Margaret Sanger - Woman and the New Race (1920)

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She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.

Margaret Sanger
Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.

Margaret Sanger
When motherhood becomes the fruit of deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race.

Margaret Sanger
Woman must have her freedom; the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she shall be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers; and before it can be his, it is hers alone.

Margaret Sanger
The basic freedom of the world is woman's freedom. A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

Margaret Sanger
Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives. So, in compliance with nature's working plan, we must permit womanhood its full development before we can expect of it efficient motherhood. If we are to make racial progress, this development of womanhood must precede motherhood in every individual woman.

Margaret Sanger
While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.

Margaret Sanger
War, famine, poverty and oppression of the workers will continue while woman makes life cheap. They will cease only when she limits her reproductivity and human life is no longer a thing to be wasted.

Margaret Sanger
Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries.

Margaret Sanger
Birth control is the means by which woman attains basic freedom.

Margaret Sanger
Usually this desire [for family limitation] has been laid to economic pressure... It has asserted itself among the rich and among the poor, among the intelligent and the unintelligent. It has been manifested in such horrors as infanticide, child abandonment and abortion.

Margaret Sanger
Woman was and is condemned to a system under which the lawful rapes exceed the unlawful ones a million to one.

Margaret Sanger
It is apparent that nothing short of contraceptives can put an end to the horrors of abortion and infanticide.

Margaret Sanger
No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural resources.

Margaret Sanger
Like begets like. We gather perfect fruit from perfect trees.... Abused soil brings forth stunted growths.

Margaret Sanger
The most far-reaching social development of modern times is the revolt of woman against sex servitude. The most important force in the remaking of the world is a free motherhood...

Margaret Sanger