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14. “The Right to Control Birth” (1916)
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104 | 14 “The Right to Control Birth” (1916) Rose Pastor Stokes Rose Pastor Stokes (1879–1933) emigrated from Poland to Cleveland, Ohio, where she worked as a cigar roller during her teenage years. Pastor Stokes’s career as a labor advocate began in 1903 when she took a job in New York City writing for the English pages of the Yidishes tageblat. Her marriage in 1905 to James Graham Phelps Stokes, a social reformer from a wealthy Anglo-Protestant family, generated much public attention. Pastor Stokes joined the Socialist Party a year later and became a popular lecturer and writer for party publications. Stokes delivered the following speech at a birth control rally in honor of Emma Goldman, who was present at the occasion. Stokes was later arrested, in 1916, for passing out leaflets on the subject of birth control. We have met here in protest against the law which operates to keep the knowledge of contraception from the mothers of the poor and blinks the fact that the comfortable classes obtain that knowledge from their highlypaid physicians and from one another. We demand that the law which is a dead letter for the rich also become a dead letter for the poor, and declare that we shall continue in ever-increasing numbers to honor this law by breaking it. The poor and the physicians of the [poor], and those who realize the immediate necessity of spreading contraceptive knowledge, will not continue to respect a law that is negatively responsible for so much misery among the masses of the people. The absurdity of the situation is clear to everyone. Some of the administrators of the law are being privately ridiculed for their hypocrisy. For it is widely known—and discussed (although not in print)—that not among the least of those who have persecuted the poor law-breakers in this respect have rich law-breaking friends and do themselves break the law and benefit by the scientific knowledge they are instrumental in sending others to prison for disseminating. “The Right to Control Birth” | 105 What a travesty of justice! Here is material for a Shavian comedy and will surely find an enterprising author to do the theme justice. Again, we find the authorities setting a Comstockian1 detective to catch William Sanger,2 for instance, in the act of giving out contraceptive information . Why (is the question being asked everywhere), to be consistently legal (or equally unjust), do they not send a Comstockian detective to catch a society doctor or put themselves in jail? No one condemns the society doctor. He is thought to be both wise and humane. But so too in this respect are William Sanger, Emma Goldman, Ben Reitman.3 Why, then, this discrimination? Is it possible that according to the law of our economic autocracy to be poor is to be obscene and to have property is not to be obscene? Ah, but these propertyless agitators who are spreading this scientific knowledge among the poor and the propertyless must be suppressed. For it is the business of our greedy capitalist society to prevent the poor from regulating the size of their families in order that the size of unearned incomes might not also thereby be automatically regulated—downward. The overburdened mothers of the poor must not be given food for thought, when overburdened capitalism (overburdened with the unconsumed surplus of its exploited peoples) needs food for cannon. The reformer could, and indeed tries to, convince the capitalist class of its short-sightedness by pointing to the high death rate which, in present conditions , is a concomitant of the high birth rate. He points to the incalculable economic waste this fact indicates: the cost of the births: doctors, nurses, special expenditures for food and clothing, hospitals, clinics, lost work days, loss of physical and mental efficiency, the cost of sickness in those periods , long or short, between birth and death; then the cost of the deaths: the funeral expenses and again the loss of work days and of mental and physical efficiency for those most intimately concerned. Marshalling these facts, which speak in terror of dollars and cents, (the language best understood by the ruling class), the reformer tries to make some impression upon the dull brains of the exploiters. But the thing that impresses the “impractical” radical most is not so much the cost in money as the cost in human life, the toll paid in human suffering, the agony millions of mothers endure when sickness or...