ID# 1600:
"Birth Control and the Racial Future," by Frank H. Hankins, People (April 1931)
Date:
1931
Pages: (1|2|3|4|5)
Source:
Cold Spring Harbor, ,

&quote;Birth Control and the Racial Future,&quote; by Frank H. Hankins, People (April 1931)

PEOPLE 13 [left column, top]material comfort and prestige. It has steadily made its way among them by virtue of its logicality and in spite of the opposition of law, social sentiment and religion. The smallness of their families has been a cause of their social advancement and a means of maintaining their social rank. Family limitation is for them, especially for their womenfolk, a logical necessity, because it is an essential foundation for all that their standard [photo][photo credit]Ewing Galloway [photo caption] New York's East Side "The poor and ignorant seem trapped in a vicious circle: their poverty and ignorance prevent them from acquiring the means, and sometimes even the disposition, to limit their families; meanwhile their large families are a primary cause of their continued poverty and ignorance." [text, lower left column] of life leads them to hold dear. They will not, therefore, give it up voluntarily, and there is no power which can compel them to surrender it involuntarily. We have then to reckon with the fact that contraception has become a durable part of the life plan of the more enlightened and successful classes. Since these classes seem on the whole to be better endowed than those below them, there is some danger that the average quality of the population may be reduced through the undue multiplication of the less gifted. The upper classes do not seem likely to increase their fertility until such changes occur in the social system as to make it expedient, from their own point of view, for them to do [upper right column]so. One such change would be the greater honor for motherhood consequent upon less competition in the maternal function on the part of the lower classes. If, then, we are to reduce the dangers inherent in the differential fertility of the social classes we can hope to do so only by enabling the less successful to make a more reasonable adjustment of the size of their families to their incomes. Birth control thus becomes a basic [lower right column]principle in any eugenic program which might be devised. Here the racial argument joins with the sociological. It is a reasonable opinion that social welfare could be enormously enhanced by a reduction of the rapidly growing burden of the thousands who ought never to have been born. Moreover, the future character of western civilization depends largely on the outcome of the decisive battle now being waged between the advancement and popularization of scientific knowledge and viewpoints, on the one hand, and the high fertility of the lower classes on the other; for behind the latter are entrenched the forces of priestcraft, occultism and obscurantism. One of the most effective blows that can be [end]

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