"If the abortion is well done, we don't have to watch the baby die. So we inject a salt solution. The result is like putting salt on a slug, but we don't have to watch it."
—
Russell Sacco, M.D., quoted in James Long. "Infants Aborted Alive: Officials Wink at Laws." The Oregon Journal, March 14, 1982, pages 4 and 5.
Sadik, Nafis (former Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA))
"China has every reason to feel proud of and pleased with its remarkable achievements made in its family planning policy and control of its population growth over the past 10 years. Now the country could offer its experiences and special experts to help other countries."
—
Nafis Sadik, former Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), quoted by China's official news agency Xinhua on April, 11, 1991. Also described in "Canada Donates $9 Million to UNFPA — Funders of China's One-Child Policy." LifeSite Daily News, May 7, 2001.
"[The policies advanced by UNFPA] may not reflect the narrow traditional moral boundaries which some people would draw around sexual behavior. In that case, I would suggest that the boundaries need to be redrawn. In many cases I believe that restrictive morality is being used falsely, as a means of asserting power, over women in particular. ... We must make male and female condoms far more widely available, and we must demand that men use them."
—
Excerpts from the keynote address Of Nafis Sadik, former Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), at a conference of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) in the Philippines. WAGGGS also presented Sadik with its "World Citizenship Award." "Joining China, Girl Scouts Honor Former UNFPA Chief Sadik." Friday Fax (Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM)), August 16, 2002 [Volume 5, Number 34] [NOTE: According to the WAGGGS website, delegates to the convention "enjoyed listening to keynote speaker Dr. Nafis Sadik." The Web site also reports that "for the first time ever, young women from each of the regions formed a panel to discuss the prevention of adolescent pregnancy."
"I am China's old friend. ... China has made an indelible mark in the global population community. It is to be congratulated on its successful programmes. ... I feel a great sense of pride that UNFPA made the wise decision to resist external pressures and continue its fruitful cooperation with China. ... I am confident that the cooperation between UNFPA and China will not only continue, but will also be further strengthened in the future. ... UNFPA and the Chinese Government are together developing the Fifth Country Programme, which will continue the reproductive health and family planning activities and will address new issues."
—
Excerpts from remarks by Nafis Sadik, former Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), during her acceptance of the People's Republic of China's "Population Prize Award." "Joining China, Girl Scouts Honor Former UNFPA Chief Sadik." Friday Fax (Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM)), August 16, 2002 [Volume 5, Number 34]. Also see State Family Planning Commission of China. "Population Prize Award Ceremony, Speech by Nafis Sadik," January 12, 2002, and Steve Mosher. "UN Population Controllers Support Forced Abortion, Lose US Funding." Population Research Institute Weekly Briefing, August 2, 2002 [Volume 4, Number 18].
Saferstein, Harvey I.
"When lawyer jokes become the basis for prejudice and bigotry, a line has been crossed which can lead to dangerous situations. Lawyer-bashing is hate speech that is as heinous as all other forms of bigotry. Crimes of violence against attorneys should be covered by hate-crime laws."
—
Harvey I. Saferstein, the President of the California State Bar Association, quoted in "He Must Be Joking." The Oregonian, July 8, 1993, page B8.
Salant, Richard (former President of CBS News)
"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
—
Richard Salant, former President of CBS News, quoted in "CBS News Head Puts It Bluntly." National Federation for Decency Journal, July/August 1985, page 16.
Salas, Rafael (former Executive Director, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA))
"Each country has its view of what is free, a free choice. If you refer to the case of China, I am very sure that the Chinese themselves will say that within their cultural norms, they are not at all coercive. Maybe from Western standards, these might not be totally acceptable, but then each country must determine that for themselves."
—
April 1986 quote of Rafael Salas, former Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). "An Uncompromising Position: China, the UNFPA and U.S. Population Policy." Undated Zero Population Growth Backgrounder.
Sandburg, Eugene C.
"As legal abortion has become increasingly available, it has become evident that some women are now intentionally using abortion as a substitute for contraception."
—
Eugene C. Sandburg, M.D. and Ralph I. Jacobs, M.D. "Psychology of the Misuse and Rejection of Contraception." American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, May 15, 1971, pages 227 to 237.
Sandler, et.al.
"Pancreatic glands of human fetuses obtained from 31 consecutive legal abortions were used. The abortions were induced by prostaglandin and carried out over a period of three months. The crown-heel lengths of the fetuses ... ranged from 12 to 34 cm."
—
Sandler, Andersson, Swenne, Petersson, Hellerstrom, Bjorken, Christensen and Groth. "Structure and Function of Human Fetal Endocrine Pancreas Before and After Cryopreservation." Cryopreservation of Human Fetal Pancreas. Huddings, Sweden, 1982, page 230 [NOTE: An unborn baby with a crown-heel length of 34 centimeters is at 28 weeks of development — and, since deformed babies are not used for harvesting purposes, he or she would be the victim of a third-trimester convenience abortion].
Sanger, Alexander C. (Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), and Margaret Sanger's grandson)
"I intend to be out on the front lines of our issues. That is why I'm here ... Right now, we have three clinics in this city and I want ten more. We currently have a small storefront office in central Harlem, and it is my first priority to see if we can transform that into a clinic ... With all her success, my grandmother left some unfinished business, and I intend to finish it."
—
Margaret Sanger's grandson, Alexander C. Sanger, President and Chief Executive Officer of Planned Parenthood of New York City, quoted in "Another Sanger Leads Planned Parenthood." The New York Times, January 23, 1991, page B2.
"Abortion should be legal because giving parents the ability to control their reproduction helps more of humanity survive."
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Alexander Sanger, quoted in "Sanger Continues His Feminist Grandmother's Work." San Diego Union-Tribune, March 8, 2004.
"The clinic violence has mostly been against white clinics in white communities as opposed to clinics serving people of color. The fanatics want to stop white women from having abortions. They fear race suicide."
—
Margaret Sanger's grandson Alexander Sanger, President of Planned Parenthood of New York City, quoted in Jonathan Tilove, Newhouse News Service. "Fewer Doctors, Fewer Choices for Minorities." The Oregonian, April 23, 1993, page A4.
Sanger, Margaret
"While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing the human tinder for racial conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for prisons. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively ... [Women] went on breeding with staggering rapidity those numberless, undesired children who become the clogs and the destroyers of civilizations."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter I, "Woman's Error and Her Debt." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 4 and 5 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"To get rid of these obstacles is to invite attack from the forces of reaction which are so strongly entrenched in our present-day society. It means warfare in every phase of her life. Nevertheless, at whatever cost, she must emerge from her ignorance and assume her responsibility.
"She can do this only when she has awakened to a knowledge of herself and of the consequences of her ignorance. The first step is birth control. Through birth control she will attain to voluntary motherhood. Having attained this, the basic freedom of her sex, she will cease to enslave herself and the mass of humanity. Then, through the understanding of the intuitive forward urge within her, she will not stop at patching up the world; she will remake it."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter I, "Woman's Error and Her Debt." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 7 and 8. Also in Chapter I, "Woman's Error and Her Debt" [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"By law, by religious canons, by public opinion, by penalties ranging all the way from ostracism to beheading, they have sought to crush this effort. Neither threat of hell nor the infliction of physical punishment has availed. Women have deceived and dared, resisted and defied the power of church and state. Quietly, desperately, consciously, they have marched to the gates of death to gain the liberty which the feminine spirit has desired."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter II, "Woman's Struggle for Freedom." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 12 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Westermarck is of the opinion that it [infanticide] "hardly occurred among the Hebrews in historic times. But we have reason to believe that at an earlier period, among them, as among other branches of the Semitic race child murder was frequently practiced as a sacrificial rite.""
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter II, "Woman's Struggle for Freedom." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 14 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Infanticide tends to disappear as skill in producing abortions is developed or knowledge of contraceptives is spread, and only then. One authority, as will be seen in a later chapter, estimates the number of abortions performed annually in the United States at 1,000,000, and another believes that double that number are produced."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter II, "Woman's Struggle for Freedom." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 24 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide. The Roman Catholic church, which has fought these practices from the beginning, has been unable to check them; and no more powerful agency could have been brought into play. It took that church, even in the days of its unlimited power, many centuries to come to its present sweeping condemnation of abortion. The severity of the condemnation depended upon the time at which the development of the foetus was interfered with. An illuminating resume of the church's efforts in this direction is given by Dr. William Burke Ryan in his authoritative and exhaustive study entitled "Infanticide; Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and History." Dr. Ryan says: "Theologians of the church of Rome made a distinction between the inanimate and the animate foetus to which the soul is added by the creation of God, and adopted the opinions of some of the old philosophers, more particularly those of Aristotle, as to animation in the male and female, but the canon law altogether negatived the doctrine of the Stoics, for Innocent II condemned the following proposition:
"'It seems probable that the foetus does not possess a rational soul as long as it is in the womb, and only begins to possess it when born, and consequently in no abortion is homicide committed.' Sextus V [sic] inflicted severe penalties for the crime of abortion at any period; these were in some degree mitigated by Gregory XIV, who, however, still held that those producing the abortion of an animated foetus should be subject to them, viz., and excommunication reserved to the bishop and also an 'irregularity' reserved to the Pope himself for absolution."
Today, the Roman church stands firmly upon the proposition that "directly intended, artificial abortion must be regarded as wrongful killing, as murder." But it required a long time for it to reach that point, in the face of the demand for relief from large families."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter II, "Woman's Struggle for Freedom." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 25 and 26 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The chief obstacles to the normal expression of this force are undesired pregnancy and the burden of unwanted children. These obstacles have always been and always will be swept aside by a considerable proportion of women. Driven by the irresistible force within them, they will always seek wider freedom and greater self-development, regardless of the cost ... Society, in dealing with the feminine spirit, has its choice of clearly defined alternatives. It can continue to resort to violence in an effort to enslave the elemental urge of womanhood, making of woman a mere instrument of reproduction and punishing her when she revolts. Or, it can permit her to choose whether she shall become a mother and how many children she will have ... Do we want the millions of abortions performed annually to be multiplied?"
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter II, "Woman's Struggle for Freedom." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 28 and 29 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Each of us has an ideal of what the American of the future should be. We have been told times without number that out of the mixture of stocks, the intermingling of ideas and aspirations, there is to come a race greater than any which has contributed to the population of the United States ... To understand the difficulties and the obstacles to be overcome before the dream of a greater race in America can be attained, is to understand something of the task before the women who shall give birth to that race."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter III, "The Materials of the New Race." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 30 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"That these foreigners who have come in hordes have brought with them their ignorance of hygiene and modern ways of living and that they are handicapped by religious superstitions is only too true."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter III, "The Materials of the New Race." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 35 and 36 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"From these same elements, living under these same conditions come the feebleminded and other defectives. Just how many feebleminded there are in the United States, no one knows, because no attempt has ever been made to give public care to all of them, and families are more inclined to conceal than to reveal the mental defects of their members ... Only 34,137 of these unfortunates were under institutional care in the United States in 1916, the rest being free to propagate their kind — piling up public burdens for future generations. The feebleminded are notoriously prolific in reproduction."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter III, "The Materials of the New Race." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 40 and 41 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"If we are to develop in America a new race with a racial soul, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter III, "The Materials of the New Race." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 44 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"We must set motherhood free ... Motherhood, when free to choose the father, free to choose the time and the number of children who shall result from the union, automatically works in wondrous ways. It refuses to bring forth weaklings; refuses to bring forth slaves; refuses to bear children who must live under the conditions described. It withholds the unfit, brings forth the fit; brings few children into homes where there is not sufficient to provide for them. Instinctively it avoids all those things which multiply racial handicaps. Under such circumstances we can hope that the "melting pot" will refine. We shall see that it will save the precious metals of racial culture, fused into an amalgam of physical perfection, mental strength and spiritual progress. Such an American race, containing the best of all racial elements, could give to the world a vision and a leadership beyond our present imagination."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter III, "The Materials of the New Race." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 45 and 46 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The feminine element in her — that spirit which blossoms forth now and then in women free from such burdens — cannot assert itself. She can contribute nothing to the wellbeing of the community. She is a breeding machine and a drudge — she is not an asset but a liability to her neighborhood, to her class, to society. She can be nothing as long as she is denied means of limiting her family."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "Two Classes of Women." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 53 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Women who have a knowledge of contraceptives are not compelled to make the choice between a maternal experience and a marred love life; they are not forced to balance motherhood against social and spiritual activities. Motherhood is for them to choose, as it should be for every woman to choose ... Fit mothers of the race are these, the courted comrades of the men they choose, rather than the "slaves of slaves." For theirs is the magic power — the power of limiting their families to such numbers as will permit them to live full-rounded lives."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "Two Classes of Women." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 55 and 56 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children ... The immorality of large families lies not only in their injury to the members of those families but in their injury to society.
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 57 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"First of the manifold immoralities involved in the producing of a large family is the outrage upon the womanhood of the mother. If no mother bore children against her will or against her feminine instinct, there would be few large families. The average mother of a baby every year or two has been forced into unwilling motherhood, so far as the later arrivals are concerned. It is not the less immoral when the power which compels enslavement is the church, state or the propaganda of well-meaning patriots clamoring against "race suicide.""
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 58 and 59 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 62 and 63 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The forlorn figures of the shadows where lurk the girls who sell themselves that they may eat and be clothed rise up to damn the moral dogmatists, who mouth their sickening exhortations to the wives and mothers of the workers to breed, breed, breed."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 66 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Large families among the rich are immoral not only because they invade the natural right of woman to the control of her own body, to self-development and to self-expression, but because they are oppressive to the poorer elements of society."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 68 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"One thing we know — the woman who has escaped the chains of too great reproductivity will never again wear them. The birth rate of the wealthy and upper classes will never appreciably rise. The woman of these classes is free of her most oppressive bonds. Being free, we have a right to expect much of her ... We expect her to demolish old systems of morals, a degenerate prudery, Dark-Age religious concepts, laws that enslave women by denying them the knowledge of their bodies, and information as to contraceptives. These must go to the scrapheap of vicious, cast-off things. Hers is the power to send them there. Shall we look to her to strike the first blow which shall wrench her sisters from the grip of the dead hand of the past?"
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Wickedness of Creating Large Families." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 70 and 71 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Before we pass to a further consideration of our subject, shall we not pause to take a still closer look at the human misery wrought by the enslavement of women through unwilling motherhood? ... Learn from the words of the victims of involuntary motherhood what it means to them, to their children and to society to force the physically unfit or the unwilling to bear children. When you have learned, stop to ask yourself what is the worth of the law, the moral code, the tradition, the religion, that for the sake of an outworn dogma of submission would wreck the lives of these women, condemn their progeny to pain, want, disease and helplessness. Ask yourself if these letters, these cries of despair, born of the anguish of woman's sex slavery are not in themselves enough to stop the mouths of the demagogues, the imperialists and the ecclesiastics who clamor for more and yet more children?"
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter VI, "Cries of Despair and Society's Problems." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 72 and 73 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Each and every unwanted child is likely to be in some way a social liability. It is only the wanted child who is likely to be a social asset."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter VI, "Cries of Despair and Society's Problems." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 74 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"It is the story of slow murder of the helpless by a society that shields itself behind ancient, inhuman moral creeds — which dares to weigh those dead creeds against the agony of the living who pray for the "mercy of death.""
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter VI, "Cries of Despair and Society's Problems." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 74 and 75 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The offspring of one feebleminded man named Jukes has cost the public in one way and another $1,800,000 in seventy-five years. Do we want more such families?"
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter VI, "Cries of Despair and Society's Problems." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 78 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
The wife who through an unwilling continence drives her husband to prostitution, habitual drunkenness, which prohibition may or may not have disposed of as a social problem; mothers who toil in mills and whose children must follow them to that toil, adding to the long train of evils involved in child labor; mothers who have brought eight, ten, twelve or fifteen undernourished, weakly children into the world to become public burdens of one sort or another — all these and more, with the ever-present economic problem, and women who are remaining unmarried because they fear a large family which must exist in want; men who are living abnormal lives for the same reason. All the social handicaps and evils of the day are woven into these letters — and out of each of them rises these challenging facts: First, oppressed motherhood knows that the cure for these evils lies in birth control; second, society has not yet learned to permit motherhood to stand guard for itself, its children, the common good and the coming race. And one reading such letters, and realizing their significance, is constrained to wonder how long such a situation can exist."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter VI, "Cries of Despair and Society's Problems." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 83 and 84 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective. No matter how much they desire children, no man and woman have a right to bring into the world those who are to suffer from mental or physical affliction. It condemns the child to a life of misery and places upon the community the burden of caring for it, probably for its defective descendants for many generations."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter VII, "When Should a Woman Avoid Having Children?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 89 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Shall she say to society that she will go on multiplying the misery that she herself has endured? Shall she go on breeding children who can only suffer and die? Rather, shall she not say that until society puts a higher value upon motherhood she will not be a mother? Shall she not sacrifice her mother instincts for the common good and say that until children are held as something better than commodities upon the labor market, she will bear no more? Shall she not give up her desire for even a small family, and say to society that until the world is made fit for children to live in, she will have no children at all?"
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter VII, "When Should a Woman Avoid Having Children?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 92 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter VIII, "Birth Control — A Parents' Problem or Woman's?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 94 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Conditions, rather than theories, facts, rather than dreams, govern the problem. They place it squarely upon the shoulders of woman. She has learned that whatever the moral responsibility of the man in this direction may be, he does not discharge it. She has learned that, lovable and considerate as the individual husband may be, she has nothing to expect from men in the mass, when they make laws and decree customs. She knows that regardless of what ought to be, the brutal unavoidable fact is that she will never receive her freedom until she takes it for herself."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter VIII, "Birth Control — A Parents' Problem or Woman's?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 97 and 98 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that within her which struggles for expression ... Only thus can she restore to him that of which he robbed himself in restricting her. Only thus can she remake the world. The world is, indeed, hers to remake, it is hers to build and to recreate ... Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter VIII, "Birth Control — A Parents' Problem or Woman's?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 99 and 100 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Were such continence to be practiced, there is no doubt that it would be a most effective check upon the birth rate. It is seldom practiced, however, and when adhered to under compulsion the usual result is injury to the nervous system and to the general health. Among healthy persons, this method is practicable only with those who have a degree of mentally controlled development as yet neither often experienced nor even imagined by the mass of humanity."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter IX, "Continence — Is It Practicable or Desirable?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 101 and 102 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"What is the result of forcing continence upon those who are not fitted or do not desire to practice it? The majority opinion of medical science and the evidence of statistics are united on this point. Enforced continence is injurious — often highly so."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter IX, "Continence — Is It Practicable or Desirable?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 103 and 104 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"For all that, an increasing number of persons, mostly women, are advocating continence within marriage.
"Sexual union is nearly always spoken of by such persons as something in itself repugnant, disgusting, low and lustful. Consciously or unconsciously, they look upon it as a hardship, to be endured only, to bring "God's image and likeness" into the world. Their very attitude precludes any great probability that their progeny will possess an abundance of such qualities.
"Much of the responsibility for this feeling upon the part of many thousands of women must be laid to two thousand years of Christian teaching that all sex expression is unclean ...
"Truly the church and those "moralists" who have been insisting upon keeping sex matters in the dark have a huge list of concealed crimes to answer for."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter IX, "Continence — Is It Practicable or Desirable?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 108 to 110 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The woman is condemned to physical, mental and spiritual misery by the ignorance which society has fixed upon her. She has her choice between an enforced continence, with its health-wrecking consequences and its constant aggravation of domestic discord, and the sort of prostitution legalized by the marriage ceremony."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter IX, "Continence — Is It Practicable or Desirable?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 112 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"To enforce continence upon those whose natures do not demand it, is an injustice, the cruelty and the danger of which has been underestimated rather than exaggerated. It matters not whether this wrong is committed by the church, through some outworn dogma; by the state, through the laws prohibiting contraceptives, or by society, through the conditions which prevent marriage when young men and women reach the age at which they have need of marriage ... The disastrous effects of repressing the sex force are written plainly in the health rates, the mortality statistics, the records of crime and the entry books of the hospitals for the insane."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter IX, "Continence — Is It Practicable or Desirable?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 115 and 116 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Sex life must be stripped of its fear. This is one of the great functions of contraceptives. That which is enshrouded in fear becomes morbid. That which is morbid cannot be really beautiful."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter IX, "Continence — Is It Practicable or Desirable?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 117 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The reader will recall that one authority says that there are 1,000,000 abortions in the United States every year, while another estimates double that number."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter X, "Contraceptives or Abortion?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 115 and 116 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Does anyone imagine that a woman would submit to abortion if not denied the knowledge of scientific, effective contraceptives? ... The abortionist could not continue his practice for twenty-four hours if it were not for the fact that women come desperately begging for such operations. He could not stay out of jail a day if women did not so generally approve of his services as to hold his identity an open but seldom-betrayed secret."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter X, "Contraceptives or Abortion?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 121 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The knowledge of contraceptive methods may yet for a time be denied to the woman of the working class, but those who are responsible for denying it to her, and she herself, should understand clearly the dangers to which she is exposed because of the laws which force her into the hands of the abortionist.
To understand the more clearly the difference between birth control by contraceptives and family limitation through abortion it is necessary to know something of the processes of conception. Knowledge of these processes will also enable us to comprehend more thoroughly the dangers to which woman is exposed by our antiquated laws, and how much better it would be for her to employ such preventive measures as would keep her out of the hands of the abortionist, into which the laws now drive her."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter IX, "Continence — Is It Practicable or Desirable?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 122 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"It needs no assertion of mine to call attention to the grim fact that the laws prohibiting the imparting of information concerning the preventing of conception are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths each year in this country and an untold amount of sickness and sorrow. The suffering and the death of these women is squarely upon the heads of the lawmakers and the puritanical, masculine-minded person who insist upon retaining the abominable legal restrictions.
"Try as they will they cannot escape the truth, nor hide it under the cloak of stupid hypocrisy. If the laws against imparting knowledge of scientific birth control were repealed, nearly all of the 1,000,000 or 2,000,000 women who undergo abortions in the United States each year would escape the agony of the surgeon's instruments and the long trail of disease, suffering and death which so often follows.
""He who would combat abortion," says Dr. Hirsch, "and at the same time combat contraceptive measures may be likened to the person who would fight contagious diseases and forbid disinfection. For contraceptive measures are important weapons in the fight against abortion."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter X, "Contraceptives or Abortion?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 127 and 128 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The woman who goes to the abortionist's table is not a criminal but a martyr — a martyr to the bitter, unthinkable conditions brought about by the blindness of society at large."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter X, "Contraceptives or Abortion?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 127 and 128 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Prolonged nursing hurts both child and mother, it is said. In the child it causes a tendency to brain disease, probably through disordered digestion and nutrition. In the mother it causes a strong tendency to deafness and blindness. If a child is nursed after it is twelve months old, it is generally pale, flabby and unhealthy, often rickety, one authority points out, while the mother is usually nervous, emaciated and hysterical."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XI, "Are Preventive Means Certain?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 133 and 134 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The way to get rid of labor problems, unemployment, low wages, the surplus, unwanted population, is to stop breeding."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XII, "Will Birth Control Help the Cause of Labor?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 146 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Groups and parties working for a new social order must include it [birth control] in their programmes. No social system, no workers' democracy, no Socialist republic can operate successfully and maintain its ideals unless the practice of birth control is encouraged to a marked and efficient degree."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XII, "Will Birth Control Help the Cause of Labor?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 148 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"It will be the drama of labor until labor finds its real enemy. That enemy is the reproductive ability of the working class which gluts the channels of progress with the helpless and weak, and stimulates the tyrants of the world in their oppression of mankind."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XII, "Will Birth Control Help the Cause of Labor?" Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 149 and 150 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Once the German mothers had submitted to the plea for overbreeding, it was inevitable that imperialistic Germany should make war. Once the battalions of unwanted babies came into existence — babies whom the mothers did not want but which they bore as a "patriotic duty" — it was too late to avoid international conflict. The great crime of imperialistic Germany was its high birth rate.
"It has always been so. Behind all war has been the pressure of population."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XIII, "Battalions of Unwanted Babies the Cause of War." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 157 and 158 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"When Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant were on trial in England in 1877 for publishing information concerning contraceptives, Mrs. Besant put the case bluntly to the court and the jury: "I have no doubt that if natural checks were allowed to operate right through the human as they do in the animal world, a better result would follow. Among the brutes, the weaker are driven to the wall, the diseased fall out in the race of life. The old brutes, when feeble or sickly, are killed. If men insisted that those who were sickly should be allowed to die without help of medicine or science, if those who are weak were put upon one side and crushed, if those who were old and useless were killed, if those who were not capable of providing food for themselves were allowed to starve, if all this were done, the struggle for existence among men would be as real as it is among brutes and would doubtless result in the production of a higher race of men."
""But are you willing to do that or to allow it to be done?"
"We are not willing to let it be done. Mother hearts cling to children, no matter how diseased, misshapen and miserable. Sons and daughters hold fast to parents, no matter how helpless. We do not allow the weak to depart; neither do we cease to bring more weak and helpless beings into the world. Among the dire results is war, which kills off, not the weak and the helpless, but the strong and the fit."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XIII, "Battalions of Unwanted Babies the Cause of War." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 159 to 161 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"UPON the shoulders of the woman conscious of her freedom rests the responsibility of creating a new sex morality. The vital difference between a morality thus created by women and the so-called morality of today, is that the new standard will be based upon knowledge and freedom while the old is founded upon ignorance and submission."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XIV, "Woman and the New Morality." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 167 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"... in its operation, the church's code of sex morals has nothing to do with the basic sex rights of the woman, but enforces, rather, the assumed property rights of the man to the body and the services of his wife. They are man-made codes; their vital factor, as they apply to woman, is submission to the man.
"Closely associated with and underlying the principle of submission, has been the doctrine that the sex life is in itself unclean. It follows therefore, that all knowledge of the sex physiology or sex functions is also unclean and taboo. Upon this teaching has been founded woman's subjection by the church and, largely through the influence of the church, her subjection by the state to the needs of the man ... The church has sought to keep women ignorant upon the plea of keeping them "pure." To this end it has used the state as its moral policeman."
"It clings to this last stronghold of ignorance, knowing that woman free from sexual domination would produce a race spiritually free and strong enough to break the last of the bonds of intellectual darkness.
"It is within the marriage bonds, rather than outside them, that the greatest immorality of men has been perpetrated. Church and state, through their canons and their laws, have encouraged this immorality. It is here that the woman who is to win her way to the new morality will meet the most difficult part of her task of moral house cleaning."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XIV, "Woman and the New Morality." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 169 to 171 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
When the church became a political power rather than a strictly religious institution, it needed a high birth rate to provide laymen to support its increasingly expensive organization. It then began to exploit the sex force for its own interest. It reversed its position in regard to children. It encouraged marriage under its own control and exhorted women to bear as many children as possible. The world was just as sordid and the birth wails of the infants were just as piteous, but the needs of the hierarchy had changed. So it modified the standard of sex morality to suit its own requirements — marriage now became a sacrament.
"Shrewd in changing its general policy from celibacy to marriage, the church was equally shrewd in perpetuating the doctrine of woman's subjection for its own interest."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XIV, "Woman and the New Morality." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 173 and 174 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"If Christianity turned the clock of general progress back a thousand years, it turned back the clock two thousand years for woman. Its greatest outrage upon her was to forbid her to control the function of motherhood under any circumstances, thus limiting her life's work to bringing forth and rearing children. Coincident with this, the churchmen deprived her of her place in and before the courts, in the schools, in literature, art and society. They shut from her heart and her mind the knowledge of her love life and her reproductive functions. They chained her to the position into which they had thrust her, so that it is only after centuries of effort that she is even beginning to regain what was wrested from her.
"Christianity had no favorable effect upon women," says Donaldson, "but tended to lower their character and contract the range of their activity."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XIV, "Woman and the New Morality." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 175 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"It would seem that this pernicious result was premeditated, and that from the very early days of Christianity, there were among the hierarchy those who recognized the creative power of the feminine spirit, the force of which they sought to turn to their own uses. Certain it is that the hierarchy created about the whole love life of woman an atmosphere of degradation.
"Fear and shame have stood as grim guardians against the gate of knowledge and constructive idealism. The sex life of women has been clouded in darkness, restrictive, repressive and morbid."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XIV, "Woman and the New Morality." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 177 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"On the other hand, church and state have forbidden women to leave their legal mates, or to refuse to submit to the marital embrace, no matter how filthy, drunken, diseased or otherwise repulsive the man might be — no matter how much of a crime it might be to bring to birth a child by him.
"Woman was and is condemned to a system under which the lawful rapes exceed the unlawful ones a million to one ... Besides the wrongs done to women in marriage, those involved in promiscuity, infidelities and rapes become inconsequential in nature and in number.
"Out of woman's inner nature, in rebellion against these conditions, is rising the new morality. Let it be realized that this creation of new sex ideals is a challenge to the church. Being a challenge to the church, it is also, in less degree, a challenge to the state. The woman who takes a fearless stand for the incoming sex ideals must expect to be assailed by reactionaries of every kind. Imperialists and exploiters will fight hardest in the open, but the ecclesiastic will fight longest in the dark. He understands the situation best of all; he best knows what reaction he has to fear from the morals of women who have attained liberty. For, be it repeated, the church has always known and feared the spiritual potentialities of woman's freedom."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XIV, "Woman and the New Morality." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 177 to 179 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Love is the greatest force of the universe; freed of its bonds of submission and unwanted progeny, it will formulate and compel of its own nature observance to standards of purity far beyond the highest conception of the average moralist. The feminine spirits animated by joyous, triumphant love, will make its own high tenets of morality.
"... Subversion of the sex urge to ulterior purposes has dragged it to the level of the gutter. Recognition of its true nature and purpose must lift the race to spiritual freedom. Out of our growing knowledge we are evolving new and saner ideas of life in general. Out of our increasing sex knowledge we shall evolve new ideals of sex. These ideals will spring from the innermost needs of women. They will serve these needs and express them."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XIV, "Woman and the New Morality." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 182 and 184 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Woman, bent upon her freedom and seeking to make a better world, will not permit the indecent and unclean forces of reaction to mask themselves forever behind the plea that it is necessary to keep her in ignorance to preserve her purity. In the birth-control movement, she has already begun to fight for her right to have, without legal interference, all knowledge pertaining to her sex nature. This is the third and most important of the epoch-making battles for general liberty upon American soil. It is most important because it is to purify the very fountain of the race and make the race completely free."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XV, "Legislating Woman's Morals." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 187 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Comstock has passed out of public notice. His body has been entombed but the evil that he did lives after him. His dead hand still reaches forth to keep the subject of prevention of conception where he placed it — in the same legal category with things unclean and vile. Forty years ago the laws were changed and the chief work of Comstock's life accomplished. Those laws still live, legal monuments to ignorance and to oppression. Through those laws reaches the dead hand to bring to the operating table each year hundreds of thousands of women who undergo the agony of abortion."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XV, "Legislating Woman's Morals." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 191 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The rapidity with which women are going into industry, the increasing hardship and poverty of the lower strata of society, the arousing of public conscience, have all operated to give force and volume to the demand for woman's right to control her own body that she may work out her own salvation."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XV, "Legislating Woman's Morals." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 193 and 194 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The law of woman's being is stronger than any statute, and the man-made law must sooner or later give way to it."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XV, "Legislating Woman's Morals." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 197 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"We know that abortion, when performed by skilled hands, under right conditions, brings almost no danger to the life of the patient ..."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVI, "Why Not Birth-Control Clinics in America." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 200 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"When she is not given such [birth control] information, she is plunged blindly into married life and a few years is likely to find her with a large family, herself diseased and damaged, an unfit breeder of the unfit, and still ignorant!"
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVI, "Why Not Birth-Control Clinics in America." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 203 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The effort toward racial progress that is being made today by the medical profession, by social workers, by the various charitable and philanthropic organizations and by state institutions for the physically and mentally unfit, is practically wasted. All these forces are in a very emphatic sense marking time. They will continue to mark time until the medical profession recognizes the fact that the ever increasing tide of the unfit is overwhelming all that these agencies are doing for society. They will continue to mark time until they get at the source of these destructive conditions and apply a fundamental remedy. That remedy is birth control."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVI, "Why Not Birth-Control Clinics in America." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 207 and 208 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"They who today deny the right of a woman to control her own body speak with the hardihood of invincible ignorance or with the folly of those blind ones who in all ages have opposed the light of progress."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVII, "Progress We Have Made." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 211 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Society is beginning to give ear to the promise of modern womanhood: "When you have ceased to chain me, I shall by the virtue of a free motherhood remake the world.""
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVII, "Progress We Have Made." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 212 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"The medical profession as a whole had ignored the tragic cry of womanhood for relief from forced maternity."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVII, "Progress We Have Made." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 218 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"We know of some thirty-five arrests of women and men who have dared entrenched prejudice and the law to further the cause of birth control. The persistent work in behalf of the movement, attended as it was by danger of fines and jail sentences, seemed to puzzle the authorities. Sometimes they dismissed the arrested persons, sometimes they fined them, sometimes they imprisoned them. But the protests went on, and through these self-sacrifices, word of the movement went constantly to more and more people.
"Each of these arrests brought added publicity. Each became a center of local agitation. Each brought a part of the public, at least, face to face with the issue between the women of America and this barbarous law ... What does it all mean? It means that American womanhood is blasting its way through the debris of crumbling moral and religious systems toward freedom."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVII, "Progress We Have Made." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 218 and 225 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"WHAT is the goal of woman's upward struggle? Is it voluntary motherhood? Is it general freedom? Or is it the birth of a new race? For freedom is not fruitless, but prolific of higher things. Being the most sacred aspect of woman's freedom, voluntary motherhood is motherhood in its highest and holiest form. It is motherhood unchained — motherhood ready to obey its own urge to remake the world.
"Voluntary motherhood implies a new morality — a vigorous, constructive, liberated morality. That morality will, first of all, prevent the submergence of womanhood into motherhood. It will set its face against the conversion of women into mechanical maternity and toward the creation of a new race."
Woman's role has been that of an incubator and little more.
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVIII, "The Goal." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 226 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"In the mass, she has brought forth quantity, not quality. The requirement of a male dominated civilization has been numbers. She has met that requirement.
"It is the essential function of voluntary motherhood to choose its own mate, to determine the time of childbearing and to regulate strictly the number of offspring ... The exercise of her right to decide how many children she will have and when she shall have them will procure for her the time necessary to the development of other faculties than that of reproduction."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVIII, "The Goal." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 227 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"Through the development of the individual mother, better and higher types of animals are produced and carried forward. In a word, natural law makes the female the expression and the conveyor of racial efficiency.
"Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives. So, in compliance with nature's working plan, we must permit womanhood its full development before we can expect of it efficient motherhood. If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman. Then and then only can the mother cease to be an incubator and be a mother indeed. Then only can she transmit to her sons and daughters the qualities which make strong individuals and, collectively, a strong race.
"Voluntary motherhood also implies the right of marriage without maternity ... In order to give the mate relationship its full and free play, it is necessary that no woman should be a mother against her will."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVIII, "The Goal." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 229 and 230 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race. There will be no killing of babies in the womb by abortion, nor through neglect in foundling homes, nor will there be infanticide."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVIII, "The Goal." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, page 232 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
The relentless efforts of reactionary authority to suppress the message of birth control and of voluntary motherhood are futile. The powers of reaction cannot now prevent the feminine spirit from breaking its bonds. When the last fetter falls the evils that have resulted from the suppression of woman's will to freedom will pass. Child slavery, prostitution, feeblemindedness, physical deterioration, hunger, oppression and war will disappear from the earth ... Fearless motherhood goes out in love and passion for justice to all mankind. It brings forth fruits after its own kind. When the womb becomes fruitful through the desire of an aspiring love, another Newton will come forth to unlock further the secrets of the earth and the stars. There will come a Plato who will be understood, a Socrates who will drink no hemlock, and a Jesus who will not die upon the cross. These and the race that is to be in America await upon a motherhood that is to be sacred because it is free."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter XVIII, "The Goal." Woman and the New Race [New York City: Brentano's], 1920, pages 233 and 234 [NOTE: For the full text of Woman and the New Race, click here].
"We are living not in a simple and complete civilization, but in a conflict of at least two civilizations, based on entirely different fundamental ideas, pursuing different methods and with different aims and ends."
—
H.G. Well's Introduction to Margaret Sanger's The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page xii [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"The New Civilization is saying to the Old now: "We cannot go on making power for you to spend upon the international conflict. You must stop waving flags and bandying insults. You must organize the Peace of the World; you must subdue yourselves to the Federation of all mankind. And we cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny. We want fewer and better children who can be reared up to their full possibilities in unencumbered homes, and we cannot make the social life and the world peace we are determined to make, with the ill bred, ill trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.""
—
H.G. Well's Introduction to Margaret Sanger's The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page xvi [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"The very idea of Birth Control resurrected the spirit of the witch hunters of Salem. Could they have usurped the power, they would have burned us at the stake. Lacking that power, they used the weapon of suppression, and invoked medieval statutes to send us to jail."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter I, "A New Truth Emerges." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 14 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"In America, on the other hand, I found from the beginning until very recently that the so-called intellectuals exhibited a curious and almost inexplicable reticence in supporting Birth Control. They even hesitated to voice any public protest against the campaign to crush us which was inaugurated and sustained by the most reactionary and sinister forces in American life."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter I, "A New Truth Emerges." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 15 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"For centuries official moralists, priests, clergymen and teachers, statesmen and politicians have preached the doctrine of glorious and divine fertility. Today, we are confronted with the world wide spectacle of the realization of this doctrine. It is not without significance that the moron and the imbecile set the pace in living up to this teaching, and that the intellectuals, the educators, the archbishops, bishops, priests, who are most insistent on it, are the staunchest adherents in their own lives of celibacy and non-fertility. It is time to point out to the champions of unceasing and indiscriminate fertility the results of their teaching."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter I, "A New Truth Emerges." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 18 and 19 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"The First American Birth Control Conference, held at the same time as the Washington Conference for the Limitation of Armaments, marks a turning point in our approach to social problems. The Conference made evident the fact that in every field of scientific and social endeavor the most penetrating thinkers are now turning to the consideration of our problem as a fundamental necessity to American civilization. They are coming to see that a qualitative factor as opposed to a quantitative one is of primary importance in dealing with the great masses of humanity."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter I, "A New Truth Emerges." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 22 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"An idealistic code of sexual ethics, imposed from above, a set of rules devised by high-minded theorists who fail to take into account the living conditions and desires of the masses, can never be of the slightest value in effecting change in the customs of the people. Systems so imposed in the past have revealed their woeful inability to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world has drifted."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter I, "A New Truth Emerges." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 24 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"The lack of balance between the birth rate of the "unfit" and the "fit," admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble minded, the mentally defective, the poverty stricken, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit, and therefore less fertile, parents of the educated and well to do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter I, "A New Truth Emerges." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 25 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Conditions of life among the primitive tribes were rude enough and severe enough to prevent the unhealthy growth of sentimentality, and to discourage the irresponsible production of defective children."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter II, "Conscripted Motherhood." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 29 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Every year I receive thousands of letters from women in all parts of America, desperate appeals to aid them to extricate themselves from the trap of compulsory maternity."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter II, "Conscripted Motherhood." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 30 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"I have chosen a small number of typical cases from these reports. Though drawn from widely varying sources, they all emphasize the greatest crime of modern civilization — that of permitting motherhood to be left to blind chance, and to be mainly a function of the most abysmally ignorant and irresponsible classes of the community."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter II, "Conscripted Motherhood." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 31 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"The reports on infant mortality published under the direction of the Children's Bureau substantiate for the United States of America the findings of the Galton Laboratory for Great Britain, showing that an abnormally high rate of fertility is usually associated with poverty, filth, disease, feeblemindedness, and a high infant mortality rate."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter II, "Conscripted Motherhood." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 47 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"As Dr. Karl Pearson has stated: "Degenerate stocks under present social conditions are not short-lived; they live to have more than the normal size of family"."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter II, "Conscripted Motherhood." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 48 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"These large families migrated to the beet-fields in early spring. Seventy-two percent of them are retarded. When we realize that feeble-mindedness is arrested development and retardation, we see that these "beet children" are artificially retarded in their growth, and that the tendency is to reduce their intelligence to the level of the congenital imbecile. Nor must it be concluded that these large "beet" families are always the "ignorant" foreigner so despised by our respectable press ..."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter III, "Children Troop Down From Heaven ..." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 63 and 64 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Many white American children are among them — pure American stock, who have gradually moved from the Carolinas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arizona, and on into the Imperial Valley."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter III, "Children Troop Down From Heaven ..." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 66 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"It is not only through the lowered power, the stunting and the moral degeneration of its individual members, but in actual expense, through the necessary provision for the human junk, created by premature employment, in poor houses, hospitals, police and courts, jails and by charitable organizations."
—
Margaret Sanger. Chapter III, "Children Troop Down From Heaven ..." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 70 and 71 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Into such schools such as described in the recent reports of the Public Education Association, no intelligent parent would dare send his child. They are not merely fire-traps and culture-grounds of infection, but of moral and intellectual contamination as well. More and more are public schools in America [are] becoming institutions for subjecting children to a narrow and reactionary orthodoxy, aiming to crush out all signs of individuality, and to turn out boys and girls compressed into a standardized pattern, with ready made ideas on politics, religion, morality, and economics. True education cannot grow out of such compulsory herding of children in filthy fire-traps.
"Character, ability, and reasoning power are not to be developed in this fashion. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether even a completely successful educational system could offset the evils of indiscriminate breeding and compensate for the misfortune of being a superfluous child."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter III, "Children Troop Down From Heaven ..." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 77 and 78 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble minded. That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics from every country indicate, is invariable associated with an abnormally high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding ground for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile. "We protect the members of a weak strain," says Davenport, "up to the period of reproduction, and then let them free upon the community, and encourage them to leave a large progeny of 'feeble minded': which in turn, protected from mortality and carefully nurtured up to the reproductive period, are again set free to reproduce, and so the stupid work goes on of preserving and increasing our socially unfit strains"."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 80 and 81 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Feeble-mindedness in one generation becomes pauperism or insanity in the next. There is every indication that feeble-mindedness in its protean form is on the increase, that it has leaped the barriers, and that there is truly, as some of the scientific eugenists have pointed out, a feeble-minded peril to future generations — unless the feeble-minded are prevented from reproducing their kind. To meet this emergency is the immediate and peremptory duty of every State and of all communities.
"The curious situation has come about that while our statesmen are busy upon their propaganda of "repopulation," and are encouraging the production of large families, they are ignoring the exigent problem of the elimination of the feeble-minded. In this, however, the politicians are at one with the traditions of a civilization which, with its charities and philanthropies, has propped up the defective and degenerate and relieved them of the burdens borne by the healthy sections of the community, thus enabling them more easily and more numerously to propagate their kind."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 82 and 83 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Sir James Crichton-Browne speaks of the great numbers of feeble-minded girls, wholly unfit to become mothers, who return to the work house year after year to bear children, "many of whom happily die, some of whom survive to recruit our idiot establishments and to repeat their mothers' performances." Tredgold points out that the number of children born to the feeble-minded is abnormally high. Feeble-minded women "constitute a permanent menace to the race and one which becomes serious at a time when the decline of the birth-rate is ... unmistakable"."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 86 and 87 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Thus we are brought face to face with another problem of infant mortality. Are we to check the infant mortality among the feeble-minded and aid the unfortunate offspring to grow up, a menace to the civilized community even when not actually certifiable as mentally defective or not obviously imbecile?"
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 88 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Confronted with these shocking truths about the menace of feeble-mindedness to the race, a menace acute because of the unceasing and unrestrained fertility of such defectives, we are apt to become the victims of a "wild panic for instant action"."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 88 and 89 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"In such a reckless and thoughtless differentiation between the "bad" and the "good" feeble-minded, we find new evidence of the conventional middle-class bias that also finds expression among some of the eugenists. We do not object to feeble-mindedness simply because it leads to immorality and criminality; nor can we approve of it when it expresses itself in docility, submissiveness and obedience. We object because both are burdens and dangers to the intelligence of the community."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 90 and 91 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"I have touched upon these various aspects of the complex problem of the feeble-minded, and the menace of the moron to human society, not merely for the purpose of reiterating that it is one of the greatest and most difficult social problems of modern times, demanding an immediate, stern and definite policy, but because it illustrates the actual harvest of reliance upon traditional morality, upon the biblical injunction to increase and multiply, a policy still taught by politician, priest and militarist. Motherhood has been held universally sacred; yet, as Bouchacourt pointed out, "today, the dregs of the human species, nervous, the vicious, the idiotic, the imbecile, the cretins and the epileptics — are better protected than pregnant women." The syphilitic, the irresponsible, the feeble-minded are encouraged to breed unhindered, while all the powerful forces of tradition, of custom, or prejudice, have bolstered up the desperate effort to block the inevitable influence of true civilization in spreading the principles of independence, self reliance, discrimination and foresight upon which the great practice of intelligent parenthood is based.
"To-day we are confronted by the results of this official policy. There is no escaping it; there is no explaining it away. Surely it is an amazing and discouraging phenomenon that the very governments that have seen fit to interfere in practically every phase of the normal citizen's life, dare not attempt to restrain, either by force or persuasion, the, moron and the imbecile from producing his large family of feeble minded offspring." P. 98
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 96 to 98 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"But there is a point at which philanthropy may become positively dysgenic, when charity is converted into injustice to the self-supporting citizen, into positive injury to the future of the race. Such a point, it seems obvious, is reached when the incurably defective are permitted to procreate and thus increase their numbers."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 99 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"The actual dangers can only be fully realized when we have acquired definite information concerning the financial and cultural cost of these classes to the community, when we become fully cognizant of the burden of the imbecile upon the whole human race; when we see the funds that should be available for human development, for scientific, artistic and philosophic research, being diverted annually, by hundreds of millions of dollars, to the care and segregation of men, women, and children who never should have been born."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 100 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period. Otherwise, she is almost certain to bear imbecile children, who in turn are just as certain to breed other defectives. The male defectives are no less dangerous. Segregation carried out for one or two generations would give us only partial control of the problem. Moreover, when we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of an endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.
"This, I say, is an emergency measure. But how are we to prevent the repetition in the future of a new harvest of imbecility, the recurrence of new generations of morons and defectives, as the logical and inevitable consequence of the universal application of the traditional and widely approved command to increase and multiply?
"At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of imbecility, defect and delinquency ... It is, therefore, necessary to interpret and criticize the three programs offered to meet our emergency. These may be briefly summarized as follows:"
"(1) Philanthropy and Charity: This is the present and traditional method of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of poverty and delinquency. It is emotional, altruistic, at best ameliorative, aiming to meet the individual situation as it arises and presents itself. Its effect in practice is seldom, if ever, truly preventive. Concerned with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and catastrophic miseries, it cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery. At its worst, it is sentimental and paternalistic.
(2) Marxian Socialism: This may be considered typical of many widely varying schemes of more or less revolutionary social reconstruction, emphasizing the primary importance of environment, education, equal opportunity, and health, in the elimination of the conditions (i.e. capitalistic control of industry) which have resulted in biological chaos and human waste ...
(3) Eugenics: Eugenics seems to me to be valuable in its critical and diagnostic aspects, in emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and uncontrolled fertility of the "unfit" and the feeble minded establishing a progressive unbalance in human society and lowering the birth rate among the "fit"."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter IV, "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 101 to 104 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Fostering the good for nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles."
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Margaret Sanger. Quote by Herbert Spencer introducing Chapter V, "The Cruelty of Charity." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 123 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism. It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease.
Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the "failure" of philanthropy, but rather at its success.
"These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice. Readers of Huxley's attack on the Salvation Army will recall his penetrating and stimulating condemnation of the debauch of sentimentalism which expressed itself in so uncontrolled a fashion in the Victorian era."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Cruelty of Charity." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 108 and 109 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Thus, while the City of New York spent $7.35 per capita on public education in the year 1918, it spent on public charities no less than $2.66. Add to this figure an even larger amount dispensed by private agencies, and we may derive some definite sense of the heavy burden of dependency, pauperism and delinquency upon the normal and healthy sections of the community."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Cruelty of Charity." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 111 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"When we learn further that the total number of inmates in public and private institutions in the state of New York — in alms-houses, reformatories, schools for the blind, deaf and mute, in insane asylums, in homes for the feeble minded and epileptic — amounts practically to less than sixty-five thousand, an insignificant number compared to the total population, our eyes should be opened to the terrific cost to the community of this dead weight of human waste."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Cruelty of Charity." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 112 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Organized charity is thus confronted with the problem of feeble-mindedness and mental defect. But just as the State has so far neglected the problem of mental defect until this takes the form of criminal delinquency, so the tendency of our philanthropic and charitable agencies has been to pay no attention to the problem until it has expressed itself in terms of pauperism and delinquency. Such "benevolence" is not merely ineffectual; it is positively injurious to the community and the future of the race."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Cruelty of Charity." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 113 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Now, as the findings of Tredgold and Karl Pearson and the British Eugenists so conclusively show, and as the infant mortality reports so thoroughly substantiate, a high rate of fecundity Is always associated with the direst poverty, irresponsibility, mental defect, feeble-mindedness, and other transmissible taints. The effect of maternity endowments and anthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute necessity is to discourage it.
"Such "benevolence" is not merely superficial and near sighted. It conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Cruelty of Charity." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 115 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. 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. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter V, "The Cruelty of Charity." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 116 and 117 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Dr. Austin Freeman has recently pointed out some of the physiological, and racial effects of machinery upon the proletariat, the breeders of the world. Speaking for Great Britain, Dr. Freeman suggests that the omnipresence of machinery tends toward the production of large but inferior populations. Evidences of biological and racial degeneracy are apparent to this observer. "Compared with the African negro," he writes, "the British sub-man is in several respects markedly inferior. He tends to be dull; he is usually quite helpless and unhandy; he has, as a rule, no skill or knowledge of handicraft. Or indeed knowledge of any kind ... Over-population Is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and the elimination of the fit"."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter VI, "Neglected Factors of the World Problem." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 131 and 132 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"... the advent of machinery has brought with it a counteracting centripetal effect. The result has been the accumulation of large urban populations, the increase of irresponsibility, and ever-widening, margin of biological waste." —
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rgaret Sanger. Chapter VI, "Neglected Factors of the World Problem." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 132 and 133 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"We can hope for no advance until we attain a new conception of sex, not as a merely propagative act, not merely as a biological necessity for the perpetuation of the race, but as a psychic and spiritual avenue of expression."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter VI, "Neglected Factors of the World Problem." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 140 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"The new conception of sex has been well stated by one to whom the debt of contemporary civilization is well nigh immeasurable. "Sexual activity," Havelock Ellis has written, "is not merely a baldly propagative act, nor, when propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels. It is something more even than the foundation of great social institutions. It is the function by which all the finer activities of the organism, physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter VI, "Neglected Factors of the World Problem." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 141 and 142 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Before we can undertake the calm and impartial investigation of any social problem, we must first of all free ourselves from all those sexual prejudices which are so vehement and violent and which so completely distort our vision of the external world society as a whole has yet to fight its way through an almost impenetrable forest of sexual taboos. There are few things from which humanity has suffered more than the degraded and irreverent feelings of mystery and shame that have been attached to the genital and excretory organs."
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Quote by George Drysdale in Chapter VI, "Neglected Factors of the World Problem." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 142 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Puritanic and academic taboo of sex in education and religion is as disastrous to human welfare as prostitution or the venereal scourges. "We are compelled squarely to face the distorting influences of biologically aborted reformers as well as the wastefulness of seducers," Dr. Edward A. Kempf recently declared. "Man arose from the ape and inherited his passions, which he can only refine but dare not attempt to castrate unless he would destroy the fountains of energy that maintain civilization and make life worth living and the world worth beautifying ... We do not have a problem that is to be solved by making repressive laws and executing them. Nothing will be more disastrous ... The noblest and most difficult art of all is the raising of human thoroughbreds."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter VI, "Neglected Factors of the World Problem." The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, pages 144 and 145 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Modern psychology has taught us that human nature has a tendency to place the cause of its own deficiencies and weaknesses outside of itself, to attribute to some external agency, to some enemy or group of enemies, the blame for its own misery."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter VII, "Is Revolution the Remedy?" The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 153 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"Sex, uncontrolled, misdirected, over-stimulated and misunderstood, has run riot at the instigation of priest, militarist and exploiter. Uncontrolled sex has rendered the proletariat prostrate, the capitalist powerful."
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Margaret Sanger. Chapter VII, "Is Revolution the Remedy?" The Pivot of Civilization [New York City: Brentano's], 1922, page 165 [NOTE: For the full text of The Pivot of Civilization, click here].
"... we should not minimize the importance of the Socialist movement in so valiantly and so courageously battling
