We know, too, that among mentally defective parents the birth rate is four times as great as that of the normal parent. Is this not cause for alarm? Is it not time for our physicians, social workers and scientists to face this array of facts and stop quibbling about woman’s morality? I say this because it is these same people who raise objection to birth control on the ground that it may cause women to be immoral.
Solicitude for woman’s morals has ever been the cloak Authority has worn in its age-long conspiracy to keep woman in bondage.
When I was in Spain a year ago, I found that the Spanish woman was far behind her European sisters in readiness or even desire for modern freedom. Upon investigation as to the cause of this I found that there are over five thousand villages and towns in Spain with no means of travel, transportation and communication save donkeys over bridle paths. I was told that all attempts to build roads and railroads in Spain had been met with the strongest opposition of the Clergy and the Government on the ground that roads and railroads would make communication easier and bring the women of the country into the cities where they would meet their downfall.
Do we who have roads and railroads think our women are less moral than the Spanish women? Certainly not. But we in this country are, after all, just emerging from the fight for a higher education of women which met with the same objection only a few years ago.
We know now that education has not done all the dreadful things to women that its opponents predicted were certain to result. And so shall we find that knowledge to control birth, which has been in the hands of the women of wealth for the past twenty-five years, will not tend to lower woman’s standard of morality.
Statistics show us that the birth-rate of any given quarter is in ratio with and to its wealth. And further figures prove that in large cities the rich districts yield a birth-rate of a third of that of the poor districts. In Paris for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 50 the poor districts yield 116 births and the rich districts 34 births. In Berlin conditions are approximately the same. For every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 50 the poor districts yield 157 births while the rich yield 47. This applies also to all large cities the world over.
It can be inferred from these figures that the women of wealth use means to control birth which is condemned when taught to the poor. But the menace to our civilization, the problem of the day, is not the stationary birth-rate among the upper classes so much as the tremendous increase among the poor and diseased population of this country....
Is woman’s health not to be considered? Is she to remain a producing machine? Is she to have time to think, to study, to care for herself? Man cannot travel to his goal alone. And until woman has knowledge to control birth she cannot get the time to think and develop. Until she has the time to think, neither the suffrage question nor the social question nor the labor question will interest her, and she will remain the drudge that she is and her husband the slave that he is just as long as they continue to supply the market with cheap labor.
Let me ask you: Has the State any more right to ravish a woman against her will by keeping her in ignorance than a man has through brute force? Has the State a better right to decide when she shall bear offspring?
Picture a woman with five or six little ones living on the average working man’s wage of ten dollars a week. The mother is broken in health and spirit, a worn out shadow of the woman she once was. Where is the man or woman who would reproach me for trying to put into this woman’s hands knowledge that will save her from giving birth to any more babies doomed to certain poverty and misery and perhaps to disease and death.