"The authorities at Rome have again and again declared that all positive methods of this nature are immoral and forbidden," states the National Council of Catholic Women.
Self-appointed censors, grossly immoral "moralists," makeshift legislators, all face a heavy responsibility for the miseries, diseases, and social evils they perpetuate or intensify by enforcing the primitive taboos of aboriginal customs, traditions, and outworn laws, which at every step hinder the education of the people in the scientific knowledge of their sexual nature. Yet men continue to drug themselves with the opiate of optimism, or sink back upon the cushions of Christian resignation, their intellectual powers anaesthetized by cheerful platitudes. Time after time, I was struck by the change in their attitude after the briefest enjoyment of this illusory power. We try to save the lives of the people we formerly sought to weaken by devastation, disease and starvation. The instinct is here. The programme for Birth Control is not a charity. This is, of course, impossible as long as women are driven into the factories, on night as well as day shifts, as long as children and girls and young women are driven into industries to labor that is physically deteriorating as a preparation for the supreme function of maternity.
At that time, it defined its enemies as Blacks, Catholics and Jews. It may thus be transmuted into a docile, tractable, and peaceable element of the community. The fear of set limitations, of punitive and restrictive laws imposed by Fate upon human life was visibly fading in human minds.
They prefer that we should think their small number of children is accidental, rather than publicly admit the successful practice of intelligent foresight. The facts, the figures, the appalling truth are there for all to read. Birth Control, on the contrary, implies voluntary action, the decision for one's self how many children one shall or shall not bring into the world. The domestication of animal life marked another great step in the long ascent.
The matter becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states, like England, the United States and Germany, because in such states, a tacit conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race. Or else, even those, who are fully cognizant of the chaos and conflict, seek an escape in those pretentious but fundamentally fallacious social philosophies which place the blame for contemporary world misery upon anybody or anything except the indomitable but uncontrolled instincts of living organisms. Professor Pearson and his associates show us that "if fertility be correlated with anti-social hereditary characters, a population will inevitably degenerate. The Congressional Record mirrors our political imbecility.For long ages, the Old Civilization kept the New subordinate, apologetic and ineffective, but for the last two centuries, the New has fought its way to a position of contentious equality.
It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. As represented by militaristic governments, militarism like Socialism has always encouraged the proletariat to increase and multiply. Moreover, she directed the feeding of her daughter's baby until it died at the age of three months.
In the past the helter-skelter crowding and over-crowding together of all classes of children of approximately the same age, produced only a dull leveling to mediocrity.
Birth Control emphasizes the need of re-investigation and of knowledge of their integral relationship, and aims at the solution of the great problem of Hunger and Sex at one and the same time.Marx was fully aware of the consequences of this condition of things, but shut his eyes tightly to the cause. These child-workers were really called into being by the industrial situation.