Author: Margaret H Sanger

Publisher:

Published: 2019-07-31

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9781086658415

This collection of statistical material and opinion -- chiefly medical -- is designed to do for birth control what the Brandeis-Consumers' League briefs did for the eight-hour day and minimum wage legislation.Some fault might be found with the arrangement of the material, the failure to provide an index or a bibliographical list of authorities, and the indifferent proof-reading. The academic Malthusian may also be tempted to adverse criticism of the absence of any material bearing on the larger economic aspects of the problem. Such criticism, however, would be unfair and entirely out of place, because the book -- as indeed Mrs. Sanger's whole propaganda -- is not designed to attack any long-range problem of population in relation to natural resources or to international rivalries, but to help in the immediate and pressing task of rationalizing public sentiment and informing the judiciary with regard to the real issues and facts involved in the law's edict concerning the giving of information on contraceptive methods.And it must be said that even the most puritanical exponent of the ignorant, prurient idealism of our "black walnut" period would find in this volume that which might give his conscience a beneficial shock. He could hardly brush aside the weight of medical fact and opinion here marshaled, nor the well presented statistics of birth, death, and infant mortality rates, showing the remarkable and sinister correlation between high birth rate and high infant mortality. One especially interesting fact brought out is that the number of deaths of women 15 to 44 years of age from puerperal septicemia, etc. (9,876 in 1913), is second only to the number resulting from tuberculosis (26,265). In all the literature of population, there is a curiously obtuse failure to give consideration to the vital costs of large populations and high fertility rates. This may be attributed to the fact that it has been chiefly economists, and among them chiefly those strongly under the influence of classical materialism, who have studied population problems seriously. A second explanation lies in the fact that most of the writers have been men, upon whose sex the vital costs do not fall heavily. Certainly social science and ethics, as well as law and social politics, have lost greatly from the fact that women have so long been discouraged -- or rather not encouraged to enter a field of study which concerns them in so fundamental a manner.--"The American Economic Review," Volume 8