Legal Birth Control
In her text, Margaret Sanger describes the early part of the twentieth century as a time when the United States was still recovering from war and struggling with an influx of immigrants, uncontrolled population growth, poverty, disease, and labor issues. In Woman and the New Race, Sanger explores the causes of overpopulation, including ignorance, immigration, and religious ideals, which have the effect of degrading the race, and details how birth control is the only logical and moral response to this crisis.
Sanger insists that woman’s ignorance of her reproductive abilities causes her to bear more children than she can properly care for and her husband can support resulting in overpopulation. In fact, when her husband’s salary does not increase at the same rate as the size of the family, Sanger reports, the mother must join her husband in the work force, leaving her little time to attend to her children and household, causing harm to her health as well as to the children’s well-being. Additional strain on the mother’s health, Sanger informs, comes when she has too many children born one after another, preventing the mother from having sufficient time to recover her health. Therefore, a mother who bears children when she herself is not in good health passes along this legacy of ill-health and poor strength to her offspring, she states. Consequently, as the foregoing reasons demonstrate, the degradation of the race is the end result, asserts Sanger. She notes in the following, “Caught in this ‘vicious circle,’ . . . human beings so plentiful as to be cheap, and so cheap that ignorance was their natural lot” (5). Sanger suggests that when there is too-prolific reproduction, an individual’s value is lessened as there are too many people to fill too few jobs causing financial hardship. Family life therefore, becomes stressful and suffers due to the lack of the mother’s presence and care, which in turn damages the health of the mother and that of her children, Sanger comments. She indicates the situation could easily be remedied with the use of legalized birth control.

Sanger explains that due to prolific reproduction among the country’s substantial immigrant population, the result is cities’ slums being inhabited with a huge quantity of illiterate persons. In the following, Sanger shares research information about the issue: “Over one-fourth of all the immigrants . . . were illiterate . . . There were 1,600,000 illiterate foreigners in the United States when the 1910 census was taken” (17). Sanger demonstrates further that in all but 14 of the major cities of the United States, immigrants make up at least 50% of the population. Additionally, she reports, immigrants and their children comprise a vast majority of the workers in the country’s industries where they are rewarded for their hard work with starvation wages and unfair treatment. Moreover, she notes, analysis indicates that foreign-born mothers are responsible for an extraordinarily high birth rate; resulting in thirty-three to sixty-two percent of all births in many of our states born to these mothers. Sanger comments that the abundance of foreign-born individuals and their offspring worsens the already critical circumstances of illiteracy, overpopulation, and poor working conditions.
Because the United States is a Roman Catholic church-inspired society, which teaches that a woman’s role is one of submission to her husband and that the only proper means of birth control is abstinence, resulting in conflicting ideas, leading to large families, informs Sanger. She explains that the early church held several beliefs related to reproduction and human sexuality, for example, that there were already enough children on earth, that sexual union for all purposes was sinful, and that newborns cried as a protest to being born into a foul world. Only in later times did the church begin advocating to its followers the precept of being fruitful and multiplying. Sanger shares her thoughts on these conflicting messages of the church in the following: “When the church became a political power . . . it needed a high birth rate to provide laymen to support its increasingly expensive organization” (77). Clearly, Sanger tells, the church changed its stance on reproduction and abstinence when its needs were best suited by that change. Sanger asserts that the Christian church, due to its self-serving tenets, has denied woman the pleasures of life which she previously enjoyed, thus creating a childbearing vessel to whom few joys of life are given.

Sanger passionately advocates educating woman on the use of legalized contraceptives as a means of limiting the size of her family to create a new race. She stresses that because birth control will allow woman to plan the size and timing of her family, she will gain the ability to free herself which will result in a slower growing population, less ignorance, fewer children being born to immigrants and an uplifted position within the church and society.