Woman and the New Race by Margaret Sanger

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Despite the unreliability of some methods and the harmfulness of some
others, there _are_ methods which are both harmless and certain. This
much the woman who is seeking means of limiting her family may be told
here. _In using any method_, whatsoever, all depends upon the care
taken to use it properly. No surgeon, no matter how perfect his
instruments, would expect perfect results from the simplest operation
did he not exercise the greatest possible care. Common sense, good
judgment and taking pains are necessary in the use of all
contraceptives.

More and more perfect means of preventing conception will be developed
as women insist upon them. Every woman should make it plain to her
physician that she expects him to be informed upon this subject. She
should refuse to accept evasive answers. An increasing demand upon
physicians will inevitably result in laboratory researches and
experimentation. Such investigation is indeed already beginning and we
may expect great progress in contraceptive methods in the near future.
We may also expect more authoritative opinions upon preventive methods
and devices. When women confidently and insistently demand them, they
will have access to contraceptives which are both certain and
harmless.

CHAPTER XII

WILL BIRTH CONTROL HELP THE CAUSE OF LABOR?

Labor seems instinctively to have recognized the fact that its
servitude springs from numbers. Seldom, however, has it applied its
knowledge logically and thoroughly. The basic principle of craft
unionism is limitation of the number of workers in a given trade. This
has been labor's most frequent expedient for righting its wrongs.
Every unionist knows, as a matter of course, that if that number is
kept small enough, his organization can compel increases of wages,
steady employment and decent working conditions. Craft unionism has
succeeded in attaining these insofar as it has been able to apply this
principle. It has failed insofar as it has been unable to apply it.

The weakness of craft unionism is that it does not carry its principle
far enough. It applies its policy of limitation of numbers only to the
trade. In his home, the worker, whether he is a unionist or
non-unionist, goes on producing large numbers of children to compete
with him eventually in the labor market.

"The history of labor," says Teresa Billington-Greig in the _Common
Sense of The Population Question_, "is the history of an ever
unsuccessful effort upon the part of man to bring his productive
ability as a worker up to his reproductive ability. It has been a
losing battle all the way."

The small percentage of highly skilled, organized workers lead in the
struggle for better conditions. Craft unions, by limiting the number
of men available for any one trade, manage to procure better pay,
shorter hours and other advantages for their members.

Disaster, in the form of famine, pestilence, tidal waves, earthquakes
or war, sometimes limits the number of available workers. Then those
who live in parts of the world that are not affected, or who stay at
home during wars, reap a temporary advantage. These advantages,
however, are quickly offset by increased prices, or by competition for
jobs when soldiers return from war. This form of limitation of numbers
works to the advantage of labor as long as it is available, but great
disasters are not constantly in operation while the worker's
reproductive ability is. So in a few years they have lost what
nature's destructiveness won for them.

The great mass of the workers--including children and women--are
unskilled and unorganized. Not only that, they are for some
considerable part of the time seeking employment. They are, of course,
poorly paid. Thus, through their low wages and their seeking of
employment, they always come into direct competition with one another
and with the skilled and organized workmen. As their families live in
want and are often diseased, they create the chief social problems of
the day. They bring children into the world as fast as women can bear
them. With each child they increase their own misery and provide
another worker to force down wages and prolong hours, through
competition for employment.

This has been the way of labor from the beginning. It is labor's way
in every country.

Having discovered that there is no relief in legislation, labor
organizes to limit its numbers in certain trades. Meanwhile the women
of the working class go on breeding more workers to wipe out in the
future the advantages gained for the present. In Paris, for instance,
the proletarian quarters of the city show a birth rate more than three
times as high as the birth rate in the well-to-do sections.

"Dr. Jacques Bartillon furnishes us with statistics which prove that
the birth rate in any quarter of Paris is in inverse ratio to its
degree of affluence," says G. Hardy in _How to Prevent Pregnancy_.
"The rich Champs-Elysees has a birth rate a third of that Bellerville
or of the Buttes-Chaumont. From 1,000 women from the age of fifteen to
fifty, Menimontant gives 116 births; the Champs-Elysees thirty-four
births.

"It is the same in Berlin. For 1,000 women from the age of fifteen to
that of fifty, a very poor quarter gives 157 births; a rich quarter
gives 47 births."

And so it is the world over. The very word "proletarian," as Hardy
points out, means "producer of children."

The children thus carelessly produced undermine the health of the
mother, deepen the family's poverty, destroy the happiness of the
home, and dishearten the father; all this in addition to being future
competitors in the labor market. Too often their increasing number
drives the mother herself into industry, where her beggarly wages tend
to lower the level of those of her husband.

The first sickening feature of this general situation is the high
infant mortality among the children of the workers. Many children come
merely to sap the strength of the mother, suffer and die, leaving to
show for their coming and going only an increased burden of sorrow and
debt. The lower the family income, the more of these babies die before
they are a year old.

A survey of infant mortality in Johnstown, Pa., by the federal
Children's Bureau, gave these typical results for the year 1911:

Infant Mortality
Father's Earnings Rate
Under $521.................. 197.3
$521 to $624................ 193.1
$625 to $779................ 163.1
$780 to $899................ 168.4
$900 to $1,199.............. 142.3
$1,200 or over.............. 102.
Ample........................ 88.

These figures do not represent the total income of all families.
Neither will money buy as much in 1920 as it did in 1911. Seventy per
cent of the people of the United States have incomes of less than
$1,000. This means that from 142 to 197 children born into such
families die before they are one year old. The births and deaths of
these children represent just so much useless burden of anguish and
sorrow to the workers.

Despite this high infant death rate, the workers of the United States
still have more children than they can care for. There are enough of
them left over to provide 3,000,000 child laborers, who by working for
a pittance crowd their parents out of employment and force the
families deeper into poverty.

When all is said and done, the workers who produce large families have
themselves to blame for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed
grasping for jobs, for the strike breakers, for the policemen who beat
up and arrest strikers and for the soldiers who shoot strikers down.
All these come from the families of workingmen. Their fathers and
mothers are workers for wages. Out of the loins of labor they come
into the world and compel surplus labor to betray labor that is
employed.

Nor is this all. When a workman of superior strength and skill,
protected by his union, manages to maintain a large or moderate sized
family in a degree of comfort, there always comes a time when he must
strike to preserve what he has won. If he is not beaten by unorganized
workers who seek his job, he still has to face the possibility of
listening to the cries of several hungry children. If the strike is a
long one, these cries often down the promptings of loyalty and class
interest--often they defeat him when nothing else could.

Is it any wonder that under handicaps like these labor becomes
confused and flounders? It has been offered a multitude of
remedies--political reforms, wage legislation, statutory regulation of
hours, and so on. It has been invited to embrace craft and industrial
unionism, syndicalism, anarchism, socialism as panaceas for its
liberation. Except in a few countries, it has not attained to
aggressive power, but has been a tool for unscrupulous politicians.

Even with the temporary advantages gained by the wiping out of
millions of workers in the Great War, labor's problem remains
unsolved. It has now, as always, to contend with the crop of young
laborers coming into the market, and with the ever-present "labor-saving"
machine which, instead of relieving the worker's situation,
makes it all the harder for him to escape. Fewer laborers are needed
to-day for a given amount of production and distribution than before
the invention of these machines. Yet, owing to the increase in the
number of the workers, labor finds itself enslaved instead of
liberated by the machine.

"Hitherto," says John Stuart Mill, "it is questionable if all the
mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any
human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same
life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of
manufacturers and others to make fortunes."

That, in a few words, sums up the greater part of labor's progress. We
blame capitalism and its wasteful, brutal industrial system for all
our social problems, but our numbers were vast and our bondage
grievous before modern industry came into existence. We may curse the
trusts, but our subjection was accomplished before the trusts had
emerged from the brain of evolution. We may blame public officials and
individual employers, but our burdens were crushing before these were
born. We look now here, now there, for the cause of our
condition--everywhere but at the one to blame. We fight again and
again for our rights, only to be conquered by our own kind, our
own children, our brother's, our neighbor's.

Let us carry to its logical conclusion the principle of limitation
which has been partially applied by labor unions. The way to get rid
of labor problems, unemployment, low wages, the surplus, unwanted
population, is to stop breeding. They come from our own ranks--from
our own families. The way to get better wages, shorter hours, a new
system for the advancement of labor, is to make labor's numbers fewer.
Let us not wait for war, famine and plague to do it. Let us cease
bringing unwanted children into the world to suffer a while, add to
our burdens and die. Let us cease bringing others into the world to
compete with us for a living. Let the women workers practice birth
control.

What are the concrete things which the worker can gain at once through
birth control? First, a small family can live much better than a large
one upon the wages now received. Workers could be better fed, clothed
and educated. Again, fewer children in the families of the workers
would tend to check the rise in the prices of food, which are forced
up as the demand increases. Within a few years it would reduce the
number of workers competing for jobs. The worker could the more easily
force society to give him more of the product of his labor--or all of
it. And while these things are taking place, the slums, with their
disease, their moral degradation and all their sordid accompaniments,
would automatically disappear. No worker would need to live in such
tenements--hence they would be modernized or torn down. At the same
time, the few children that were being born to the workers would be
stronger, healthier, more courageous. They would be fit human
beings--not miserable victims of murderous conditions.

Birth control does not propose to replace any of the idealistic
movements and philosophies of the workers. It is not a substitute, it
precedes. It is of itself a principle that lifts the heaviest of the
burdens that afflict labor. It can and it must be the foundation upon
which any permanently successful improvement in conditions is
attained. It is, therefore, a necessary prelude in all effective
propaganda.

A few years of systematic agitation for birth control would put labor
in a position to solve all its problems. Labor, organized or
unorganized, must take heed of this fact. Groups and parties working
for a new social order must include it in their programmes. No social
system, no workers' democracy, no Socialist republic can operate
successfully and maintain its ideals unless the practice of birth
control is encouraged to a marked and efficient degree.

In Spain I saw a bull fight. It was in the great arena at Barcelona.
As bull after bull went down, his magnificent, defeated strength
bleeding away through wounds inflicted by his weak but skillful
assailant, I thought of the world of workers and their oppressors.

As each bull was sent into the arena, he was confronted by one
assailant and twenty _confusers_. There was but one enemy for him to
face, but there were twenty brilliant flags, each of a different
color, to distract his attention from the man who held the weapon. No
sooner was his real antagonist in danger, than one of the confusers
fluttered a flag before his anger-maddened eyes. With one toss of his
horns he could have ripped the life from the toreador, but his
confusers were always there with the flags. One after another he
charged them, only to spend the force of his lunges in the empty air.
He found that as he was about to toss one of his confusers into the
air, he was confronted by another flag, which he charged with equal
futility.

Finally, utterly bewildered and exhausted, too spiritless to meet the
attack, he falls under the sword thrust of the toreador. And the sun
shines in the deep blue overhead, the band plays, the ten thousand
gayly-clad spectators shout, while the victim is dragged out to make
room for another.

It is the drama of labor.

It will be the drama of labor until labor finds its real enemy. That
enemy is the reproductive ability of the working class which gluts the
channels of progress with the helpless and weak, and stimulates the
tyrants of the world in their oppression of mankind.

CHAPTER XIII BATTALIONS OF UNWANTED BABIES THE CAUSE OF WAR

In every nation of militaristic tendencies we find the reactionaries
demanding a higher and still higher birth rate. Their plea is, first,
that great armies are needed to defend the country from its possible
enemies; second, that a huge population is required to assure the
country its proper place among the powers of the world. At bottom the
two pleas are the same.

As soon as the country becomes overpopulated, these reactionaries
proclaim loudly its moral right to expand. They point to the huge
population, which in the name of patriotism they have previously
demanded should be brought into being. Again pleading patriotism, they
declare that it is the moral right of the nation to take by force such
room as it needs. Then comes war--usually against some nation supposed
to be less well prepared than the aggressor.

Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians
violently denounce the politicians of other countries. There is a long
beating of tom-toms by the press and all other agencies for
influencing public opinion. Facts are distorted and lies invented
until the common people cannot get at the truth. Yet, when the war is
over, if not before, we always find that "a place in the sun," "a path
to the sea," "a route to India" or something of the sort is at the
bottom of the trouble. These are merely other names for expansion.

The "need of expansion" is only another name for overpopulation. One
supreme example is sufficient to drive home this truth. That the Great
War, from the horror of which we are just beginning to emerge, had its
source in overpopulation is too evident to be denied by any serious
student of current history.

For the past one hundred years most of the nations of Europe have been
piling up terrific debts to humanity by the encouragement of unlimited
numbers. The rulers of these nations and their militarists have
constantly called upon the people to breed, breed, breed! Large
populations meant more people to produce wealth, more people to pay
taxes, more trade for the merchants, more soldiers to protect the
wealth. But more people also meant need of greater food supplies, an
urgent and natural need for expansion.

As shown by C.V. Drysdale's famous "War Map of Europe," the great
conflict began among the high birth rate countries--Germany, with its
rate of 31.7, Austria-Hungary with 33.7 and 36.7, respectively, Russia
with 45.4, Serbia with 38.6. Italy with her 38.7 came in, as the world
is now well informed through the publication of secret treaties by the
Soviet government of Russia, upon the promise of territory held by
Austria. England, owing to her small home area, is cramped with her
comparatively low birth rate of 26.3. France, among the belligerents,
is conspicuous for her low birth rate of 19.9, but stood in the way of
expansion of high birth rate Germany. Nearly all of the persistently
neutral countries--Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland
have low birth rates, the average being a little over 26.

Owing to the part Germany played in the war, a survey of her birth
statistics is decidedly illuminating. The increase in the German birth
rate up to 1876 was great. Though it began to decline then, the
decline was not sufficient to offset the tremendous increase of the
previous years. There were more millions to produce children, so while
the average number of births per thousand was somewhat smaller, the
net increase in population was still huge. From 41,000,000 in 1871,
the year the Empire was founded, the German population grew to
approximately 67,000,000 in 1918. Meanwhile her food supply increased
only a very small per cent. In 1910, Russia had a birth rate even
higher than Germany's had ever been--a little less than 48 per
thousand. When czarist Russia wanted an outlet to the Mediterranean by
way of Constantinople, she was thinking of her increasing population.
Germany was thinking of her increasing population when she spoke as
with one voice of a "place in the sun."

"For some decades," said the Royal Prussian Journal, in an article
quoted by the Malthusian (London) of April 15, 1911, "the great growth
of German population has been almost entirely forced into the towns,
since of the four millions of increase in five years, only a few can
find places in agriculture, as most properties are too small to permit
of letting off a portion. And as regards the larger farms, the
tendency of modern, cheaper machine methods is rather to produce a
saving of the more costly manual labor."

"For some time past Germany has no longer been in the position of
feeding her own population, and large quantities of food as
raw-materials have to be imported, for which exports have to be exchanged.
It is doubtful whether even this can for long keep pace with the
present rate of increase of population."

There were other utterances which just as frankly acknowledged that,
having produced surplus population, Germany proposed to procure by
means of war the expansion necessary to care for it. Adelyne More, in
"Uncontrolled Breeding," a study of the birth rate in its relation to
war, quoted the Berliner Post: "Can a great and rapidly growing nation
like Germany always renounce all claims to further development or to
the expansion of its political power? The final settlement with France
and England, the expansion of our colonial possessions, in order to
create new German homes for the overflow of our population--these are
problems which must be faced in the near future." This was published
in 1913.

Just as frank was the recognition of the true cause of international
conflicts by a number of British authorities.

In "Uncontrolled Breeding," the author quotes the British National
Commission's report on The Declining Birth Rate: "The pressure of
population in any country brings, as a chief historic consequence,
overflows and migrations not only for peaceful settlement, but for
conquest and for the subjugation and exploitation of weaker peoples.
This always remains a chief cause of international disputes."

The militaristic claim for Germany's right to new territory was simply
a claim to the right of life and food for the German babies--the same
right that a chick claims to burst its shell. If there had not been
other millions of people claiming the same right, there would have
been no war. But there were other millions.

The German rulers and leaders pointed out the fact that expansion
meant more business for German merchants, more work for German workmen
at better wages, and more opportunities for Germans abroad. They also
pointed out that lack of expansion meant crowding and crushing at
home, hard times, heavy burdens, lack of opportunity for Germans, and
what not. In this way, they gave the people of the Empire a startling
and true picture of what would happen from overcrowding. Once they
realized the facts, the majority of Germans naturally welcomed the
so-called war of defense.

The argument was sound. Once the German mothers had submitted to the
plea for overbreeding, it was inevitable that imperialistic Germany
should make war. Once the battalions of unwanted babies came into
existence--babies whom the mothers did not want but which they bore as
a "patriotic duty"--it was too late to avoid international conflict.
The great crime of imperialistic Germany was its high birth rate.

It has always been so. Behind all war has been the pressure of
population. "Historians," says Huxley, "point to the greed and
ambition of rulers, the reckless turbulence of the ruled, to the
debasing effects of wealth and luxury, and to the devastating wars
which have formed a great part of the occupation of mankind, as the
causes of the decay of states and the foundering of old civilizations,
and thereby point their story with a moral. But beneath all this
superficial turmoil lay the deep-seated impulse given by unlimited
multiplication."

Robert Thomas Malthus, formulator of the doctrine which bears his
name, pointed out, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, the
relation of overpopulation to war. He showed that mankind tends to
increase faster than the food supply. He demonstrated that were it not
for the more common diseases, for plague, famine, floods and wars,
human beings would crowd each other to such an extent that the misery
would be even greater than it now is. These he described as "natural
checks," pointing out that as long as no other checks are employed,
such disasters are unavoidable. If we do not exercise sufficient
judgment to regulate the birth rate, we encounter disease, starvation
and war.

Both Darwin and John Stuart Mill recognized, by inference at least,
the fact that so-called "natural checks"--and among them war--will
operate if some sort of limitation is not employed. In his _Origin of
Species_, Darwin says: "There is no exception to the rule that every
organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, if not destroyed,
that the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair."
Elsewhere he observes that we do not permit helpless human beings to
die off, but we create philanthropies and charities, build asylums and
hospitals and keep the medical profession busy preserving those who
could not otherwise survive. John Stuart Mill, supporting the views of
Malthus, speaks to exactly the same effect in regard to the
multiplying power of organic beings, among them humanity. In other
words, let countries become overpopulated and war is inevitable. It
follows as daylight follows the sunrise.

When Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant were on trial in England
in 1877 for publishing information concerning contraceptives, Mrs.
Besant put the case bluntly to the court and the jury:

"I have no doubt that if natural checks were allowed to operate right
through the human as they do in the animal world, a better result
would follow. Among the brutes, the weaker are driven to the wall, the
diseased fall out in the race of life. The old brutes, when feeble or
sickly, are killed. If men insisted that those who were sickly should
be allowed to die without help of medicine or science, if those who
are weak were put upon one side and crushed, if those who were old and
useless were killed, if those who were not capable of providing food
for themselves were allowed to starve, if all this were done, the
struggle for existence among men would be as real as it is among
brutes and would doubtless result in the production of a higher race
of men.

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