Woman, William J. Robinson [classic literature books txt] 📗

On the contrary, much as we are in favor of birth control, we advise limitation of offspring only to those who for various reasons, financial, hereditary or hygienic, are unable to have many children. We emphatically believe that couples who are in excellent health, who are of untainted heredity, who are fit to bring up children, and have the means to do so, should have at least half a dozen children. If they should have one dozen, they would deserve the thanks of the community. All we claim is that in such an important matter as bringing children into the world, the parents who have to carry the full burden of bringing up these children should have the right to decide. They should have the means of control. They should be able to say whether they will have two or six or one dozen children.

Contraceptive Measures

And the argument that contraceptives are injurious to the health of the woman, of the man, or of both, may be curtly dismissed. It is not true of any of the modern contraceptives. But even if it were true, the amount of injury that can be done by contraceptives would be like a drop of water in comparison with the injuries resulting from excessive pregnancies and childbirths. Some of the contraceptive measures require some trouble to use, some are unesthetic, but these are trifles and constitute a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to regulate the number of one's offspring according to one's intelligent desires.

The commonest argument now made against contraceptives is that they are not absolutely safe, that is, absolutely to be relied upon, that they will not prevent in absolutely every case. This is true; but there are three answers which render this objection invalid. First, many of the cases of failure are to be ascribed not to the contraceptives themselves, but to their improper, careless and unintelligent use. The best methods in the world will fail if used improperly. Second, if the measures are efficient in 98 or 99 per cent, and fail in one or two per cent., then they are a blessing. Some women would be the happiest women in the world if they could render 98 per cent. of their conjugal relations unfruitful. Third, the imperfections of our contraceptive measures are due to the secrecy with which the entire subject must necessarily be surrounded. If the subject of birth control could be fully discussed in medical books there is no doubt that in a short time we would have measures that would be absolutely certain and would leave nothing to be desired. But even such as they are, the measures are better than none, and as said in the beginning of this chapter, it is the duty of every young woman to acquire as one of the items of her sex education the knowledge of how to avoid too frequent pregnancies. In fact, I consider this the most important item in a woman's sex education, and if she has learned nothing else she should learn this. For this information is absolutely necessary to her future health and happiness.

A Few Everyday Cases

In my twenty years' work for the cause of rational birth control I have come in contact with thousands and thousands of cases which demonstrate in the most convincing manner possible the tragic results of forced or undesired motherhood, and of the fear of forced or undesired motherhood.

Some of the cases were in my own practice, some were related to me by brother physicians, some were described to me by the victims living in all parts of this vast country. Were I to collect and report all the cases that came to my notice during those twenty years, they would without exaggeration make a volume the size of the latest edition of the Standard Dictionary, printed in the same small type. Some of them are positively heartbreaking. They make you sick at the stupidity of the human race, at the stupidity and brutality of the lawgivers. But I do not wish to appeal to your emotions. I do not wish to take extreme and unique cases. I will therefore briefly relate a few everyday cases, which will demonstrate to you the beneficence of contraceptive knowledge and the tragedy and misery caused by the lack of such knowledge.

Case 1. This class of case is so common that I almost feel like apologizing for referring to it. She, whom I will call by the forbearing name of Mrs. Smith, had been married a little over nine years, and had given birth to five children. She was an excellent mother, nursed them herself, took good care of them, and all the five were living and healthy. But in caring for them and for the household all alone, for they could not afford a servant or a nurse-girl, all her vitality had been sapped, all her originally superb energy had dwindled down to nothing; her nerves were worn to a frazzle and she became but a shadow of her former self. And the fear of another pregnancy became an obsession with her. She dreamed of it at night, and it poisoned her waking hours in the day. She felt that she simply could not go through another pregnancy, another childbirth, with its sleepless nights and its weary toilsome days. She asked her doctor who brought her children into the world to give her some preventive, but he laughed the matter off. "Just be careful," was all the advice she got from him. And when in spite of being careful, she, horror of horrors, became pregnant again, she gathered up courage, went to the same doctor, and asked him to perform an abortion on her. But he was a highly respectable physician, a Christian gentleman, and he became highly indignant at her impudence in coming to him and asking him to commit "murder." Her tears and pleadings were in vain. He remained adamant.

Whether he would have remained as adamant if instead of Mrs. Smith, who could only pay twenty-five dollars for the abortion, the patient had been one of his society clientele, who could pay two hundred and fifty dollars, is a question which I will not answer in the affirmative or negative. I will leave it open. I will merely remark that in the question of abortion in certain specific cases the moral indignation of some physicians is in inverse proportion to the size of the fee expected. A doctor who will become terribly insulted when a poor woman who can only pay ten or fifteen dollars asks to be relieved of the fruit of her womb, will usually discover that the woman who can afford to pay one hundred dollars is badly in need of a curettement. Oh, no. He does not perform an abortion. He merely curets the uterus.

But to come back to Mrs. Smith. She went away from the indignant adamant doctor. But she was determined not to give birth to another child. She confided her trouble to a neighbor, who sent her to a midwife. The midwife was neither very expert, nor very clean. Mrs. Smith had to go to her two or three times. After bleeding for about ten days she developed blood poisoning, from which she died a few days later, at the early age of twenty-nine, leaving a disconsolate father, who in time to come will probably find consolation with another woman, and five motherless children, who will never find consolation. One may find a substitute for a wife, there is no substitute for a mother.

And such tragedies are of daily occurrence. May the Lord have mercy on the souls of those who are responsible for them.

Before I proceed further I wish to say that it is the terrible prevalence of the abortion evil, with its concomitant evils of infection, ill health, chronic invalidism and death, that more than any other single factor urges us in our birth control propaganda. And those who want to forbid the dissemination of any information about the prevention of conception are playing directly into the hands of the professional abortionists. They could not act any more zealously if they were in league with the latter and were paid by them. And having mentioned the subject of abortion, I wish to utter a note of warning. In our birth control propaganda, we must be very careful to keep the question of the prevention of conception and of abortion separate and apart. The stupid law puts the two in the same paragraph, some ignorant laymen and equally ignorant physicians treat the two as if they were the same thing, but we, in our speeches and our writings, must keep the two separate, we must show the people the essential difference between prevention and abortion, between refraining from creating life and destroying life already created; we must show the viciousness of meting out the same punishment for two things which are fundamentally different, different not only in degree but in kind—and it is only by thus keeping the two things apart, by showing that we stand for one thing—prevention—and not for the other—abortion, that we can ever gain the general sympathy of the public and the co-operation of the legislators. I do not say that there are not many cases in which the induction of abortion is not only justifiable, but imperative; but that is a different question, and the two issues must not be confused. And we would and should resent any attempt on the part of either enemy or friend to so confuse them.

Case 2. Mr. A. and Miss B. are in love with each other. But they cannot get married, for his salary is too small. They might risk getting married, if the specter of an indefinite number of children did not stretch out its restraining hand. She comes from a good family, she was brought up, if not in the lap of luxury, in the lap of comfort and coziness, and it is the ambition of every good American to furnish his wife at least as good a home as her father gave her. Her father, by the way, died prematurely from overwork in trying to give all possible comforts and advantages to a bevy of six unmarried and marriageable daughters.

As I said, the fear of children kept them back. Each year the hope revived that in another year their union in matrimony would be consummated. But the years passed. Mr. A.'s hair became thin and grayish, Miss B began to look haggard and pinched—and still the marriage could not take place. Miss B was very religious and very proper, and would not do anything that was improper. A was not quite so proper; he paid occasional visits elsewhere, and as instruction in venereal prophylaxis was not included in his college course, he acquired a gonorrhea, which it took him about six months to get rid of. To shorten the story, A was thirty-nine and Miss B was thirty-five when the many times postponed marriage was consummated, but Cupid seemed to be busy elsewhere when the ceremony took place, and there is very little romance in their married life. The marriage has remained childless, as I told Mr. A it would be.

I consider this a ruined life—and all for the lack of a little knowledge.

If the anti-preventionists, those who are opposed to any information about the prevention of conception, were not so hopelessly stupid, they would see that from their own point of view it would be better if such information were legally obtainable. For it would be instrumental in causing more marriages which otherwise remain unconsummated, and by favoring early marriages, it would be instrumental in curtailing the demand for prostitution, in diminishing venereal disease. And as is well known, venereal disease is one of