14 PEOPLE [photo][photo credit]Ernest Galloway [photo caption]Before the Machine In plotting the racial future we must not expect to return to the simpler methods of a pastoral age, Dr. Hankins says. We must accept modernism and its inferences. We can't go back to the days of chin-whiskers and hand-scythes.[end caption] struck against these ancient enemies of popular welfare and universal enlightenment is the spread of contraceptive information among the poor and ignorant. If the reasons that have appealed to the upper classes in adopting family limitation are sound, then we are double warranted in doing whatever is feasible to overcome priestly and legal opposition. We may do so in order to confer on all classes the benefits which the upper classes have acquired through smaller families; and we may do so in order to ward off the evils of dysgenic reproduction. In this connection we can no longer assume that the poor are indifferent to their fate. They now realize that there is a more rational family life and are eager to share it. The reports of birth control clinics here and abroad evidence the strong desire of working-class women for more adequate protection from too numerous pregnancies. Reports at the World Population Conference at Geneva in 1927 showed that the differential net fertility as between social classes can be wiped out by dissemination of available techniques. It should not be overlooked that the demand of the unenlightened is not merely for methods of family limitation. These to some extent they already have; but such methods! Abortion and infanticide, methods that leave behind them a deadly trail of human woe, physical debility and psychic demoralization. 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 for their poverty and ignorance. As regards this miaater we live in topsy-turvy land. It has been said that the crime of the poor is their poverty, but no controllable factor contributes so much to their destitution as too many mouths to feed and too many funerals. What they should have, in the name of decency and humanity, in the name of social welfare and racial soundness, are safe and sane contraceptive methods of greater certainty. The morality of the spread of contraceptive information is by no means adequately viewed solely from the standpoint of a problematical increase in unorthodox sex relations. This is, as I see it, an incidental aspect of the matter. When we think in terms of concrete human beings, instead of such vague and often deceptive terms as church, society or nation, and when we free our minds of the deceit involved in calling a thing moral because it is traditional, we see that birth control is intimately related to the welfare of the feminine half of the adult population and all their children. It has a bearing on the happiness of men also, but it is peculiarly a woman's problem. It is, therefore, no accident that it has come into the open as women have acquired greater freedom. Such freedom as they have could not have been made effective in the first place had it not been for contraceptive practices. We have now arrived at a point where a morality made in the interests of the masculine sex, ecclesiastical authority and militant tribalism is yielding to reognition of the right of the feminine [end]