When we refuse to produce battalions of babies to be exploited; when we declare to the nation;
Show us that the best possible chance in life is given to every child now brought into the world, before you cry for more! At present our children are a glut on the market. You hold infant life cheap.
Help us to make the world a fit place for children. When you have done this, we will bear you children, -- then we shall be true women..."
Sanger expressed the position that the constant "supply" of children that resulted from belief in the traditional morality effectively cheapened the value of human life. She was obviously referring to the "Great War" and to the recent waste of more than eight million human lives in the trenches of Europe. Her suggestion is that the concept of "fruitful multiplication" only enables nations to use its children as cannon fodder in warfare. Her final point is reminiscent of one of the main points of contemporary Pro-Choice proponents who suggest that the Pro-Life faction concern itself with improving the lives of the already born before worrying about the unborn.
3. Why did Sanger believe that birth control was an "ethical necessity"?
Birth Control is an ethical necessity for humanity today because it places in our hands a new instrument of self-expression and self-realization. It gives us control over one of the primordial forces of nature, to which in the past the majority of mankind have been enslaved, and by which it has been cheapened and debased. It arouses us to the possibility of newer and greater freedom. It develops the power, the responsibility and intelligence to use this freedom in living a liberated and abundant life....
It permits us to enjoy this liberty without danger of infringing upon the similar liberty of our fellow men, or of injuring and curtailing the freedom of the next generation. It shows us that we need not seek in the amassing of worldly wealth, not in the illusion of some extra-terrestrial Heaven or earthly Utopia of a remote future the road to human development. The Kingdom of Heaven is in a very definite sense within us. Not by leaving our body and our fundamental humanity behind us, not by aiming to be anything but what we are, shall we become ennobled or immortal. By knowing ourselves, by expressing ourselves, by realizing ourselves more completely than has ever before been possible, not only shall we attain the kingdom ourselves but we shall hand on the torch of life undimmed to our children and the children of our children.
Sanger's point about the ethical necessity of permitting birth control, and the relationship between birth control and human welfare, was that birth control represented a mechanism for implementing independent thought and freedom from the oppressive nature of traditional moral values. In her view, this helps, at least indirectly, shift the focus of human thought, teaching, and moral concern from an imaginary "afterlife" to the realities and necessities of life on Earth.
Sanger's position was that birth control is one mechanism of undermining the control over human life and thought represented by the Church, and for empowering all people to worry more about truly important matters in life instead of imaginary fears of eternal punishment and a preoccupation with adhering to nonsensical moral values that bear little actual relationship to the betterment of humanity.
