"
There is no need to go on repeating these cries. These letters have
come to me by the thousands. There are enough of them to fill many
volumes--each with its own individual tragedy, each with its own
warning to society.
Every ill that we are trying to cure to-day is reflected in them. The
wife who through an unwilling continence drives her husband to
prostitution; habitual drunkenness, which prohibition may or may not
have disposed of as a social problem; mothers who toil in mills and
whose children must follow them to that toil, adding to the long train
of evils involved in child labor; mothers who have brought eight, ten,
twelve or fifteen undernourished, weakly children into the world to
become public burdens of one sort or another--all these and more, with
the ever-present economic problem, and women who are remaining
unmarried because they fear a large family which must exist in want;
men who are living abnormal lives for the same reason. All the social
handicaps and evils of the day are woven into these letters--and out
of each of them rises these challenging facts: First, oppressed
motherhood knows that the cure for these evils lies in birth control;
second, society has not yet learned to permit motherhood to stand
guard for itself, its children, the common good and the coming race.
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