The responsibility always comes back upon those who have protected themselves, those who have lived within their own means, and according to their own intelligence.
I am not going to take up all the time I have been allotted because I am quite through. I want to say in the first place birth control joins the fight against the transmission of venereal disease to the next generation. Birth control is the pivot around which every movement must swing making for race betterment. Birth control does not act as a substitute for any social scheme or other ideal system. But it must be the base and serve them as a foundation.
Birth control will free the mother from the trap of pregnancy. It will save the child from that procession of coffins, as well as from the toil of mill and factory.
Birth control will make parenthood a voluntary function instead of an accident as it is today. When motherhood and childhood is free, we then can go hand in hand with the emancipation of the human race. (Applause.)
Winter Russell
THIRD SPEECH
Mr. Russell: May I say that if Mrs. Sanger does not know what the cause of no children in Farmington was, I do. Everybody in that town knew. It was because they had made up their minds that they were not going to do that and they did not have them.
That is one of the great troubles with this volunteer parenthood—it is that there are so very few volunteers. Mrs. Sanger and I agree upon this matter of education. She would not say to those who are trying to find the ready path to health—those who are afflicted with tuberculosis and venereal disease—that they can reach this road to health by self control. She says that we will educate you and the feeble-minded about the most delicate, intricate complications, and disseminate information and literature that we have on the human body. She thinks she can take the millions of people and, as a matter of cold fact, introduce this knowledge. A large percentage of these millions of abortions are due to the fact that they thought they knew all about it and they didn’t. And Mrs. Sanger has pointed out that here still is a lot of laboratory experiments and research work that has got to be done before they will be absolutely, scientifically sure that they will know just exactly what they are doing.
I would have them educated, and I would have Mrs. Sanger and all the rest of them change their views in this connection because of education. I agree with her absolutely with this. We are handing a marriage certificate to those who are not prepared to have it. We make a man who is going to run a steam engine or an automobile or prepare teeth—he has to have a license. We ought to know about this matter of rearing children. We ought to have education but it ought to be the education that will give us the key to self-control and teach us how to take care of the children after they have come.
And then this matter of the difficulty of self-control. If these people that have the one or two or three children would take them with joy and thanksgiving and devote themselves to the higher mental and spiritual development that ought to come with them, and would have come if they had been properly educated, the matter of self-control would be a very simple matter indeed.
Oh, this matter of quality. We are misled on this matter of quality—this matter of accomplishments. I don’t know how I can possibly impress this any better than this. I believe that a woman who comes into Ellis Island and can neither read nor write, and has seven to eight children, is worth more to the United States of America than a graduate of Vassar University. I will go further. I say this that if I had not been blessed with a wife and mother such as Mrs. Russell is, that I would choose for a wife today—I would rather have a girl that cooks and can’t read nor write, who loves children, than some of these graduates with accomplishments.