child or children with mental defects, should refrain from having more.
(4) Every mother rich or poor, sick or well, should space her pregnancies from 18 months to three years in order to regain her own strength and to prepare her body for the coming of the next.
(5) And, perhaps, aside from these considerations one more reasons which is of vital importance to the future of our Country is the happiness of the family. The adolescent years are good years for marriage but parenthood is often more satisfactory after a brief waiting period. Young people who marry early or late often need the first year or two just to get acquainted to learn to know each other, and to make those adjustments, physical, mental, economic and spiritual, so necessary in building a companionship to endure through the years. If the first year or even two years can be free from pregnancy children invited into these homes come wanted before they are conceived. Here we lay the foundations for happy marriages and larger wanted families.
All of these arguments have been brilliantly stated by Catholic leaders in support of the so-called Rhythm Method of birth control. We who do not share the Catholic theological distinction between the Rhythm and medical methods are confident that the recognition of the need for birth control, on the part of so many Catholic officials and laymen marks the beginning of the end of religious controversy over this question. After all, there is something definitely pathological about the small and rapidly dwindling minority of people who are forced to accept the logic of birth control by the now official version of the church and yet become hysterical at the thought of birth control by scientific medical methods.
Let us state again with the scholars and scientists of the English speaking world who have given us the prestige of their names and the full weight of their influence--that there is no subject that has so large a practical significance and which at the same time, is so deeply imbedded into the foundations of social evolution.
George Bernard Shaw said it is the most revolutionary idea of this century. Julian Huxley says it will go down in history with the greatest achievements of the human intellect. Such as the invention of the stone hammer, mastery of fire, discovery of electricity and the invention of the art of printing. “Birth control has historical significance because its application means that population’s size, quality and growth can be brought under the control of foresight, reason and self control.”
During the past twenty years we have set up more than 580 demonstration clinics in the United States. We have over 80,000 records in one clinic in New York over a period of ten years, so we know what birth control practice does and can and will do. We know we have reduced deaths of countless mothers, and kept alive thousands of children. We have given knowledge to parents which has prevented separation and divorce. We have taken families off charitable and relief rolls by giving the wage earning father hope, and a chance to provide for those already born.
Our goal is now to level off our dysgenic birth rate by making contraceptive information available to all parents who need and want it, including the poorest parents on relief, on farms, on homestead, in slums and to all married people who depend upon existing public health or welfare agencies.
We know that the well-to-do and those able to have a private or family physician are equipped with knowledge. But the mothers seeking medical advice from hospitals or dispensaries are refused all help even though the life of the woman is endangered by another pregnancy. This can be remedied only when public health policies include this teaching in state programs.
I’ve talked about population, about health and planned parenthood. Now I want to talk about something that is closer and dearer to us today than ever before--individual human liberty. We have seen, tragically, in recent months, millions of people reduced to slavery; we have seen the human rights we think of here as inseparable from life itself, destroyed over night, every trace wiped away as if they had never existed.
Thus I say that at no time in history has it been so important that we here in the last remaining stronghold of human liberty keep that eternal vigilance that is the price of freedom; that we be alert to preserve our human rights--our civil liberties--in their full vigor. We must keep always before us that independent belief, held by your own Thoreau, that the State is the servant of the people, not the people of the State. I recall that famous episode when Thoreau was imprisoned for refusing to pay his poll tax because he believed the Government was spending the tax payers’ money foolishly. Emerson, visiting him in prison, said: “What are you doing in there, Henry?” And Thoreau replied: “What are you doing out there, Ralph?”
Our civil liberties are well-defined--freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of worship. To me in equal measure with those, and perhaps even more deeply and intimately concerned with each individual, is the right of free men and free women to control, as best they may, their own destiny on earth; their right to undertake the deep and satisfying act of parenthood, not by chance or in ignorance, but in full knowledge of their responsibility--to the child, to themselves and to their nation. Only on this foundation can a free, sturdy and independent people build their collective life and maintain intact their liberties.
This year is the twenty-sixth anniversary of the beginning of the fight for the birth control movement in the United States. In those twenty-six years opponents of the movement have used virtually every means, in violation of American civil liberties, to destroy it. Spokesmen for the movement have been denied public platforms; editors have been threatened with economic loss if they did not suppress news of the movement; government authority has been misused in innumerable cases to prevent the circulation of literature. But to no avail. Slowly and surely the movement has become an ineradicable part of the nation’s life, and it cannot be stopped by cheap and lying propaganda.
Margaret Sanger |
