Every year I receive thousands of letters from women in all parts of
America, desperate appeals to aid them to extricate themselves from the
trap of compulsory maternity. Lest I be accused of bias and exaggeration
in drawing my conclusions from these painful human documents, I prefer
to present a number of typical cases recorded in the reports of the
United States Government, and in the evidence of trained and impartial
investigators of social agencies more generally opposed to the doctrine
of Birth Control than biased in favor of it.
A perusal of the reports on infant mortality in widely varying
industrial centers of the United States, published during the past
decade by the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of
Labor, forces us to a realization of the immediate need of detailed
statistics concerning the practice and results of uncontrolled breeding.
Some such effort as this has been made by the Galton Laboratory of
National Eugenics in Great Britain. The Children's Bureau reports only
incidentally present this impressive evidence. They fail to coordinate
it. While there is always the danger of drawing giant conclusions from
pigmy premises, here is overwhelming evidence concerning irresponsible
parenthood that is ignored by governmental and social agencies.
I have chosen a small number of typical cases from these reports. Though
drawn from widely varying sources, they all emphasize the greatest crime
of modern civilization--that of permitting motherhood to be left to
blind chance, and to be mainly a function of the most abysmally ignorant
and irresponsible classes of the community.
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