"Birth Control and the Racial Future," by Frank H. Hankins, People (April 1931) (1)

1599. 12 PEOPLE [photo][credit/caption] Ewing Galloway Snipers Advance American sharpshooters picking off German rearguardsmen in a retreat through a ruined French village. War and peace are potent factors in the racial future. Professor Harrison R. Hunt has recently said in [italics]Some Biological Aspects of War,[end italics] - "War is morally bad because it involves the ruthless sacrifice of human life on a large scale. This assumption is ethically axiomatic, like our rejection of infanticide, murder, cannibalism, piracy and dueling[sic]."[end caption] what not, one sees that birth control is the most significant single application of scientific knowledge to the problems of human welfare. It seems to me to be fraught with larger consequences for the future of our civilization than any other movement of our time, except the general progress of science itself. It is of the greatest importance, therefore, that the birth control movement be seen in its proper perspective as an integral part of a well-rounded and rational population policy. The very nature of the subject has made it the center of violent emotional reactions which have often obscured thought in both protagonist and antagonist. Thanks to the valiant courage of the pioneers the subject has been wrested from the taboos and squeamish prudishness of prurient-minded purists and has become a legitimate subject of scientific discussion. It now appears that the supreme and unanswerable argument in favor of birth control in a scientific age is that it is the only means whereby the reproductive impulses and their fruition in offspring can be brought under more or less rational regulation. No one claims that all aspects of this vastly important subject have been clarified; far from it. We do know that family limitation is a necessity of civilization; that it is in harmony with the general effort to gain control of human destiny by the application of knowledge; and that the immense effort which society is now making to acquire knowledge and apply it to the problems of social welfare is doomed to defeat unless the reproduction of the species on both quantitative and qualitative sides is brought within the scientific sphere. The greatest need of the hour is for more elaborate and convincing investigations of the whole set of problems centering in the birth rate, including the immensely important question whether the conditions of modern life in our great urban centers are affecting the natural fertility of the population. Two arguments are constantly advanced against the birth control movement as though they were convincing proof that it is fraught with evil potency. One is that it leads to a modification of the whole scheme of traditional sex morality, and the other that it is dysgenic because practiced[sic] more extensively by the more successful classes. These seem to me to be among the strongest arguments for an extension and perfection of contraceptive technique. They seem to me convincing evidence that this movement must go on to its logical conclusion, which is none other than its acceptance as an integral part of a new sexual morality and a fundamental postulate of a rational population policy. Let me state briefly and systematically some reasons for this view. In the first place, it must be a fundamental proposition in any realistic thinking on this matter that we cannot reverse the course of social evolution so as to return to the pre-scientific and pre-industrial era. We must go forward; and we should do so with as much wisdom as the state of knowledge permits. Any other view is timid and unrealistic. One of the principal reasons why we cannot go back, even if we wanted to, is that contraceptive knowledge and practice have become an integral part of the sex and marital mores among all those classes which have attained a status of [end]