The reasons which lead parents to limit their
offspring are sometimes selfish, but more often honorable and cogent."
A report of the Fabian Society (5) on the morality of Birth Control,
based upon a census conducted under the chairmanship of Sidney Webb,
concludes: "These facts--which we are bound to face whether we like them
or not--will appear in different lights to different people. In
some quarters it seems to be sufficient to dismiss them with moral
indignation, real or simulated. Such a judgment appears both irrelevant
and futile.... If a course of conduct is habitually and deliberately
pursued by vast multitudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming
probably a majority of the whole educated class of the nation, we must
assume that it does not conflict with their actual code of morality.
They may be intellectually mistaken, but they are not doing what they
feel to be wrong."
The moral justification and ethical necessity of Birth Control need not
be empirically based upon the mere approval of experience and custom.
Its morality is more profound. Birth Control is an ethical necessity
for humanity to-day because it places in our hands a new instrument of
self-expression and self-realization. It gives us control over one of
the primordial forces of nature, to which in the past the majority
of mankind have been enslaved, and by which it has been cheapened and
debased. It arouses us to the possibility of newer and greater freedom.
It develops the power, the responsibility and intelligence to use this
freedom in living a liberated and abundant life.
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