The Case for Birth Control: A Supplementary Brief and Statement of Facts

by Margaret Sanger

PAUPERISM

We need not dwell upon this question, as the amount of pauperism depends upon a large variety of circumstances. But it is satisfactory to note that pauperism in England and Wales, i.e., the number of persons relieved annually per thousand of the population, has fairly steadily fallen from 34.5 in 1875 to 26.4 in 1910, or by 23.5 per cent. during the period of the declining birth-rate. This is so far reassuring, in that it indicates that the easier circumstances engendered by smaller families do not lead to idleness, as is frequently contended. The industry and saving habits of the French peasantry are world-renowned, and it is worthy of note that France is almost the only country in which the real wages of the working classes have been increasing of late years, while they have dropped 15 per cent. in this country, and nearly 25 per cent. in prolific Germany.

THE REPORT OF THE POOR LAW COMMISSION. By Sir Edward Bradbrook, C.B. Eugenics Review, Vol. 1, April 1909. Eugenics Education Society, London.

The Commissioners throw a strong light upon the ineffectiveness of existing measures when they show that the great and growing expenditure upon education and upon the public health has had no result in reducing pauperism, which is on the contrary of late years deplorably increasing, and that the advance in the rate of wages, and the diminution in the cost of living have been equally ineffectual.

In the words of the Commissioners, children who are brought up in such conditions, surrounded by disease and immorality and drunkenness are almost doomed to pauperism. If relief be given it should be used to check the creation of another generation of paupers. Much that is very instructive is contained in the report on the subject of children who come by one means or another to be under the control of the Guardians of the Poor, and important suggestions are made for reforms in the manner and training of such children. This, however, we need not discuss, as the spread of eugenic principles would tend to reduce their number until the time should come when the children dependent on public care should be few and exceptional. In their discussion of the causes of pauperism, the Commissioners quote a statement from a relief officer of Leeds, that one of the most important causes is early marriage of persons dependent upon casual labor. Large families are the rule. Unless we can cut off some of the sources from which that stream is being fed, the attempt to do more constructive work, whether by public assistance or by voluntary charity will continue to be swamped by hopeless cases—men and women ruined by bad habits or disease from infancy who propagate their own misery and hand on another generation of hopeless cases to the future. A great evil justifies strong measures to remedy it. This is true eugenic doctrine. P. 47–50.

THE METHODS OF RACE REGENERATION. C. W. Saleeby, M.D., CH.B., F.Z.S., F.R.S., Edinburgh; Fellow of the Obstetrical Society of Edinburgh; Member of Council of the Eugenic Education Society, of the Psychological Society, and of the National League for Physical Education and Improvement; Member of the Royal Institution and of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, etc., etc. New Tracts for the Times. Cassell & Co., Ltd., London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne. 1911.

At the National Conference on the Prevention of Destitution, held in London at Whitsuntide, 1911, we gathered together in the section dealing with this subject a number of papers by authoritative writers, whose knowledge of the problem is first-hand, and the following is an extract from the paper, the Eugenic Summary and Demand, in which I endeavored to express the substance of the evidence. The mentally defective and diseased, existing in it and as part of it, injure the community in the following ways:

1—They contribute largely to the ranks of chronic alcoholism and inebriety, with all their consequences.

2—They contribute largely to the illegitimate birth rate, that is to say, to the production of children for whose nurture, quite apart from the question of their natural defect, adequate and satisfactory provision is not, or indeed cannot be made.

3—They contribute largely to the ranks of prostitution.

4—They thus contribute largely to the propagation of the venereal diseases, with all their consequences to the present and the future.

5—They are responsible for much crime, major and minor.

6—Both directly, as chronically inefficient, and indirectly, in the ways here cited, they contribute to the number of the destitute, constituting the majority of the naturally, as distinguished from the nurturally unemployable.

7—They contribute largely as parents, married or unmarried, to parental neglect and cruelty to children which is probably more injurious to the adult life of the next generation, than most, or any of us realize.

8—They contribute largely to the ranks of the wastrel and the hooligan. In such ways, and to such a degree these persons injure the community. But it is particularly to be noted that therein the community also injures them. The fact is obvious to all of us here. The injury wrought by the present relations between the community and these unfortunate persons is mutual, they injure it and it injures them. And not until we recall the words of Burke, in the light of modern genetics, shall we realize the full measure of this injury, for as that great thinker said, a community is “a partnership, not only between those who are living, but between those who are living and those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” To the foregoing indictment of the present state of things, and remembering that whatever is inherent is transmissible, I therefore add:

9—They become parents and thus contribute incalculably to the maintenance of these evils after we are dead, but not after we are responsible. P. 49–50.

But it does not suffice to pursue positive methods, the encouragement of parenthood on the part of the worthy, and negative methods, the discouragement of parenthood on the part of the unworthy, if there be any agencies in the world which are forever turning worthy stocks into unworthy stocks. If there be such racial poisons, plainly we must stand between healthy stocks and their influence. By the term racial poisons I mean to indicate those agents, whatever they may be which, in greater or less degree, injurious to individuals as individuals, prejudices their subsequent parenthood. The racial poisons are very various, they include substances inorganic, such as lead, organic, such as alcohol, and organized, such as the living causes of certain forms of disease. Circulating in the parental blood, they reach and injure the racial tissues, or germ-plasm. P. 56.

WOMEN AND LABOR. New York Evening World, May 8, 1917.

With American industry preparing to put women into the places of male workers called to the war, it is a rather surprising thing to learn that there already are 7,438,686 women in the United States who earn their own living. Of these no less than one-fourth are married. Here are the figures: Single, 4,401,000; married, 1,890,626; widowed or divorced, 1,147,060.

In 1900 only 4,833,630 women left their homes to work, showing an increase of approximately one-half since then.

In 1890 the married formed 14.3 per cent. of all women sixteen years of age and over engaged in gainful occupations. By 1900 this proportion had increased to 15.9 per cent. From 1900 to 1910 it jumped to the unprecedented proportion of 25.4 per cent. While there were important variations, the great increase was not confined to any one occupation or group of occupations, nor to any one State or group of States. In every occupation examined the married formed a larger proportion of all women sixteen years of age and over in 1910 than in 1900.

The proportions were exceptionally high in the South and Arizona—50.8 per cent. in South Carolina, 46.8 per cent. in Georgia, 46.7 per cent. in Florida, 47.4 per cent. in Alabama, 54.2 per cent. in Mississippi, 45.6 per cent. in Arkansas, 40.7 per cent. in Arizona. In contrast, the proportion was only 15.8 per cent. in Connecticut, 15.1 per cent. in Pennsylvania, 13.1 per cent. in Wisconsin, 11.9 per cent. in Minnesota, and 15.7 per cent. in Iowa.

The unusually large proportion of married women engaged outside their homes in the South is explained by the number of negroes living in that section of the country. The total of white women working for a living in the same States is perhaps smaller than in any other part of the United States.

Even more significant than the great increase in the proportion which the married form of all women sixteen years of age and over engaged in gainful occupations is the marked increase in the proportion of all women so employed.

Statistics show that in 1890 just 4.6 per cent. of married women went to work. The figures had expanded to 5.6 per cent. ten years later, and in 1910 had reached 10.7 per cent.

It may be safely assumed that in the years which have elapsed between then and now the increase has more than kept pace with earlier figures. And it is equally certain that once men have been replaced by women under war conditions neither they nor employers will be inclined to restore ante-bellum conditions. The problem is one to give economists grave concern.