#Birth Control#

I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by
minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated curse to
the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which might be used
to slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these weapons are not
allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be mentioned. Consider
the misery which is piling itself up in the slums of our great
cities--the degenerate, the defective, the insane, who are multiplying
as never before in history. There exists a perfectly harmless and
painless method of sterilizing the hopelessly unfit, so that they can
not reproduce their hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this
operation, and so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There
exists a simple, entirely harmless, and practically costless method of
preventing conception, which would enable us to check the blind and
futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead of as
animals. Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums of our
great cities; consider the millions of terrified, poverty-hounded
women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after another, struggling
desperately to feed and care for them, and seeing them drop into the
grave as fast as they are born--until finally the mother, worn out
with the Sisyphean labor, gives up and follows her misbegotten
offspring. Consider how many women, in their agony and despair,
make use of the methods of the primitive savage, to escape from
Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr. Wm. J. Robinson has estimated
that in the United States alone there are a million abortions
every year; and consider that all this hideous mass of suffering--a
bloody European war going on continually, unheeded by any newspaper
correspondent--might be avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing
formula, which we are not permitted to give! The Federation of
Catholic Societies have placed a law upon the statute-books of the
nation, and of all the states as well; the whole power of police and
courts and jails is at the service of religious bigots, and a young
girl is sent to prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose
for telling poverty-ridden slum-women how to keep from becoming
pregnant!

And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges and
district attorneys, the commissioners of correction and doctors who
perpetrated this infamy under, a so-called "reform" administration in
New York City--