       The pages of the Birth Control Review are saturated with noxious ideas and statements — eugenic, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and so on. The "out of context" defense is grossly unpersuasive because the many repugnant ideas listed in this document are the context!
       Keep in mind that Planned Parenthood smears Human Life International and many other pro-life organizations with ridiculous labels such as "anti-Semitic" and "racist," often with a single quote made by a minor spokesperson, or a quote that is many years old. We should feel perfectly justified, then, in splattering Planned Parenthood with the same tarry brush, considering that we have nearly 1,200 quotes to work with. After all, if PP wants to play rough verbally, we should be able to use the same tactics. What's fair is fair!

       (2)  "Most of This Material Was Not Written By Margaret Sanger." Margaret Sanger wrote perhaps two percent of the total volume of information contained in the 24-year run of the Birth Control Review. However, her quotes are offensive in the extreme. For example, there are 23 lengthy quotes by Sanger in this document supporting negative eugenics alone, including her infamous "Plan for Peace."
       To address the above objection, we know that, if an American Nazi or known racist was allowed to print an article in a pro-life newsletter, the pro-abortionists would never let us forget it. They would not only smear the pro-life organization that published the offending article, they would relentlessly tar and feather the entire pro-life movement as "Nazis" and "racists."
       Human Life International is merely holding Planned Parenthood to the same standard. The Birth Control Review is larded with articles written by such 'luminaries' as Lothrop Stoddard, American Birth Control League board member and author of the book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy and Ernst Rudin, Adolf Hitler's Director of Genetic Sterilization and founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene — the organization behind the master plan to exterminate Jews during World War II.
       We can thus say with certainty that Planned Parenthood honors a person (Margaret Sanger) who not only befriended authentic racists and Nazis, but gave them a widespread platform to spread their poison.

       (3)  "The Review Does Not Reflect Current Planned Parenthood Thinking." One typical reaction of Planned Parenthood defenders is to say that Margaret Sanger lived a long time ago, and her thoughts and writings are not representative of the philosophy of today's "new, improved" Planned Parenthood.
       In response, pro-lifers can say with authority that no Planned Parenthood spokesperson — at any level — has ever disavowed Margaret Sanger. The furthest anyone has gone in this direction is Faye Wattleton's extraordinarily lame statement that "No one can really interpret what Sanger meant because she's dead" [New York City Tribune, February 23, 1988, page 1].
       In fact, PPFA names its most prestigious major projects and awards after Sanger: The Margaret Sanger Award is given annually to the person that PPFA perceived as most advancing the cause of "reproductive rights" during the previous year, and PPFA's 1996 national fundraising drive was named "Maggie's Millions."
       A few quotes from recent Planned Parenthood leaders and writers demonstrate that PPFA still embraces the Sangerian philosophy;

       "I believe Margaret Sanger would have been proud of us today if she had seen the directions that we have most recently in this organization taken."
—  Faye Wattleton, former President of the Planned Parenthood Federation
      of America, at PPFA's annual luncheon in St. Louis, on May 2, 1979.

       "First, as you know, as we celebrate the 100th birthday of Margaret Sanger, our outrageous and our courageous leader, we will probably find a number of areas in which we may want to find more about Margaret Sanger than we thought we wanted to know ... we should be very proud of what we are and what our mission is. It is a very grand mission ... abortion is only the tip of the iceberg."
—  Excerpt from the transcript of the address given by Faye Wattleton, former
      President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, at a luncheon
      in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 5, 1979.

       "I can't think of anyone who has made a greater contribution to the lives of women, children and families — of all races — than Margaret Sanger. You have to look at [her] life to see she had a desire to halp the poor and the downtrodden of any race."
—  Gloria Feldt, President and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of
      America (PPFA) from 1996 to 2005 and former President of the Planned
      Parenthood Action Fund, quoted in the Phoenix Gazette, September 12, 1991.

       "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.

"We remain committed to Margaret Sanger's vision that everyone has the right to choose when and whether to have a child, and that every child should be wanted and loved."
— Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. 2006 Annual Report, page 1.

       Writers for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America vigorously defend Margaret Sanger in print and on the Internet. Two examples of this are (1) an article entitled "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?," written by Charles Valenza and published in the January/February 1985 issue of the Alan Guttmacher Institute's Family Planning Perspectives, and (2) a second electronic article entitled "The Truth About Margaret Sanger." Both of these articles were featured on the Web site of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America until recently.
       In fact, PPFA adores Sanger so much they even had a "photo album" devoted to her life at its Web site until it was recently removed.
       In conclusion, an organization does not honor a person with photo albums, fawning articles, and attempts at memorialization unless it embraces that person's philosophies. Margaret Sanger's philosophies, as shown in this document, were eugenics, free love, anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant bigotry, and population control.

How to Use This Document.

       Each quote from the Birth Control Review is preceded by one or more three-letter codes in brackets. These correspond to the below categories. Therefore, if you are looking for pro-eugenics quotes, simply use your word processor search routine to look for [EUG]. For particularly outstanding examples of each category of quote, look for the bracketed three-letter code with asterisk. This means that the outstanding and most extreme pro-eugenics quotes from the Birth Control Review will be preceded with the code [EUG*].
       The categories of quotes in this document are listed below.

QUOTE CODES


ABO	Pro-abortion quotes
ADU	Pro-adultery, pro-fornication and pro-prostitution quotes
COE	Quotes advocating forced abortions, sterilization and contraception
EUG	Pro-eugenics quotes
FAM	Anti-child, anti-marriage and anti-family quotes
ILL	Quotes advocating illegal activities
INF	Pro-infanticide quotes
PRE	Bizarre predictions
RAC	Racist quotes
REL	Anti-religious quotes
SBC	Pro-sex education and pro-school-based clinic (SBC) quotes
SIT	Pro-situational ethics (moral relativism) quotes
SLO	Sloganistic quotes

Birth Control Review Quotes from 1917

[EUG][PRE] "Birth control is the message of a new social philosophy dedicated primarily to the proposition of voluntary motherhood and racial betterment. By its advent a new epoch is dawning in the affairs of men. A new race shall arise, released from the dead weight of poverty, disease, almshouses, asylums, reformatories and prisons. It shall be a race more dynamic in its pro-social impulses, more keen and alert to digest ideas, a race arising from a finer mother- and father-hood, from firesides where children have been wanted and welcomed and reared in an environment of human tenderness and all that that implies."

—: William Sanger. "Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 1 (January 1917), page 7.

[ILL] "Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of to-day arises. She no longer pleads. She no longer implores. She no longer petitions. She is here to assert herself, to take back those rights which were formerly hers and hers alone. If she must break the law to establish her right to voluntary motherhood, then the law shall be broken."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Shall We Break This Law?" Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 2 (February 1917), page 4.

[PRE] "Summed up in a word, by "birth control" is meant the regulation of conception by harmless means, with a view to preventing the birth of undesired children. By no stretch of the wildest imagination can it be made to spell abortion or any form of infanticide."

—: Frederick A. Blossom. "Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 2 (February 1917), page 12.

[EUG][INF]       "A portion of infant and child mortality represents, no doubt, the lingering and wasteful removal from this world of beings with inherent defects, beings who for the most part ought never to have been born and need not have been born under conditions of greater foresight.
       "The plain and simple truth is that they [children] are born needlessly. There are still far too many births for our civilization to look after adequately; we are still unfit to be trusted with a rising birth rate.
       "Our civilization at present has neither the courage to kill them [children] outright quickly, cleanly and painlessly, nor the heart and courage and ability to give them what they need."

—: H.G. Wells, Mankind in the Making. "Needless Waste of Little Lives." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 2 (February 1917), page 13.

[FAM] "The large family is a menace to-day because each additional child in a wage earner's family lowers the family standard and renders it less probable that the members of the family will elude the clutches of poverty."

—: Scott Nearing. "The Menace of Large Families." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 2 (February 1917), page 13.

[REL][EUG] "Foxes think large families among the rabbits highly commendable. Employers who want large supplies of cheap labor, priests who want large numbers of parishioners, military leaders who want plenty of cheap food for gunpowder, politicians who want plenty of voters, all agree in commending large families and rapid multiplication among the poorer classes."

—: Professor Thomas Nixon Carver, Harvard University, President of the American Economic Association. "The Enemies of Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 2 (February 1917), page 14.

[EUG] "Of course, there are a number of people "that never would be missed," if they probably had never been born because of the practice of birth control."

—: "Awful Probabilities." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 2 (February 1917), page 15.

[EUG] "If there is no ideal method of birth control, then there ought to be. The eugenist, the sociologist, the hospital and charity worker, the penologist, the specialist in tuberculosis, epilepsy, bone deformities, heart and kidney diseases, not only has the right but it is his duty to demand: "Tell us, and at once, what we can do to prevent the multiplication of the imbecile, the epileptic, the consumptive, the host of mental, moral and physical defectives and perverts who are increasing so much more rapidly than the more normal members of the community.""

—: A.L. Goldwater, M.D. "The Need For Free Discussion of Birth Control Methods." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 3 (March 1917), page 5.

[RAC][EUG] "Brownsville is the most thickly populated section of Brooklyn. Here the working people live. Here are the dwelling-places of the very poor, a whole city of Jewish and Italian inhabitants housed in the most assiduously investigated and frequently condemned type of tenement. Block after block, street after street, as far as one can see in every direction, there is an endless stretch of dreary walls bursting with their excess of wretched humanity. Unkempt children swarm the alley ways and fire escapes and you seldom see a woman without her inevitable baby."

—: Elizabeth Stuyvesant. "The Brownsville Birth Control Clinic." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 3 (March 1917), page 6.

[EUG][REL][SLO] "The good preacher 'thanks God that Susannah Wesley [mother of John Wesley] was not the kind of woman' who refuses to do her full duty in the line of babies. He wishes this country 'had a million mothers like Susannah Wesley.' It has. There are probably several million just as thoughtless and improvident as she was. The country is full of foolish women who continually bring into the world babies ... I might point out to Dr. Cadman that most of Susannah's babies were of no use. Only John and Charles amounted to a hill of beans. The rest were nonentities, like all the Washington brood except George.
"Family limitation seeks to stop this child murder [illegal abortion], which Mrs. Sanger and the rest of us deplore as deeply as Dr. Cadman or any other preacher can. Child murder is effected principally by way of abortion. The prevention of conception when children are not desired would make abortion a useless crime."

—: Charles Hiram Chapman. "Have we A Son Named Samuel?" Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 3 (March 1917), page 9.

[EUG] "When birth control is fully understood, we will have a finer and more perfect race."

—: Mrs. J. Westburg's letter to Margaret Sanger. Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 3 (March 1917), page 10.

[PRE][ADU] "All the children you now see are suitably dressed; they look now as neat as formerly only the children of the village clergymen did. In the families of the laborers there is now a better personal and general hygiene, a finer moral and intellectual development. All this has become possible by limitation of the number of children in these families. It may be that now and then this preventive teaching has caused illicit intercourse but, on the whole, morality is now on a much higher level and mercenary prostitution, with its demoralizing consequences and propagation of continuous diseases, is on the decline."

—: Dr. J. Rutgers of the Neo-Malthusian League of Holland. "After Thirty-Five Years of Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 3 (March 1917), page 14.

[EUG]       "Why do we let ignorant mothers bear untimely and unwelcome children? Do we not care enough for the nation's native citizenship to fortify potential mothers with the knowledge that will guarantee welcome, healthy children at the time when the mother can give them wise and loving care?
       "Ten percent of the young, athletic enthusiasts who go to Plattsburg [US Army Training Camp] are reported to have fainted on a hot day's hike. Our men are too soft for vigorous fatherhood. How many young women are fit for motherhood?
       We limit immigrants; we hold them up to the nation's portals and inquire about their pedigree, their health, and their sanity; why do we not choose our natives? Why do we let mothers bear untimely and unwanted children?

—: Charles Zueblin, "Mothers First!" Birth Control Review, Volume I, Numbers 4 and 5 (April-May 1917), page 4.

[EUG]       "A spread of birth control to the less capable part of the population will be an important advance for eugenics in cutting down the racial contribution of inferior stocks.
       "They [eugenicists] will look with satisfaction on an extension of birth control to the inefficient part of the population, and many of them are taking an active part in the campaign.
       "... Even possession of a knowledge of contraceptive methods will not affect the reckless and improvident, those who procreate while drunk — those, in short, whose children the race would be better off without."

—: Paul Popenoe. "Birth Control and Eugenics." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Numbers 4 and 5 (April-May 1917), page 6.

[ADU][PRE][EUG] "One of the strongest arguments of our moralists and purists is that the knowledge of contraception would lead the young to enter upon forbidden sexual relations. Granted that this may happen in a number of instances, the benefit derived from a diminution of venereal diseases, a greater number of happy and successful marriages among the younger people, fewer but better and healthier offspring, instead of an unrestricted procreation of the underfed, the tuberculous, the alcoholic, the degenerate, the feeble-minded and insane, would more than outweigh the isolated instances of sexual intercourse prior to marriage."

—: S. Adolphus Knopf, M.D. "An Arsenal of Argument." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Numbers 4 and 5 (April-May 1917), page 8.

[EUG] "Efficiency is the cry of the day. Let us employ eugenics in its highest form for the efficiency of the human race. We'd thus alleviate the suffering of the mothers of our race from too frequent child-bearing, a subject which men (who make the laws) could hardly seriously consider or have any conception of. We'd thus diminish the number of cripples and unfit, which are a burden to all of us, to whose upkeep every citizen, either directly or indirectly, contributes. We'd thus have children which mother, with the mother instinct, desired and wished for, and to which both parents were able to give proper attention and to bring up properly."

—: Samuel Bernard. "Efficiency and Moral Liberty." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Numbers 4 and 5 (April-May 1917), page 10.

[SIT] "... one is forced to admit that our whole attitude towards sex is on an unwholesome and unsound basis. Fundamental psychic changes must obtain, a cleaner, more natural attitude must take the place of the primitive convention-veneered instincts — in short, we must create a new morality ... we need a new morality."

—: Lillian Browne-Olf. "A Psychological Aspect of Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Numbers 4 and 5 (April-May 1917), page 12.

[PRE]

       "Mrs. Margaret Sanger:
       "You will think differently about birth control, or the murder of innocent, defenseless children, when you stand before the judgement seat of God and are hurled into Hell.
       "Marriage was instituted by God for the propagation of children, and those who do not want children are privileged to remain unmarried or live as virgins.
       "You have but one life to live, which will decide your eternity in Heaven or in Hell. Why not spend it doing good instead of evil?
       "On Judgement Day, those children you have murdered and have influenced others to murder will stand before you and, pointing their fingers of denunciation at you, demand God to punish you.
       "From the instant of conception, a soul is united to the body by almighty God, which you will have to give an account of. Instead of rearing that child for Heaven, you murder it.
       "Your money will have no influence with God."

—: "A Catholic," Louisville, Kentucky, February 13, 1917. Letter written to Margaret Sanger and given the disrespectful heading "The Immaculate Misconception." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Numbers 4 and 5 (April-May 1917), page 12.

[EUG] "Not more babies but better babies, better born and better reared."

—: Slogan of the Birth Control Review, Volume I, Numbers 4 and 5 (April-May 1917), page 13.

[PRE] "It is sometimes claimed that the dissemination of contraceptive information would cause an increase in prostitution. Abraham Flexner, who made an exhaustive study of prostitution in European countries, declares that Holland, where birth control has been systematically and openly taught for more than a generation, is singularly free from the evil of prostitution.
"'The streets of Amsterdam' he says, 'were, at the time of my visit, the cleanest I had anywhere observed.'"

—: "Birth Control and Prostitution." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Numbers 4 and 5 (April-May 1917), page 15.

[EUG] "[Woman's] instincts are fundamentally creative, not destructive. But her sex-bondage has made the dumb instrument of the monster she detests. For centuries she has populated the earth in ignorance and without restraint, in vast numbers and with staggering rapidity. She has become not the mother of a nobler race, but a mere breeding machine grinding out a humanity which fills insane asylums, almshouses and sweat shops, and provides cannon fodder that tyrants may rise to power on the sacrifice of her offspring."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Woman and War." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 6 (June 1917), page 5.

[EUG] "Instead of an immense amount of life of low type, I would far sooner see half the amount of life of a high type. Increase in the swarms of people whose existence is subordinated to material development is rather to be lamented than rejoiced over."

—: Herbert Spencer. Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 6 (June 1917), page 5.

[PRE][REL*][SLO]       "Another reason why birth control appeals to the advanced radical is that it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I do not expect every one to agree with this statement, but it is the opinion of many who, like myself, look forward to seeing humanity free some day of the tyranny of priests no less than of capitalists."
       "The church depends for its existence upon dominating the family. In the early days it arrogated to itself the right of licensing the marital relations of men and women, and has partially yielded that privilege to the State only under the greatest pressure. When priests ceased to be the sole purveyors of marriage contracts, they lost much of their influence. They will still lose more when the emancipated working class mother rejects their dictum that, in order to please the Deity, she must dispute the fertility record with female guinea pigs.
       "The church will never be converted to birth control. It prefers that the world should be over-populated by the ignorant and unthinking. It will continue to thunder against the prevention of conception as an 'unholy interference with the laws of God and nature.' But those who take its clamor with a grain of salt will increase in numbers, until birth control finally looms up as one of the principal factors in the downfall of the church.
       " ...it is essential to woman to know how to prevent conception. Without this knowledge, she cannot win her moral, intellectual, or economic freedom. It is primarily her ]fight, and she must be backed in it by everyone who wishes to see her emerge from the sex bondage in which she has been held since the beginning of the Christian era.
       "There is still a third major reason why the limitation of offspring appeals to the revolutionist. It would in time make war impossible. International warfare, at all events. Men would be too precious to be conscripted and sent out to slaughter each other. They would be too intelligent to go, even if their rulers were misguided enough to attempt to herd them to the shambles. Birth control is essentially an anti-militaristic philosophy. There is no question in my mind that if it had been universally practiced by the last generation, the present war — all Kaisers, Kings, and Presidents notwithstanding — could never have been imposed upon the world."

—: Walter Adolphe Roberts. "Birth Control and the Revolution." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 6 (June 1917), page 7.

[EUG] "Instead of calling birth control among the poor and deficient a crime, it should be preached to them as a sacred duty. The laws must be changed."

—: Caroline Nelson, "On Changing the Law." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 12 (December 1917), page 4.

[EUG] "A newborn babe has rights which defective parents would be unable to give him. And if we knew a little more about the laws of Karma and Rebirth, we could plainly see that children born into unfortunate environments often had better far never have been born at all."

—: Maude Durand Edgren. "The Spiritual Aspect of Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 12 (December 1917), page 6.

[EUG][INF][PRE][SLO*]       "... owing to scientific knowledge of birth control, women are saved from the deteriorating and ghastly effects of abortion, which so many women of the United States frequently undergo.
       "In the early history of the race, so-called "natural law" reigned undisturbed. Under its pitiless and unsympathetic iron rule, only the strongest, most courageous could live and become progenitors of the race. The weak died early or were killed. Today, however, civilization has brought sympathy, pity, tenderness and other lofty and worthy sentiments, which interfere with the law of natural selection. We are now in a state where our charities, our compensation acts, our pensions, hospitals, and even our drainage and sanitary equipment all tend to keep alive the sickly and the weak, who are allowed to propagate and in turn produce a race of degenerates.
       "In this country our stupid and puritanical laws have been the cause of more than fifty thousand annual deaths resulting from abortions."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Birth Control and Women's Health." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 12 (December 1917), page 7.

[EUG][SLO] "As a result of my observations, I find that it would be a splendid thing to have a clinic where well-trained attendants could give women, who have not the advantage of an education, the necessary information. Besides, there are the women who are naturally rather dull. These by all means should be helped to limit their families. We need a generation of healthy, vigorous intelligent human beings. Therefore, the inferior strains and stocks should be encouraged to have as few children as possible, so that the average level of racial vigor and intelligence may be raised. This is in accord with the soundest eugenic science. If we withhold birth control information from the worst strains in our population by making it criminal to disseminate this knowledge, and let them do most of the breeding, we shall only be inflicting an irreparable injury on the race; for the more intelligent, energetic and far-sighted will get the information anyway, in spite of the laws."
"In one word, my experience has led me to believe that the great argument for birth control is, that contraceptive information should be especially available to the poorer classes, to prevent dire indigence and improve the average of racial vigor and intelligence."

—: Meta M. Dekker. "Birth Control in Oregon." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 12 (December 1917), page 10.

[EUG]       "The American woman of today is physically and nervously unable to compete with her grandmother in the matter of bearing unlimited offspring. In Colonial times, the environment was favorable and women specialized on reproduction with eminent success."
       "Birth control was one of the few serious moral forces at work tending to preserve the integrity of the State [in the ancient European civilizations]. But, in Rome especially, it was not quite effective enough to combat the soft luxury and vice which had come as an aftermath of an orgy of conquest."
       "There is no greater national waste than the spawning of the slums ... birth control has become necessary as a check upon the blind workings of ignorance and poverty.
       "The world over, the intelligent parents of three children or less have been, and are, the upholders of national standards."

—: Margaret Sanger editorial. "An Answer to Mr. Roosevelt." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 12 (December 1917), page 13.

[PRE] "Only limitation of births will prevent future European wars ... If people could be made to comprehend that it was the overcrowding of European nations, except France, that caused this war, birth control would become a patriotic duty and an unwritten policy."

—: A Statement by Wesley Frost, former Consul at Queenstown Ireland. "The Jostling Hordes." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 12 (December 1917), page 15.

[PRE] "But there are still some of us who believe birth control to be a fundamental solution to the problems of poverty, prostitution, child labor, and even war itself."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Editorial." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 12 (December 1917), page 16.

Birth Control Review Quotes from 1918

[SLO] "For only through giving women information as to how to prevent conception, can we avoid the wastage of bearing all these thousands of poor little diseased infants, predestined to die before they are a year old, or if they survive, to become in a majority of cases inmates of prisons, insane asylums, and houses of prostitution, as reliable statistics prove."

—: Gertrude M. Williams. "A Summons To Our Women Citizens." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 1 (January 1918), page 4.

[PRE][EUG][COE*]       "What is the average family of English intellectuals? About two and one-half. Of French physicians? One and one-half. Of married imbeciles? Six, or seven or eight, depending on the country.
       "... we need it [birth control] voluntary or enforced, if necessary by celibacy or segregation, for the seriously defective.
       "Such a true radical is the eugenist. His vision is of the voluntary control of the quality of future humanity. He would purge the world of imbeciles, epileptics, and the insane by ceasing to breed them ... he would eliminate in time those of surpassing moral and physical ugliness.
       "Godspeed the day when the unwilling mother, with her weak, puny body, her sad, anaemic unlovely face, and her dependent whine, will be no more. In that day, we shall see a race of American thoroughbreds, if not the superman.
       "It is a fact. I see it in constant operation all about me. Few of the well-to-do people I know blush to say that they have only as many children as they think they ought to have, or as they personally desire. It is only where women are poor, or tied down by the care of little children, or isolated, or profoundly ignorant, that birth control is not practiced: And just in these places it is most needed, for the welfare of the individual, and of the race."

—: Anna E. Blount, M.D. "Eugenics in Relation to Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 1 (January 1918), page 7.

[PRE] "There is no danger that the race will die off. Parental instinct is too strong and sure for that. Statistics from all foreign countries where birth control is more freely practiced show that with the drop in the birth rate comes a more than proportionate drop in infant mortality. This is due to the fact that parents having fewer children are able to take better care of those they have. The net result is not a decrease, but an increase, in population."

—: Gertrude M. Williams. "A Summons to Our Women Citizens." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 1 (January 1918), page 10.

[SLO] "The southern woman is fifty years behind the rest of the women in the country. She has no mind, no individuality, no initiative, and without question accepts all the absurd conventionalities that hedge her about and keep her a charming and useless dependent on her husband."

—: Bianca Van Beuren. "The Women of the South." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Numbers 2 and 3 (February-March 1918), page 7.

[PRE] "Some sixty years ago ... two men issued a pamphlet. That pamphlet was the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedreich Engels and last year it hurled Nicolas Romanoff off the throne of Russia forever and ever, amen. It is a truth, and people will listen to truths; slowly but surely they will pay attention and out of these truths will spring Leon Trotskys and Nicolai Lenins and Margaret Sangers despite ... respectabilities who fear intelligence and hate emancipation.
"As I write this article, news comes from Albany that the Supreme Court has declared the penal code which forbids the dissemination of birth control information constitutional. I do not even know the names of the wise and dignified men who arrived at a conclusion long after everyone expected them to do so. You, my reader, do not know their names and probably do not care to. What we do know is, that these well-fed manikins of a dead hand will be in the mud when Margaret Sanger is in bronze."

—: Louis Weitzenkorn. "The Dynamite of an Idea." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Numbers 2 and 3 (February-March 1918), page 8.

[PRE][EUG*][SLO] "Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race ...
"Our laws force women into celibacy on one hand, or abortion on the other. Both conditions are declared by eminent medical authorities to be injurious to health."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Morality and Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Numbers 2 and 3 (February-March 1918), page 14.

[REL] "All the forces of opposition were on hand to malign individuals and to misrepresent the cause [of birth control]. The influence of the Roman Catholic Church was seen everywhere ... the strongest opposition came from the subtle underground workings of that Church which apparently dominates American courts of justice and political life today."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Clinics, Courts, and Jails." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 4 (April 1918), page 4.

[EUG] "We respectfully suggest to the government that it undertake a distribution of information on how to obtain quality in human procreation through family limitation, as it now does in connection with cattle breeding."

—: Anne Wexler, President, Birth Control League of Washington, D.C. "The Fight From Coast to Coast." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 4 (April 1918), page 6.

[SLO] "Those who advocate birth control are among the foremost to advocate a hardy self-control and mutual consideration in the sexual relationship in order to keep love pure and to translate it into its highest values."

—: Frank V. Anderson. "Two Views of Love." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 4 (April 1918), page 11.

[ADU] "As for the argument that many girls would become immoral were it not for the fear of pregnancy, I feel that it would be far better for a few more girls to become immoral without any illegitimate children to be born, than for a large number of fatherless children to be born yearly and countless girls driven to a life of prostitution, because of either uncontrolled passion or seduction by some man for whom there is more love than prudent feeling."

—: Claude T. Smith. "The Real Immorality." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 4 (April 1918), page 14.

[EUG][SLO] "The only remedy for existing social evils is reconstruction of humanity from the bottom; and it is here where the birth control movement fills its place with honor. It aims to mitigate sufferings and increase happiness, it favors children with healthy bodies and minds capable of intellectual improvement, in short it stands for quality and not for quantity. Its advocates are moved by altruistic motives; they see a vision of a grander humanity which shall arise on the ashes of ours."

—: O. Kihlstom. "A Challenge to Womanhood." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 4 (April 1918), page 14.

[EUG] "Birth control prevents the reproduction of those unfit for such service, and enables the fit to postpone bringing children into the world until the wife is physically able to bear a healthy child and the family income is adequate to supply the nourishment, environment and education necessary to build up a race of efficient fighting men."

—: Anna Steese Richardson. "Birth Control and the War." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 5 (May 1918), page 3.

[PRE][REL][EUG*] "Speed the day when woman shall be free! Then, too, shall man be free and they together, emancipated from the degrading ignorance and superstition of the past, shall walk the highlands of vision, mate in perfect love, and people the earth with a race of gods."

—: Eugene V. Debs. "Freedom Is The Goal." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 5 (May 1918), page 7.

[PRE][REL*] "The Catholic Church is the bigoted, relentless enemy of birth control. It makes no bones about its stand. This [birth control] movement threatens its hold upon the poor and the ignorant, and probably only the existence of restraining laws prevents it from applying the thumb-screw and the rack to all those who believe in woman's right to practise voluntary motherhood. But, since the methods of the Inquisition are out of date, it would compromise by clapping us all into jail. "The birth-controllers are at it again!" runs a medieval editorial in The Holy Name Journal, the organ of one of the most powerful Catholic societies in America. "Prison starvation seems but to have whetted their desire to continue the propaganda for what will ultimately be the extermination of the masses upon which our country must rely in the future." Observe the admission that our propaganda (as the Holy-Namers see it) "will ultimately" succeed ... Do we expect ever to win over the Catholic Church to our way of thinking? Not right away. We are aware that it will fight to the last ditch against this ideal. But we propose to go on enrolling Catholics under our banner of progress — by the thousands today, by the hundreds of thousands in a year or two. In the long run, reason will inevitably triumph over darkness and superstition. Even the Catholic Church will yield to the force of public opinion."

—: Editorial Comment. Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 6 (June 1918), page 16.

[PRE][REL]       "We believe that with half a chance and just a little help in the right direction every woman, at least every normal woman, would strive to attain self control. If left to her own choice, she invariably would choose the higher path. And this path does not lead to celibacy. Such a life means overcoming by annulling a great part of one's nature and it seldom results in illumination. It has been tried out by the monks and the nuns. The truly illumined among them have been few and far between; on the other hand, the dire outcome of their practices has produced some of the worst licentiousness that ever existed on this planet ...
       "When she [woman], can be made to realize the beauty — and to live up to it — of making the sex relation spiritually diffusive and not merely physically gratifying, then she is on the way to become the true redeemer of the race. Not by annihilation of the sex function or sex intercourse, but by spiritualizing it.
       "The picture every woman should hold up as her ideal is a Goddess radiant with life and love, wearing the sun for a crown and using the moon for a pedestal, at the same time holding aloft, for the benefit of the whole sisterhood of womankind, the serpent twined staff of Mercury.
       "It is the divine spark in each human soul that makes that should strive upward for the light. It is confidence in the latent divinity of each human being on the face of the earth that justifies the advocacy of birth control."

—: Maude Durand Edgren. "Regeneration Through Sex." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 7 (July 1918), page 3.

[SLO][FAM] "If only birth would ensure woman's freedom from the recurrence of chance maternity! But it does not. The constant fear, anxiety, dread, and even horror as each month rolls by is something which only those who have been through it can fully realize, and how few women there are who do not know this fear!"

—: Jessie Rene. "The Waste of Creative Energy." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 7 (July 1918), page 6.

"There are already 37,069 persons in public institutions for the mentally defective and it is to be presumed that if these hospitals were not now overcrowded there would be some thousands more. And the number of insane and feeble-minded are increasing.
"Ignorance and stupidity create too many children."

—: Margaret Sanger (editorial comment). Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 7 (July 1918), page 9.

[EUG] "But after all, birth control is only one form of eugenics, and the true eugenist will hardly fail to appreciate the important aid which birth control offers him in his efforts for individual and social well-being."

—: Kepler Hoyt, letter to the Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 7 (July 1918), page 13.

[SLO] "... birth control is the highest, most far-reaching kind of patriotism."

—: Mary Ware Dennett, Executive Secretary, National Birth Control League, quoted in the Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 7 (July 1918), page 15.

[EUG][COE*] "There they are, a motley group, from the gay, light-hearted moron, who cannot make an intelligent plan, even to do mischief; to the doddering idiot, the crafty paranoiac, the wretched epileptic, the moral imbecile, the chronic criminal with hereditary taint, and even the village ne'er-do-well. What do they cost us, in wealth, in labor and in misery? They must be eliminated. Eugenics makes birth control imperative. Defectives may be segregated, they may be sterilized, and the brighter ones of them may learn methods of contraception. Their marriages should be forbidden, as an expression of the public will that their children are not wanted. But whatever the means this stream of human waste must be deflected from the melting-pot."

—: Anna E. Blount, M.D. "Large Families and Human Waste." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918), page 3.

[SLO] "Ignorance, poverty and vice must stop populating the world. To accomplish this, there is but one way. Science must make woman the owner of herself, the mistress of her person. Science, the only savior of mankind, must put it in the power of woman to decide for herself whether she will, or will not, become a mother."

—: Robert Ingersoll. Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918), page 6.

[SLO][PRE] "A generally low birth rate would tend to prevent war."

—: Editorial. "The Suicidal Birth Rate." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918), page 6.

[EUG] "The number of insane and feeble-minded is increasing. And it is still a crime to impart to the mothers of such information concerning birth control, which would save the relatives of the unfortunates inestimable trouble and sorrow."

—: "Editorials." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918), page 9.

[SBC] "The relation between sexual union and procreation, as we understand it, is the result of intelligent observation, not of instinctive or intuitive knowledge."

—: H.C. Dekker. "Improving On Instinct." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918), page 10.

[EUG][COE] "Undoubtedly we are producing too many human beings who are congenitally defective, mentally and physically, and it seems to me that this should be stopped by wise legislation and both by contraception and by the sterilization of the very unfit so that their kind shall not be born."

—: Judge J.C. Ruppenthal, in a letter to Margaret Sanger entitled "A Judge On Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918), page 11.

[PRE] "If we take the present century, we started in England and Wales with a population of thirty-two and a half millions, which should increase, as shown by the upper line, to six hundred millions by the end of the century, so that the population in England and Wales by the year 2001 should be equal to the population of the entire world in 1901."

—: C.V. Drysdale. "The Malthusian Doctrine Today." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918), page 14.

[PRE] "Nothing will permanently affect pauperism while the present reckless increase of population continues."

—: Milicent Garrett Fawcett. Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918), page 14.

[PRE*] "The churches of the various religions have been for thousands of years propagating the idea of peace on earth. They have failed to bring it about despite the tremendous wealth and power at their disposal. Birth control can bring universal peace to us, in fifty years, if labor would include the advocacy of the practice, in its march for emancipation."

—: "The Failure of the Church." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918), page 16.

[EUG][COE] "First of all, the hordes of degenerates, diseased, idiotic, feeble-minded, alcoholic, and vicious criminals must be wiped out. Their sterilization commends itself the more, in that it will not occasion them the least discomfort. Very simple operations like vasectomy insure the painless suppression of any possible descendants of those physically or mentally unfit."

—: G. Hardy. "Eugenics and Child Culture." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 9 (September 1918), page 18.

[EUG] "Eugenics aims to secure better babies."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Medical Journalists Advocate Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 10 (October 1918), page 4.

[PRE][SLO][EUG]

1.
The fall in the human birth rate is a world-wide international movement, which has come to stay.
2.
It is not due to diminished natural fertility, but to the adoption and spread of birth control principles.
3.
It is not a symptom of national decadence, but a mark of advancing civilization.
4.
It is the civilized substitute for those natural checks to population scarcity, disease and war — which have always operated in the past.
5.
Rapidly growing populations in countries with circumscribed territories are a fruitful pre-disposing cause of political unrest and war.
6.
Internationally, a competition in birth rates is compared to a competition in armaments, and both are undesirable.
7.
The prosperity of this country is absolutely dependent upon a supply of cheap coal. The more rapidly the population in this country increases the sooner will a commencing exhaustion of our coal fields manifest itself.
8.
The birth control movement is a natural ally of the maternity and child welfare movement. A low birth rate is closely correlated with a low rate of infant mortality, and vice versa.
9.
Birth control is an essential factor in the campaign against poverty. It is calculated to reduce the supply of unskilled labor, to increase efficiency, to raise wages, and to encourage a higher standard of life.
10.
Detailed knowledge of birth control is not readily available for the very poor by whom it is urgently needed.
11.
Birth control encourages early marriage by removing the fear of a large family. It is, therefore, an important factor in the campaign against immorality and venereal disease.
12.
Properly used, and not abused, birth control is a valuable eugenic instrument, capable, by restricting the multiplication of the least fit, of greatly raising the quality of the race."

"'It seems obvious...that anything that reduces the supply of labor and especially the superabundant supply of unskilled and inefficient labor will tend to raise the wages of labor ... If we could abolish this surplus of unskilled labor it would certainly be a very good thing both for unskilled labor as a class, and for the community as a whole.'"

—: Dr. C. Killick Millard. "Famous British Health Official Advocates World Wide Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 10 (October 1918), page 8.

[REL][SLO]       "The church has been powerless and the champions of worn out moral creeds find themselves trying in vain to force all women to become mothers against their wills."
       "Dr. Max Hirsch, a famous authority, quotes an opinion that there are 2,000,000 abortions in the United States every year! ... The question, then, is not whether family limitation should be practiced ... The question is now whether it is to be attained by normal, scientific birth control methods or by the abnormal, often dangerous surgical operation.
       "... if preventive means are not used and the sperm meets the ovum and development thus begins, any attempt at removing it or stopping its further growth is called abortion.
       "An abortion is as important a matter as a confinement and requires as much attention as the birth of a child at its full term.
       "'The immediate dangers of abortion' says Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, in his book The Practice of Obstetrics, 'are hemorrhage, retention of an adherent placenta, sepsis, tetanus, perforation of the uterus. They also cause sterility, anemia, malignant diseases, displaces, neurosis, and endometritis.'
       "In plain, everyday language, in an abortion there is always a very serious risk to the health and often to the life of the patient."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Birth Control or Abortion?" Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 11 (November 1918), page 3.

[SLO][EUG] "Are you aware that the high infant death rate is due principally to the family too large to afford proper living quarters, proper food, and proper physical attention? Do you know that each year 300,000 children in the United States die of diseases due to poverty and neglect?
"Do you know that 37,069 persons in the state institutions for the mentally defective came from large families reared in poverty? And do you know that unchecked breeding of these defectives has already overcrowded the state institutions to the extent of 10,000 persons?"

—: Letter by Margaret Sanger. Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 11 (November 1918), page 3.

[ILL] "Kitty Marion [a member of the Birth Control Review staff] has no apology to make for her violation of a dark age statute [New York State anti-contraceptive laws]. Neither have we one to make for her. We approve of her generous courage and we are proud of the unselfishness and fortitude with which she undergoes the penalty imposed by law for her work for women."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Judges With Small Families Jail Kitty Marion." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 11 (November 1918), page 5.

[SBC][PRE][EUG]       "Does not the Bible say 'be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth'? God's word never commanded us to fill the earth with idiots, imbeciles and blind babies, the inevitable outcome of accepting this verse of Genesis without question. A command which was given, if we literally accept Genesis as divine, when the world was in its infancy and needed population, requires some modification in these days of overcrowded tenements and filthy slums.
       "Voluntary motherhood does not lay emphasis on fewer normal babies, but it does insist on fewer babies who are unfit to fight life's battles properly.
       "Voluntary motherhood also objects to abortive operations. We further believe that it [voluntary motherhood through birth control] would minimize the number of these illegal acts [abortions] because we stand for education along sex lines by competent teachers."

—: Rabbi Rudolph I. Coffee, Ph.D. "Voluntary Motherhood." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 11 (November 1918), page 11.

[PRE] "The deeper that thinking minds look into the causes of the Great War [World War I] the more evident it is becoming that the chief cause of the cataclysmic struggle is high birth rates, particularly the high birth rate of Germany. High birth rates means expansion of national boundaries, conquests, annexations, exploitations, and all the manifold oppressions of a militaristic and imperialistic policy.
"Our remedy for prostitution is to encourage early marriage by spreading the knowledge that couples can avoid having any more children than they are able to do justice to."

—: Editorial. "Birth Control — The Cure For War." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 11 (November 1918), page 12.

[ABO][SLO]       "Family limitation will be practiced. No law has yet been framed that can prevent it. The church has been powerless and the champions of wornout moral creeds find themselves trying in vain to force all women to become mothers against their wills. Abundant evidence of the futility of seeking to impose involuntary motherhood upon women is found in the size of the families of the rich, of the well-to-do and of the wage workers of larger earning capacity. The women of these classes long ago refused to be mere brood animals — usually they prefer to be voluntary mothers, determining for themselves the number of children they shall have and when they shall have them. Family limitation for them is an accomplished fact.
       "'The immediate dangers of [illegal] abortion,' says Dr. J. Clifton Edgar, in his book "The Practice of Obstetrics," 'are hemorrhage, retention of an adherent placenta, sepsis, tetanus, perforation of the uterus. They also cause sterility, anemia, malignant diseases, displacements, neurosis, and endometritis.' In plain, everyday language, in an abortion there is always a very serious risk to the health and often to the life of the patient.
       "It is only women of wealth who can afford to give an abortion proper care and treatment both at the time of the operation and afterwards. These women often escape any serious consequences from its occurrence. The women whose incomes are limited and who must continue at work before they have recovered from the effects of an abortion are the great army of sufferers. It is among such that the deaths due to abortion usually ensue. It is these, too, who are most often forced to resort to such operations. If death does not result, the woman who has undergone an abortion is not therefore safe. The womb may not return to its natural size but remain large and heavy, tending to fall away from its natural position. Abortion often leaves the uterus in a condition to conceive easily again and unless prevention is strictly followed another pregnancy will surely occur. Frequent abortions tend to cause barrenness and serious, painful pelvic ailments. These and other conditions arising from such operations are quite likely to ruin a woman's general health.
       "While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of [illegal] abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization. I also assert that the responsibility for these abortions and the illness, misery and deaths that come in their train lies at the door of a government whose authority has been stretched beyond the limits of the people's intention and which, in its puritanical blindness, insists upon suffering and death from ignorance, rather than life and happiness from knowledge and prevention. 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 persons, who insist upon retaining the abominable legal restrictions."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Birth Control or Abortion?" Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 12 (December 1918), page 4.

Birth Control Review Quotes from 1919

[PRE][SLO]       "In the light of the best authoritative information of the day, it can be unequivocally set down that modern birth control methods, properly employed, are not only not injurious but are often positively beneficial to the woman's health.
       "Some of the persons who maintain that preventive measures are injurious are so ignorant of the whole subject that they in opposing abortion call it birth control. Still others believe that harmful drugs are given internally as contraceptives. They, of course, confuse abortives with the means of preventing conception. Anyone who knows anything about either birth control or abortion knows that scientific birth control methods would do away with abortions which occur in appalling numbers in America every year.
       "It is the consensus of modern medical opinion not only that scientific birth control methods are not harmful but in thousands of cases very beneficial to women suffering from leucorrhea, inflamed cervix, and other local disturbances.
       "The assertion that birth control methods induce sterility is equally ridiculous. Many a woman, through the use of scientific contraceptives has so toned up and strengthened her reproductive organs as to become capable of child bearing when she would otherwise had continued barren.
       "Scientific birth control is not only harmless but often a direct benefit to the health."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Are Birth Control Methods Injurious?" Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 1 (January 1919), pages 3 and 4.

[EUG] "U.S.A. needs a high quality population more than a greater quantity. She needs more of her children already born — to be reared into decent citizenship — not more to be born into destitution and poverty."

—: Editorial. Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 1 (January 1919), page 16.

[SLO] "Birth Control is not abortion and ... the latter (as at present practised, at all events) is a grave danger to women."

—: Jessie Ashley. "Editorial Comments." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 2 (February 1919), page 2.

[SBC][REL][SLO*] "... since women limit their families by abortion if by no other means, a free, unhindered spread of the knowledge of scientific birth control would do away with the appalling number of abortions occurring annually in the United States."
"... society has had an official censor deleting sex from all classroom work under the orders of a now outworn prudery."

—: Margaret Sanger. "A Victory, A New Year and A New Day." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 2 (February 1919), pages 3 and 4.

[ILL] "... insist upon birth control now — even in the face of statutes, magistrates, courts, and jails. The rebel spirit is of great social value; it keeps the race from becoming craven. Everyone can join the procession, whether it be the procession to jail or procession to visit the lawmakers."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Jessie Ashley, a Soul that Marches On." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 2 (February 1919), page 4.

[FAM][PRE*][SLO]       "The burden of excessive children on the over-worked, under-fed mothers of the working classes becomes at last so intolerable that anything seems better than another child. "I'd rather swallow the druggist's shop and the man in it than have another child," as a woman in Yorkshire said.
       "Now there has of late years arisen a movement, especially among the German women, for bringing abortion into honour and repute, so that it may be carried out openly and with the aid of the best physicians. It may be admitted that women have an abstract right to abortion and that in exceptional cases that right should be exerted. Yet there can be very little doubt to most people that abortion is a wasteful, injurious, and almost degrading method of dealing with the birth rate, a feeble apology for recklessness and improvidence. A society in which abortion flourishes cannot be regarded as a healthy society. Therefore, a community which takes upon itself to encourage abortion is incurring a heavy responsibility."
       "... Of recent years, however, evidence has been obtained that families in which the children are separated from each other by intervals of more than two years are both mentally and physically superior to those in which the interval is shorter."
       "... there cannot be any doubt about it, just as all those who work for birth control are diminishing the frequency of abortion, so every attempt to discourage birth control promotes abortion."

—: Havelock Ellis. "Birth Control in Relation to Morality and Eugenics." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 2 (February 1919), pages 7 and 9.

[SLO][EUG] "In this alone, if he has done nothing more, he [Havelock Ellis] has rendered incalculable aid in bringing about a better era for womankind. Helping to free women's creative functions of the chains of ignorance, superstition, and prudery, helping her to lift herself above the level of a subservient breeder of undesired or unfit children ... he has done an heretofore unparalleled service to the world."

—: "Havelock Ellis — An Appreciation." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 2 (February 1919), page 8.

[COE][EUG*]       "Before eugenists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control. Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance, are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit. Both are seeking a single end but they lay emphasis upon different methods. Eugenists emphasize the mating of healthy couples for the conscious purpose of producing healthy children, the sterilization of the unfit to prevent their populating the world with their kind and they may, perhaps, agree with us that contraception is a necessary measure among the masses of the workers, where wages do not keep pace with the growth of the family and its necessities in the way of food, clothing, housing, medical attention, education and the like. We who advocate Birth Control, on the other hand, lay all our emphasis upon stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care for those who are born in health. The eugenist also believes that a woman should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the state. We hold that the world is already over-populated. Eugenists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state.        "Neither the mating of healthy couples nor the sterilization of certain recognized types of the unfit touches the great problem of unlimited reproduction of those whose housing, clothing, and food are all inadequate to physical and mental health. These measures do not touch those great masses, who through economic pressure populate the slums and there produce in their helplessness other helpless, diseased and incompetent masses, who overwhelm all that eugenics can do among those whose economic condition is better.
       "We believe that if such [birth control] information is placed within the reach of all, we will have made it possible to take the first, greatest step toward racial betterment and that this step, assisted in no small measure by the educational propaganda of eugenists and members of similar schools, will be taken ...
       "Among the majority of wage-workers, the frequent arrival of children means ... the contributing of morons, feeble-minded, insane, and various criminal types to the already tremendous social burden constituted by these unfit.
       "Birth control of itself, by freeing the reproductive instinct from its present chains, will make a better race ... Eugenics without birth control seems to us a house builded upon the sands. It is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Birth Control and Racial Betterment." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 2 (February 1919), pages 11 and 12.

[SLO] "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. She goes through "the valley of the shadow of death" alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. That right to decide imposes upon her the duty of clearing the way to knowledge by which she may make and carry out the decision."

—: Margaret Sanger, "A Parent's Problem or Woman's." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 3 (March 1919), page 7.

[SLO] "The first right a child should have, and since he can't protest, we should insist upon it for him, is that of being wanted. The second right is that his parents should be educated up to not wanting him unless they are fairly sure they can provide for him decently, until he can look after himself. The only way that this can be done, is by educating the parents, fully, honestly, decently in a knowledge of themselves and their responsibilities, and by allowing them to be taught the means of regulating their families in accordance with their own health and economic resources."

—: Mary Knoblauch. "Editorial Comment." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 4 (April 1919), page 2.

[SLO][EUG] "Why the great numbers of feeble-minded children? Why the hosts of infants born too feeble to withstand the difficulties of the first year of existence? Why the weakling manhood and womanhood, too timid to make effective protest against the great social wrongs and tyrannies which crush them?"

—: Margaret Sanger. "The Tragedy of the Accidental Child." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 4 (April 1919), page 5.

[ABO] "We know that abortion, when performed by skilled hands, under the right conditions brings almost no danger to the life of the patent ..."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Why Not Birth Control Clinics in America?" Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 5 (May 1919), page 10.

[EUG][SLO][PRE] "What we would like to know is why these particular opponents of birth control believe that a general knowledge of contraceptive methods would do away with marriage, increase immorality, and finally end the human race. It seems to us that an unsentimental survey of the situation leads to just the opposite conclusion ... it is not correct to assume that birth control is synonymous with race suicide."
"In Holland one of the happiest effects of the establishment of birth control clinics in the poor districts of crowded cities was the almost immediate decrease of pauperism. A better, taller, stronger race resulted, able to live by its own exertions and not obliged ... to sell its birthright for a mess of pottage."

—: Mary Knoblauch. "Editorial Comment." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 6 (June 1919), pages 1 and 2.

[SLO] "It is well understood that one of the causes of the [first] World War was the rapid increase in the German and Russian populations. It increased sixty percent in forty-seven years and made a world cataclysm inevitable because it did not produce sufficient food to sustain its tremendously increasing numbers."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Vanderlip's Speech — A Warning Note." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 7 (July 1919), page 4.

[REL][SLO] "The representatives of religion also encourage the people to follow "God's law" and to multiply continually. But all religions have always considered woman as a breeding machine and nothing else.
"There are harmless means to prevent conception; why should they not be allowed to circulate freely? To be sure, they will not always be successful; but they will be so in the majority of the cases."

—: B. Liber, M.D., Ph.D. "The Neo-Malthusian Idea." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 7 (July 1919), pages 6 and 7.

[SLO] "Dr. Saleeby, a well-known eugenist ... now comes forward in the New Statesman with the idea that what England needs is greater numbers in order to keep the empire intact, to hold present possessions, to rule the world, and to protect itself from incursions of more overcrowded nations.
"Dr. Saleeby further advocates the rapid population of the earth with Anglo Saxon stock, by an accelerated birth rate in the dominions, by emigration from crowded quarters in the Empire (emigration of white stock)."

—: Editorial. "Militarists Want More Children." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 7 (July 1919), page 7.

[PRE*][SLO*] "My interest ... is to see American womanhood freed from forced maternity." "I do not believe that a universal knowledge of contraceptives would lead to immorality."

—: Margaret Sanger. "How Shall We Change The Law?" Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 7 (July 1919), page 8.

[PRE] "Everything that saves time or labor, or enlarges the view of man physically or historically, is a gain of freedom."

—: Anna Blount, M.D. "Birth Control to Increase Human Freedom." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 8 (August 1919), page 5.

[EUG] "America calls for quality more than quantity in her citizens. She does not want multitudes of children, badly born, to filth, disease, vice, poverty, coming to homes already poverty-stricken because of the many children to provide for; children of indolent, ignorant, indifferent, drunken parents, children conceived in debauchery, coming with poor little deformed, diseased bodies, many born blind, feeble-minded, idiotic, epileptic, coming not wanted, neglected, to be half-starved, to fight their own way with the handicap of poverty, child-labor, ignorance, vice."

—: A. Eugene Austin, M.D., H.M. "Reconstruction — A Physician's Viewpoint." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 8 (August 1919), page 7.

[REL] "Only the capitalist, with his hunger for profits, and the priest with his hunger for sheep to enlarge his fold, now cry out: Give us more people, for upon their backs we ride to glory."

—: James P. Warbasse, M.D. "The Artificial Prevention of Conception." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 8 (August 1919), page 8.

[EUG][REL][SLO] "Therefore our advance or extermination as a civilized race or nation ... requires the best kind of babies to start with. Any baby that has to start out with a weakened vitality and a blighted organization, is not only a handicap to itself but more so to the race. Then why allow their offspring even to start their individual evolution?"
"... it [society] must either abandon the doctrine of continence and teach the rejuvenescence function of sex association, or allow the teaching of birth control. For according to biological laws, if birth control is a crime, then the practice of continence is a greater crime."

—: Gideon Dietrich. "Biological Reasons For Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 8 (August 1919), page 10.

[EUG] "We can safely and profitably pay more attention than in the past to the quality rather than the quantity of the nation's babies.
"To do this we must encourage birth control. Let us have all the A-1 babies we can get, but let us discourage the present high percentage of those of the C-3 class."

—: Dr. Killick Millard, quoted in "Editor's Uneasy Chair." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 8 (August 1919), page 13.

[EUG*]       "It has been noted a thousand times that man, who strives so far as domestic animals are concerned, for the reproduction only of the best specimens, who exercises, so far as horses, cows, etc., are concerned, artificial and scientific selection, have so far neglected almost entirely to take any action tending toward the improvement and perfection of his own species.
       "Starting on the basis of eugenics, there are, it would seem, some special precautions to be taken,in order that humanity may, in many ways as possible, perfect itself.
       "First of all, the hordes of degenerates, diseased, idiotic, feeble-minded, alcoholic, and vicious criminals must be wiped out. Their sterilization commends itself all the more, in that it will not occasion them the least discomfort. Very simple operations like vasectomy insure the painless suppression of any possible descendants of those physically or mentally unfit.
       "The reproduction of the sickly, and of those tainted with transmissible diseases (syphilis, tuberculosis, etc.) must also be prevented. The most of these do not have or desire a numerous progeny, and persuasion will do as well or better, in their case, than constraint.
       "These two measures constitute what may be called repressive eugenics. They favor positive eugenics because thus only the healthy are privileged to found a family."

—: G. Hardy. "Eugenics and Child Culture." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 9 (September 1919), page 18.

[EUG] "The real question is, can we prevent the ignorant, the poor, the vicious, from filing the world with their children?"

—: "Editorial Comment." Birth Control Review, Volume III, Number 10 (October 1919), page 3.

Birth Control Review Quotes from 1920

[PRE] "Europe, according to this authority, has on the average enough food to last until February, after which the aged and the young will begin to die of starvation by the millions! ... In this hour of crisis and peril, women alone can save the world. They can save it by refusing for five years to bring a child into being. And there is no other way."

—: Margaret Sanger. "A Birth Strike to Avert World Famine." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 1 (January 1920), page 3.

[PRE] "Within the next few months millions of human beings, mostly Europeans, will starve to death. Food to meet the needs of the Earths' population is lacking and cannot be produced in time to avoid the great crash — the crash which will, as its chief incident, cost uncounted millions of lives, and bring in the train of that disaster no one knows what governmental and social changes."

—: R.C. Martens. "The Coming Crash." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 1 (January 1920), page 5.

[EUG] "The women of Japan are apt to give birth to offspring rather carelessly and thoughtlessly. The result is that children are born feeble and degenerate. The women who are least able to be wives and mothers are inclined to misuse the reproductive function ..."

—: Quote by Akiko Yoshano, in Agnes Smedley. "The Awakening of Japan." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 2 (February 1920), page 7.

[EUG][FAM] "The little sister of Jimmy the microceph was there, in worse case than he. Seven and helpless-crippled, silent, passive, with a head smaller than Jimmy's and less in it. There were ten in that family. The first eight were normal, and some exceptionally bright. Perhaps Jimmy's mother was tired by the time he came. At any rate, the last two are miserable failures — and — are they the last? Or will she go on bearing microcephalic idiots until the Lord chooses to stop sending them?"

—: Florence Lucy. "Idiots." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 2 (February 1920), page 16.

[FAM] "The mammalia branch of animals has simply resulted from the fact that before some germ-cells make their escape from the parent colony, they start their individual evolution, and in their struggle for food they cling to their mothers' tissues as being the very best feeding ground which they could find. To the mother's tissues they attach themselves, simply as parasites, and feed from her until their own organization is sufficiently developed to obtain their food from other sources."

—: Gideon Diedrich. "Biological Reasons for Family Limitation." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 2 (February 1920), page 18.

[EUG][INF] "... the people with the less searching and relentless elimination of the weaker infants is at a disadvantage. The proper moral to draw from this is not to relax our efforts to prolong life, but to apply the principles of eugenics to reproduction."

—: Edward A. Ross. "The Growth of Population." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 3 (March 1920), page 5.

[RAC] "Polish men are often immoral because they have been born of too young mothers or preceded by many born before."

—: Rev. T.V. Jakimowitz. "A Priest on Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 3 (March 1920), page 12.

[EUG][COE] "Thus although we are unable to predict the result of a given mating with any great accuracy, so far at least as the precise nature of the transmitted defects is concerned, the fact nevertheless remains that defective parents have defective children, and that the birth of defective children is an injury to the race. Difficulties are at once encountered here by the eugenicist in consequence of the necessity of determining the nature and degree of the defectiveness which in any particular case will warrant the abstention from having children and also in regard to the manner in which abstention is to be carried out or enforced."

—: Henry Bergen, Ph.D. "Eugenics and the Social Problem." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 4 (April 1920), page 6.

[PRE][SLO] "A knowledge of Birth Control, which is denied to the women of Austria, would, of course, wipe out the practice of abortion."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Preparing for the World Crisis." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 4 (April 1920), page 8.

[EUG][COE] "... there is of course no doubt but that in theory eugenists are perfectly right in their general suggestions of both repressive and positive remedies, and that the prevention of the conception of the defective by Birth Control, already significant today, will in the course of time become the most important of all selective agencies."

—: Henry Bergen, Ph.D. "Eugenics and the Social Problem." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 5 (May 1920), page 13.

[SLO] "Abortion, however, must not be confused with Birth Control, which employs contraceptives and thus does away with the demand for abortion."

—: Editor's footnote to Ella K. Dearborn, M.D. "Birth Control and a Bugaboo." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 5 (May 1920), page 14.

[EUG] "As long as the feeble-minded and other unfit are allowed to reproduce their kind, we shall have just such social needs."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Editorial Comment," Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 6 (June 1920), page 6.

[EUG][COE] "One general principle which I believe to be indisputable is that if natural selection is inhibited, if nature is not allowed to take her own way of eliminating her failures, artificial selection must take its place. Otherwise, nothing can prevent the race from reverting to an inferior type. The need is more urgent when, as in our country, the constitution of society favors the multiplication of the unfit and the elimination of the higher types.
"My point is that there is nothing inconsistent with Christianity in imposing, as well as enduring, personal sacrifice where the highest welfare of the community is at stake."

—: Rev. W.R. Inge, D.D. "Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 6 (June 1920), page 10.

[EUG][PRE] "Consequently it would seem that the only effective means of restoring the race to health and of keeping it in health will consist in the first place in making the world a fit place for men to live in, by eliminating from our social environment its multiform sources of injury. And in the opinion of the present writer, an opinion in which he is pleased to find that he is supported by ethical no less than by political and sociological considerations, this can be done in no other way than by abolishing the economic struggle for existence together with the institutions of private ownership of land and the means of production and production for profit."

—: Henry Bergen, Ph.D. "Eugenics and the Social Problem." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 6 (June 1920), page 13.

[ABO] "The food situation in the world is serious enough, it seems to me, to justify an extension of birth control propaganda to include the practice of abortion. There must be a decreasing birth rate for some years to come and all means ought to be employed to bring it about if we are to avoid aggravation of all the evils of over-population ... Let us frankly admit that "birth control" means just what it says and includes both prevention of conception and abortion."

—: Herman Dekker, Letter to the Editor. Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 7 (July 1920), page 16.

[FAM][INF] "The old Greeks and Romans put to death the babies they did not want as soon as they were born. We of the present day are inclined to feel superior because we are guilty of no such inhuman practice. But, let us be honest and look facts in the face — is our method which makes it a crime to destroy the new born babe, but permits it to be exposed to malnutrition, disease and the drudgery of our factory system more humane or less? Which is to be preferred, a quick death at birth or slow torture through a life time? Which is easier for the child? For the mother? Neither method is desirable; but if I had to choose between the two, I should have no hesitancy in choosing the ancient system."

—: Ellen A. Kennan. "Drab Monotony." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 8 (August 1920), page 7.

[EUG][COE] "First of all the hordes of degenerates, diseased, idiotic, feeble minded, alcoholic, and vicious criminals must be wiped out. Their sterilization commends itself the more in that it will not occasion them the least discomfort."

—: G. Hardy. "Eugenics and Child Culture." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 8 (August 1920), page 13.

[FAM][INF] "Perhaps they thought there was less suffering involved in doing away with unlikely specimens early in life rather than allowing then to drag out a maimed and marred existence."

—: Mary Knoblauch. "In the Bishop Museum, Honolulu." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 8 (August 1920), page 16.

[EUG] "Surely these poor devils should not blindly sow swarms of children fatally doomed by extreme poverty, heredity, the absolute lack of hygiene and education to disease, vice and death."

—: Dr. Folet, Professor in the Faculty of Lille, Medical Chronicle, July 1903, quoted in Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 9 (September 1920), page 5.

[FAM] "These poor creatures [children of poor parents] arouse so much pity that there is nothing one can wish them, — in their own interests be it understood — but a speedy death."

—: Dr. Barthelemy, Physician at St. Lazare, Medical Chronicle, July 1903, quoted in "Some Serious Observations Submitted to the Legislators for Meditation." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 9 (September 1920), page 6.

[EUG][COE] "The propagation of the unfit must be suppressed, and the accumulation of the debris which encumbers society must be prevented. Science has relieved us of famines and epidemics; science could rid us of the multiplication of degenerate types doomed to lives of wretchedness and incapacity. By what means? Malthus no doubt could show us the way."

—: Henry De Variguy. "The World and Life in a Hundred Years," Review Bleue, 1902, quoted in "Some Serious Observations Submitted to the Legislators for Meditation." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 9 (September 1920), page 6.

[RAC] "The black people, however restless and discontented, are comparatively inoffensive and in any case easy to placate, while the American Indians are a small and diminishing race."

—: Havelock Ellis. "The World's Racial Problem." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 10 (October 1920), page 15.

[SIT] "To those who unconsciously hold to the idea of an unchanging and unchangeable code of morality, we might mention that moral standards are evolutionary, and change from time to time, and often completely reverse themselves from epoch to epoch."

—: William J. Fielding. "The Morality of Birth Control." Birth Control Review Volume IV, Number 11 (November 1920), page 13.

[FAM][EUG] "At the present time, there is one matter, arising largely from temporary causes, which needs instant attention. In an ordinary elementary school, in a class of eight-year-old children, there was a child called "D." "D" is deficient — only mildly deficient. She is only incapable of growing up, hopelessly incapable of school work. She cannot write, cannot play a game properly, cannot tell a tale. Her incapacity is displayed day by day before the other children. This spectacle of human malformation is always before them. Some 30 of them consort five hours a day, five days a week, with this grotesque creature. Children who are together in a class know one another in every detail, with a minute scrutiny such as Gulliver gave the women of Brobdingnag. They do know, they cannot avoid knowing, the habitual tricks and conduct of this defective child. She will always make part of their memories of school. Besides, they cannot like her; they are far too normal to be able to like her; she is friendless."

—: N.N. "Why Not Seek to Remedy the Evil at its Source and Produce Fewer Defective Children?" Birth Control Review Volume IV, Number 11 (November 1920), page 13.

[SLO][ABO][PRE*] "It is a noteworthy fact that not one of the women to whom I have spoken so far believes in abortion as a practice; but it is principle for which they are standing. They also believe that the complete abolition of the abortion law will shortly do away with abortions, as nothing else will."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Women in Germany." Birth Control Review, Volume IV, Number 12 (December 1920), page 8.

Birth Control Review Quotes from 1921

[INF][SLO][PRE] "It is a noteworthy fact that not one of the women to whom I have spoken so far believes in abortion as a practice; but it is principle for which they are standing. They also believe that the complete abolition of the abortion law will shortly do away with abortions, as nothing else will.
"I visited hospitals in this city, and found them lacking in the simple and most ordinary article of decency. No soap — no cod-liver oil, no rubber sheets to protect the beds — no linen to give clean bedding as required — and even the babies must be all day in wet napkins, because of the inadequate supply for the proper change. This has given rise to skin trouble, and the poor little waifs are a sad, miserable lot. It would be a great kindness to let them die outright, I believe."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Women in Germany." Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 1 (January 1921), page 9.

[FAM][EUG] "Many a man is driven to spend his evenings in the public house because of a cross baby, or noisy children in the house, yet such discomforts cannot be avoided when large families are crowded into two or three small rooms. And the man who had taken a "drop too much," falls an easy victim to any sex temptation which comes his way, and thus often becomes diseased. The diseased individual, in turn, is apt to beget mentally defective children who lead poverty-stricken lives. These are likely to become tubercular subjects and to sink into downright pauperism. Thus, while cheery optimists are playing at abolishing abstractions — in vacuums, as it were — the individuals concerned will be flooding the country with their deplorable progeny.
"The present system of haphazard child-bearing degrades the wife. During the best years of her life she is constantly unsightly, suffering, peevish and inert, and her moral influence over husband and children suffers accordingly."

—: Anna Martin. "Birth Control or Racial Degeneration — Which?" Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 1 (January 1921), pages 12 and 13.

[EUG][FAM] "It is now recognized universally that children are no longer an asset, but are instead a financial burden carried be parents for a period of 20 or more years ...
"It is evident that any real program of race culture or betterment which excludes, or does not take for its fundamentally principle the exclusion or the elimination of those whose physical or mental incapacity would render them unfit for the battle of life — is entirely inadequate ... But to prevent the possibility of the degenerate, and feeble-minded propagating their calamitous infirmities is a blessing rather than a crime, as it provides the remedy for those deteriorating and retrogressive influences which arrest human progress, lowering the human species further in the scale of evolution ... As it is a universally recognized fact that many mental, moral, and physical traits are transmissible, it obviously becomes our bounden duty to eliminate all possibility of any abnormal anthropological specimens, and parasitical members of society propagating their vices, and calamitous infirmities to the detriment of society."

—: Robert H. Kennedy. "The Eugenic Conscience." Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 2 (February 1921), page 8.

[EUG] "Another reason why I do not believe that the birth rate of the poor class will ever fall as low as that of the higher classes is that the poor class will always contain a greater proportion of improvident ne'er-do-wells than the other classes ... The motive of prudence and foresight operative in the higher classes are not operative among such people. No matter how widely the knowledge of birth control may be disseminated, people who are shiftless, improvident and perhaps sub-normal will never restrict the size of their families to any appreciable degree."

—: Dr. Warren S. Thompson. "Race Suicide in the United States." Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 2 (February 1921), page 9.

[SLO][EUG] "It is not democratic for a physician to assist intelligent women in regulating their families and refuse to assist uneducated women in limiting their children — because he may be punished if the ignorant woman tells. The result of this prohibition is not only class discrimination, but also it is a swelling of our population by a tide of undesirables until it is rising to heights of a national menace today ... We need the establishment of a department of research and the cooperation of scientists — alienists, eugenists, and psycho-pathics — men who will give us facts as to the breeding of the unfit ..."

—: Florence Guertin Tuttle. "Suffrage and Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 3 (March 1921), pages 6 and 17.

[SLO] "... we all have two choices - (1) either the births must be limited, or (2) we must at periods kill each other off in order to protect the rest."

—: Letter to the Editor, Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 6 (June 1921), page 8.

[COE] "It would, if possible, be best absolutely to prohibit in every State in the Union the marriage of the physically, mentally, and morally unfit."

—: "Science and Birth Control." Review of Training of the Human Plant, by Luther Burbank (Chapter 6, Page 58), Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 6 (June 1921), page 8.

[ADU][FOR] "Every embrace of love is a new phase of being — a new sublimation of consciousness — a fresh inspiration of life. Even if love touches lips over the bars surrounding our conventional breeding-places, would it be wise to suppress, if we could, the divinity in our souls; to destroy the poetry and the spice in our lives with puny and puerile laws? For my own part, I thank whatever gods there are that we can not!"

—: From "Some Aspects of Adultery," a study by Dr. Ralcy Husted Bell, Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 6 (June 1921), page 10.

[EUG][FAM][SLO]       "The problem that American society must solve is this: Shall family limitation be attained through abortion or through Birth Control? Shall normal, safe scientific methods be employed, or shall women be forced to continue to resort to dangerous, surgical operations, often performed in the most dangerous circumstances? In view of the permanent injuries that often result from abortion — hemorrhage, sepsis, tetanus, anemia, malignant diseases, displacement, neurosis, endometritus, — there can be but one logical and sane answer to these questions ...
       "Incontrovertible figures and statistics, of the most definite and exact precision, drive us to the conclusion that filth, unsanitary conditions, and infectious diseases, are the inevitable companions of large families and numerous children ...
       "When one eminent authority informs us that there are at least one million abortions performed every year in the United States of America, and others place the figure even higher, when even the Government of the United States points to an inordinately high death rate among children, we are able to understand that scientific Birth Control, aiming to prevent the dangers and the deaths from this cause, is truly hygienic and eugenic in its aim."

—: Margaret Sanger. "Birth Control — Past, Present and Future." Birth Control Review Volume V, Number 7 (July 1921), page 6.

[COE] "In a lecture given by the writer at the Richmond Young Women's Christian Association, under the Chairmanship of Lady Nott Bower, not only was there no opposition, but several ladies including the Chairman were only concerned as to whether compulsion or even sterilization would not be necessary."

—: Dr. C. N. Drysdale, O.B.E.F.R.S.E., President of the Malthusian League. "Recent Activities of the Neo-Malthusian Movement." Birth Control Review Volume V, Number 8 (August 1921), page 6.

[EUG*] "To meet this problem as a great scientist has recently pointed out, we need not more of the fit, but fewer of the unfit. It would be unbelievable, unless it were not a cruel fact of our American civilization, that syphilitics, consumptives, epileptics and semi-idiots are permitted to propagate their own curse, both what is called legitimately and illegitimately. Is it not time to protect ourselves and our children and our children's children? The propagation of the degenerate, the imbecile, the feeble-minded, should be prevented."

—: Margaret Sanger. Birth Control — Past, Present and Future." Birth Control Review Volume V, Number 8 (August 1921), page 19.

[EUG][COE*] "Today Eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems ... As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the "unfit" a

The emblem of the English Society for ConstructiveBirth Control, with the inscription "JOYOUS ANDDELIBERATE MOTHERHOOD: A SURE LIGHT INOUR RACIAL DARKNESS." Birth Control Review,March 1930, page 68.

The emblem of the English Society for Constructive
Birth Control, with the inscription "JOYOUS AND
DELIBERATE MOTHERHOOD: A SURE LIGHT IN
OUR RACIAL DARKNESS." Birth Control Review,
March 1930, page 68.