This, I say, is an emergency measure. But how are we to prevent the
repetition in the future of a new harvest of imbecility, the recurrence
of new generations of morons and defectives, as the logical and
inevitable consequence of the universal application of the traditional
and widely approved command to increase and multiply?
At the present moment, we are offered three distinct and more or less
mutually exclusive policies by which civilization may hope to protect
itself and the generations of the future from the allied dangers of
imbecility, defect and delinquency. No one can understand the necessity
for Birth control education without a complete comprehension of the
dangers, the inadequacies, or the limitations of the present attempts at
control, or the proposed programs for social reconstruction and racial
regeneration. It is, therefore, necessary to interpret and criticize
the three programs offered to meet our emergency. These may be briefly
summarized as follows:
(1) Philanthropy and Charity: This is the present and traditional method
of meeting the problems of human defect and dependence, of poverty and
delinquency. It is emotional, altruistic, at best ameliorative, aiming
to meet the individual situation as it arises and presents itself. Its
effect in practise is seldom, if ever, truly preventive. Concerned
with symptoms, with the allaying of acute and catastrophic miseries, it
cannot, if it would, strike at the radical causes of social misery.
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