Social Reform versus Birth Control [Chesterton 1927]

The real history of the world is full of the queerest cases of notions that have turned clean head-over-heels and completely contradicted themselves. The last example is an extraordinary notion that what is called Birth Control is a social reform that goes along with other social reforms favoured by progressive people.

It is rather like saying that cutting off King Charles' head was one of the most elegant of the Cavalier fashions in hair-dressing. It is like saying that decapitation is an advance on dentistry. It may or may not be right to cut off the King's head; it may or may not be right to cut off your own head when you have the toothache. But anybody ought to be able to see that if we once simplify things by head cutting we can do without hair-cutting; that it will be needless to practise dentistry on the dead or philanthropy on the unborn--or the unbegotten. So it is not a provision for our descendants to say that the destruction of our descendants will render it unnecessary to provide them with anything. It may be that it is only destruction in the sense of negation; and it may be that few of our descendants may be allowed to survive. But it is obvious that the negation is a piece of mere pessimism, opposing itself to the more optimistic notion that something can be done for the whole family of man. Nor is it surprising to anybody who can think, to discover that this is exactly what really happened.

The story began with Godwin, the friend of Shelley, and the founder of so many of the social hopes that are called revolutionary. Whatever we think of his theory in detail, he certainly filled the more generous youth of his time with that thirst for social justice and equality which is the inspiration of Socialism and other ideals. What is even more gratifying, he filled the wealthy old men of his time with pressing and enduring terror, and about three-quarters of the talk of Tories and Whigs of that time consists of sophistries and excuses invented to patch up a corrupt compromise of oligarchy against the appeal to fraternity and fundamental humanity made by men like Godwin and Shelley.

The old oligarchs would use any tool against the new democrats; and one day it was their dismal good luck to get hold of a tool called Malthus. Malthus wrote avowedly and admittedly an answer to Godwin. His whole dreary book was only intended to be an answer to Godwin. Whereas Godwin was trying to show that humanity might be made happier and more humane, Malthus was trying to show that humanity could never by any possibility be made happier or more humane. The argument he used was this: that if the starving man were made tolerably free or fairly prosperous, he would marry and have a number of children, and there would not be food for all. The inference was, evidently, that he must be left to starve. The point about the increase of children he fortified by a fantastically mathematical formula about geometrical progression, which any living human being can dearly see is inapplicable to any living thing. Nothing depending on the human will can proceed by geometrical progression, and population certainly does not proceed by anything of the sort.

But the point is here, that Malthus meant his argument as an argument against all social reform. He never thought of using it as anything else, except an argument against all social reform. Nobody else ever thought in those more logical days of using it as anything but an argument against social reform. Malthus even used it as an argument against the ancient habit of human charity. He warned people against any generosity in the giving of alms. His theory was always thrown as cold water on any proposal to give the poor man property or a better status. Such is the noble story of the birth of Birth Control.

The only difference is this: that the old capitalists were more sincere and more scientific, while the modem capitalists are more hypocritical and more hazy. The rich man of l850 used it in theory for the oppression of the poor. The rich man of 1927 will only use it in practice for the oppression of the poor. Being incapable of theory, being indeed incapable of thought, he can only deal in two things: what he calls practicality and what I call sentimentality. Not being so much of a man as Malthus, he cannot bear to be a pessimist, so he becomes a sentimentalist. He mixes up this old plain brutal idea (that the poor must be forbidden to breed) with a lot of slipshod and sickly social ideals and promises which are flatly incompatible with it. But he is after all a practical man, and he will be quite as brutal as his forbears when it comes to practice. And the practical upshot of the whole thing is plain enough. If he can prevent his servants from having families, he need not support those families Why the devil should he?

If anybody doubts that this is the very simple motive, let him test it by the very simple statements made by the various Birth-Controllers like the Dean of St. Paul's. They never do say that we suffer from a too bountiful supply of bankers or that cosmopolitan financiers must not have such large families. They do not say that the fashionable throng at Ascot wants thinning, or that it is desirable to decimate the people dining at the Ritz or the Savoy. Though, Lord knows, if ever a thing human could look like a sub-human jungle, with tropical flowers and very poisonous weeds, it is the rich crowd that assembles in a modern Americanized hotel.

But the Birth-Controllers have not the smallest desire to control that jungle. It is much too dangerous a jungle to touch. It contains tigers. They never do talk about a danger from the comfortable classes, even from a more respectable section of the comfortable classes. The Gloomy Dean is not gloomy about there being too many Dukes; and naturally not about there being too many Deans. He is not primarily annoyed with a politician for having a whole population of poor relations, though places and public salaries have to be found for all the relations. Political Economy means that everybody except politicians must be economical.

The Birth-Controller does not bother about all these things, for the perfectly simple reason that it is not such people that he wants to control. What he wants to control is the populace, and he practically says so. He always insists that a workman has no right to have so many children, or that a slum is perilous because it is producing so many children. The question he dreads is "Why has not the workman a better wage? Why has not the slum family a better house?" His way of escaping from it is to suggest, not a larger house but a smaller family. The landlord or the employer says in his hearty and handsome fashion: "You really cannot expect me to deprive myself of my money. But I will make a sacrifice, I will deprive myself of your children."

Meanwhile, as the Malthusian attack on democratic hopes slowly stiffened and strengthened all the reactionary resistance to reform in this country, other forces were already in the field. I may remark in passing that Malthus, and his sophistry against all social reform, did not stand alone. It was one of a whole class of scientific excuses invented by the rich as reasons for denying justice to the poor, especially when the old superstitious glamour about kings and nobles had faded in the nineteenth century. One was talking about the Iron Laws of Political Economy, and pretending that somebody had proved somewhere, with figures on a slate, that injustice is incurable. Another was a mass of brutal nonsense about Darwinism and a struggle for life, in which the devil must catch the hindmost. As a fact it was struggle for wealth, in which the devil generally catches the foremost. They all had the character of an attempt to twist the new tool of science to make it a weapon for the old tyranny of money.

But these forces, though powerful in a diseased industrial plutocracy. were not the only forces even in the nineteenth century. Towards the end of that century, especially on the Continent, there was another movement going on, notably among Christian Socialists and those called Catholic Democrats and others. There is no space to describe it here; its interest lies in being the exact reversal of the order of argument used by the Malthusian and the Birth-Controller. This movement was not content with the test of what is called a Living Wage. It insisted specially on what it preferred to call a Family Wage. In other words, it maintained that no wage is just or adequate unless it does envisage and cover the man, not only considered as an individual, but as the father of a normal and reasonably numerous family. This sort of movement is the true contrary of Birth Control and both will probably grow until they come into some tremendous controversial collision. It amuses me to reflect on that big coming battle, and to remember that the more my opponents practise Birth Control, the fewer there will be of them to fight us on that day.

What I cannot get my opponents in this matter to see, in the strange mental confusion that covers the question, is the perfectly simple fact that these two claims, whatever else they are, are contrary claims. At the very beginning of the whole discussion stands the elementary fact that limiting families is a reason for lowering wages and not a reason for raising them. You may like the limitation for other reasons, as you may dislike it for other reasons. You may drag the discussion off to entirely different questions, such as, whether wives in normal homes are slaves. You may compromise out of consideration for the employer or for some other reason, and meet him half-way by taking half a loaf or having half a family. But the claims are in principle opposite. It is the whole truth in that theory of the class war about which the newspapers talk such nonsense. The full claim of the poor would be to have what they considered a full-sized family. If you cut this down to suit wages you make a concession to fit the capitalist conditions. The practical application I shall mention in a moment; I am talking now about the primary logical contradiction. If the two methods can be carried out, they can be carried out so as to contradict and exclude each other. One has no need of the other; one can dispense with or destroy the other. If you can make the wage larger, there is no need to make the family smaller. If you can make the family small, there is no need to make the wage larger. Anyone may judge which the ruling capitalist will probably prefer to do. But if he does one, he need not do the other.

There is of course a great deal more to be said. I have dealt with only one feature of Birth Control--its exceedingly unpleasant origin. I said it was purely capitalist and reactionary; I venture to say I have proved it was entirely capitalist and reactionary. But there are many other aspects of this evil thing. It is unclean in the light of the instincts; it is unnatural in relation to the affections; it is part of a general attempt to run the populace on a routine of quack medicine and smelly science; it is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands; it is ignorant of the very existence of real households where prudence comes by free-will and agreement. It has all those aspects, and many of them would be extraordinarily interesting to discuss. But in order not to occupy too much space, I will take as a text nothing more than the title.

The very name of "Birth Control" is a piece of pure humbug. It is one of those blatant euphemisms used in the headlines of the Trust Press. It is like "Tariff Reform." It is like "Free Labour." It is meant to mean nothing, that it may mean anything, and especially some thing totally different from what it says. Everybody believes in birth control, and nearly everybody has exercised some control over the conditions of birth. People do not get married as somnambulists or have children in their sleep. But throughout numberless ages and nations, the normal and real birth control is called self control. If anybody says it cannot is possibly work, I say it does. In many classes, in many countries where these quack nostrums are unknown, populations of free men have remained within reasonable limits by sound traditions of thrift and responsibility. In so far as there is a local evil of excess, it comes with all other evils from the squalor and despair of our decaying industrialism. But the thing the capitalist newspapers call birth control is not control at all. It is the idea that people should be, in one respect, completely and utterly uncontrolled, so long as they can evade everything in the function that is positive and creative, and intelligent and worthy of a free man. It is a name given to a succession of different expedients, (the one that was used last is always described as having been dreadfully dangerous) by which it is possible to filch the pleasure belonging to a natural process while violently and unnaturally thwarting the process itself.

The nearest and most respectable parallel would be that of the Roman epicure, who took emetics at intervals all day so that he might eat five or six luxurious dinners daily. Now any man's common sense, unclouded by newspaper science and long words, will tell him at once that an operation like that of the epicures is likely in the long run even to be bad for his digestion and pretty certain to be bad for his character. Men left to themselves gave sense enough to know when a habit obviously savours of perversion and peril. And if it were the fashion in fashionable circles to call the Roman expedient by the name of "Diet Control," and to talk about it in a lofty fashion as merely "the improvement of life and the service of life" (as if it meant no more than the mastery of man over his meals), we should take the liberty of calling it cant and saying that it had no relation to the reality in debate.

The fact is, I think, that I am in revolt against the conditions of industrial capitalism and the advocates of Birth Control are in revolt against the conditions of human life. What their spokesmen can possibly mean by saying that I wage a "class war against mothers" must remain a matter of speculation. If they mean that I do the unpardonable wrong to mothers of thinking they will wish to continue to be mothers, even in a society of greater economic justice and civic equality, then I think they are perfectly right. I doubt whether mothers could escape from motherhood into Socialism. But the advocates of Birth Control seem to want some of them to escape from it into capitalism. They seem to express a sympathy with those who prefer "the right to earn outside the home" or (in other words) the right to be a wage-slave and work under the orders of a total stranger because he happens to be a richer man. By what conceivable contortions of twisted thought this ever came to be considered a freer condition than that of companionship with the man she has herself freely accepted, I never could for the life of me make out. The only sense I can make of it is that the proletarian work, though obviously more senile and subordinate than the parental, is so far safer and more irresponsible because it is not parental. I can easily believe that there are some people who do prefer working in a factory to working in a family; for there are always some people who prefer slavery to freedom, and who especially prefer being governed to governing someone else. But I think their quarrel with motherhood is not like mine, a quarrel with inhuman conditions, but simply a quarrel with life. Given an attempt to escape from the nature of things, and I can well believe that it might lead at last to something like "the nursery school for our children staffed by other mothers and single women of expert training."

I will add nothing to that ghastly picture, beyond speculating pleasantly about the world in which women cannot manage their own children but can manage each other's. But I think it indicates an abyss between natural and unnatural arrangements which would have to be bridged before we approached what is supposed to be the subject of discussion.

The following is familiar to some, but bares repeating.

Angry White Female: Margaret Sanger's Race of Thoroughbreds-- BEN WIKER

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was one of the lead architects of the culture of death. Not only was she a major contributor to the liberation of sexuality from all restraint, but sexual liberation was for her part of a larger program of eugenics. While Planned Parenthood has been very careful to keep its founder's sexual and especially eugenic views from the light, they are a matter of public record, boldly and clearly expressed throughout Sanger's writings.

Sanger's dedication to the propagation and legalization of birth control was part of an overall eugenics program. Her journal, The Birth Control Review, was filled from cover to cover with the strongest and crudest eugenic propaganda. One of her favorite slogans, adorning each issue, was "Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds."

For Sanger, the "lack of balance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,'" was "the greatest present menace to civilization," so that "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective." As with the other eugenicists of the early 20th century, Sanger was particularly upset by the presence of the "feeble-minded," a vague term which seemed to encompass everyone from the insane and those with nervous disorders, to those hitting low marks on the newly developed IQ tests. (By her estimate, some 70% of the population was feebleminded.)

To deal with the great "menace," Sanger advocated a new kind of philanthropy, claiming that traditional philanthropy only succeeded in making the problem worse — "it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents," she said, who were "the most devastating curse on human progress and expression." True charity, by contrast, should not both coddle and perpetuate the "dead weight of human waste," but weed out these undesirables at the source through birth control. Nor did Sanger shrink from advocating the use of force if necessary: "We prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded."

Sanger's plans for genetic cleansing for the sake of "racial health" were racist as well. She was horrified by the fertility of the immigrant "Slavs, Latins [i.e., Italians], and Hebrews," and her first birth-control clinic was set up in the Brownsville section of New York City, where such racially defective immigrants predominated.

Nor was she innocent of connections to the eugenic policies of Hitler's Germany. Her Birth Control Review published numerous articles by leading American eugenicists who lavished envious praise on the Nazi eugenic programs. As for the black population in the United States, Sanger "did not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population," she wrote; therefore, the eugenic effort had to be carried out "through a religious appeal."

She suggested that the birth-control movement should "hire three or four colored ministers" as traveling preachers of the gospel of birth control.

Sanger's zeal as a prophet and missionary of birth control was rooted in her evolutionary beliefs. Without birth control, the "dead weight" would continually drag humanity back down the evolutionary slope. But, no less important, she believed sexuality to be a dynamic, creative power which, if released from its traditional restraints, would bring about the development of "genius," thereby allowing the "more fit" to make great leaps up that same slope.

Sanger's rather strange notion of the creation of "genius" through sexuality was based on a combination of current evolutionary thought, pop psychology and the writings of famed "sexologist" Havelock Ellis. Human beings were formed, socially and psychologically, by internal and external "forces … the greatest and most imperative of which are Sex and Hunger," she claimed. While "Hunger … has created 'the struggle for existence,'" the "dynamic energy" of "the great force of Sex" was the evolutionary force which created genius.

The creation of genius will only come about with the "removal of physiological and psychological inhibitions and constraints which makes possible the release and channeling of the primordial inner energies of man into full and divine expression," she wrote. "The removal of these inhibitions, so scientists assure us, makes possible more rapid and profound perceptions."

Since the release of sexual energy was creative, and therefore the repression of sexual energy was destructive, it followed, in Sanger's logic, that the traditional approach to sexuality had to be replaced. That meant, of course, the necessity of breaking down the "codes that have surrounded sexual behavior in the so-called Christian communities, the teachings of the churches concerning chastity and sexual purity, the prohibitions of the laws, and the hypocritical conventions of society."

As a consequence, Sanger became a direct opponent of Christianity, especially the Catholic faith, for the Church was the greatest obstacle opposing the release of the "dynamic energy" of sexuality, and such obstruction for Sanger was "nothing less than foolhardy."

"Instead of laying down hard and fast laws of sexual conduct, instead of attempting to inculcate rules and regulations," as the Church had done, "the teacher of Birth Control seeks to meet the needs of the people," she wrote.

WHAT DO PEOPLE NEED?

As we have seen, the wrong sort of people need to be taught (or forced) to quit breeding altogether. The right people need to be taught "the power to control this great force" of sexual energy — "to use it," she wrote, "to direct it into channels in which it becomes the energy enhancing their lives and increasing self-expression and self-development."

EXTOLLING EUGENICS

Sanger longed to create an earthly paradise, one in which the free expression of sexuality would replace the need for religion by creating a new religion. "Through sex," she wrote, "mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to an earthly paradise. So must we necessarily and inevitably conceive of sex-expression."

No longer would humanity foolishly yearn for a world to come, for "in that dawn men and women will have come to the realization, already suggested, that there close at hand is our paradise, our everlasting abode, our Heaven and our eternity."

Sanger not only preached this new religion; she practiced it as well. Sexual fulfillment had been, from very early on, the criterion by which she thought marriage should be judged. When marriage proved sexually unsatisfying, it should be dissolved. Even better, marriages should be "open" to sexual fulfillment elsewhere.

Following her own advise, she carried on at least six unconcealed premarital and extramarital affairs. As contemporary Mildred Dodge wrote of her: "She was the first person I ever knew who was openly an ardent propagandist for the joys of the flesh."

Even though she was an advocate of "more children from the fit, less from the unfit," she had only three children, and paid relatively little attention to them.

As her son Grant stated, "Mother was seldom around. She just left us with anybody handy and ran off we didn't know where."

Although Sanger died in 1966, her legacy lives on in Planned Parenthood. The liberation of sexuality from all traditional moral restraints is still central to its agenda, as is clear from International Planned Parenthood's recent Youth Manifesto, which states that "young people must be able to have pleasure and confidence in relationships and all aspects of sexuality." This demands that "society must recognize the right of all young people to enjoy sex and to express their sexuality in the way that they choose."

As with Sanger, contraception is the means to bring about this sexual paradise.

But with the release of sexuality from procreative ends, and making of it merely a "creative" means for "enhancing … lives and increasing self-expression and self-development," abortion has become a necessity. It is no accident that Planned Parenthood is both the largest educative force for Sangerian sexuality, and the largest abortion provider. Furthermore, with the advent of prenatal screening, abortion is bringing about Sanger's eugenic "dream" of eliminating "the mentally and physically defective," — "the dead weight of human waste," as she called them.

Sanger's "great spiritual illumination" did indeed "transform the world" — but in such a way as to usher in not an "earthly paradise," but the culture of death.

Margaret Sanger 1879-1966

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