Pro-Prostitution and Pro-Fornication Quotes from the Birth Control Review

View quotes full screen
Pro-Prostitution and Pro-Fornication Quotes from the Birth Control Review
1917

"All the children you now see are suitably dressed; they look now as neat as formerly only the children of the village clergymen did. In the families of the laborers there is now a better personal and general hygiene, a finer moral and intellectual development. All this has become possible by limitation of the number of children in these families. It may be that now and then this preventive teaching has caused illicit intercourse but, on the whole, morality is now on a much higher level and mercenary prostitution, with its demoralizing consequences and propagation of continuous diseases, is on the decline."

Dr. J. Rutgers of the Neo-Malthusian League of Holland. "After Thirty-Five Years of Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Number 3 (March 1917), page 14.


"One of the strongest arguments of our moralists and purists is that the knowledge of contraception would lead the young to enter upon forbidden sexual relations. Granted that this may happen in a number of instances, the benefit derived from a diminution of venereal diseases, a greater number of happy and successful marriages among the younger people, fewer but better and healthier offspring, instead of an unrestricted procreation of the underfed, the tuberculous, the alcoholic, the degenerate, the feeble-minded and insane, would more than outweigh the isolated instances of sexual intercourse prior to marriage."

S. Adolphus Knopf, M.D. "An Arsenal of Argument." Birth Control Review, Volume I, Numbers 4 and 5 (April-May 1917), page 8.


1918

"As for the argument that many girls would become immoral were it not for the fear of pregnancy, I feel that it would be far better for a few more girls to become immoral without any illegitimate children to be born, than for a large number of fatherless children to be born yearly and countless girls driven to a life of prostitution, because of either uncontrolled passion or seduction by some man for whom there is more love than prudent feeling."

Claude T. Smith. "The Real Immorality." Birth Control Review, Volume II, Number 4 (April 1918), page 14.


1921

"Every embrace of love is a new phase of being ) a new sublimation of consciousness ) a fresh inspiration of life. Even if love touches lips over the bars surrounding our conventional breeding-places, would it be wise to suppress, if we could, the divinity in our souls; to destroy the poetry and the spice in our lives with puny and puerile laws? For my own part, I thank whatever gods there are that we can not!"

From "Some Aspects of Adultery," a study by Dr. Ralcy Husted Bell, Birth Control Review, Volume V, Number 6 (June 1921), page 10.


1924

"Birth control makes possible such clear-cut distinctions between mating and parenthood that it might be expected to produce radical changes in theories of sex attitude or relationship, forcing the discard of many an argument for personal suppression for the good of children or the honor of the family, and forcing redefinition of concepts of honor and sincerity between the sexes."

"Press Clippings: Elsie Clews Parsons on Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 6 (June 1924), page 190.


1925

"If women are the ones primarily leading the present "sex uproar," it is because they are fundamentally less prudish than men ... Freedom of action on the part of women has brought with it a desire to attain the heights of love enjoyed by men, heights which could make Malthus, famous for his "Essay on the Principle of Population" say, "Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love ..."

Percy L. Clark, Jr. "Is Love Worth Saving?" Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 2 (February 1925), page 42.


"Many people fear birth control because they are told that it will increase extramarital immorality. They do not stop to consider whether if true (which is open to much doubt) this might be a low price to pay for the normal advance gained in avoiding the hideous immorality of enforced maternity and of easing that population pressure which bids fair to be fruitful cause of international discord."

"Population and the Food Supply: National Scientific Bodies Forecast the Future." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 2 (February 1925), page 53.


"Experience has amply demonstrated the evils of attempting to suppress the gratification of this impulse, and its utter futility, except in rare subnormal individuals ... To the accusation that the general knowledge of contraceptive practices will increase promiscuity by "making vice safe," we simply reply that the pressure of population leads to celibacy, delayed marriage, and unspeakable housing conditions in which chastity is almost impossible."

Charles V. Drysdale. "The Neo-Malthusian Philosophy: Part II." Birth Control Review, Volume IX, Number 6 (June 1925), page 181.


1928

"What does the World League for Sexual Reform aim at?

"It aims at being the headquarters of a campaign against a false sexual morality, a false morality, to which already endless numbers of human beings have been sacrificed, and which continues daily to demand its victims.

"In this fight we mean to use exclusively those mental weapons and those facts, which sexual science (in the widest sense) gives us.

"What is out of accord with the laws of nature and science can never be ethically right or truly moral. Where opposition exists between the forces of nature and of society (as, for example, in the population question) one must be at pains to do away with this opposition by using the conscious will of mankind to bring these forces into harmonious cooperation.

"We are unable to recognize as binding the varying rules prescribed at different times by the moment. We can recognize only what is in agreement with the teachings of life and love.

"The following ten points deserve special consideration:

1. Marriage reform. Wedlock must be raised to the position of a living comradeship between two people. This necessitates a reform in the marriage contract, conjugal rights and divorce.

2. The position of women as members of society. Women have not by any means everywhere as yet won the equal rights that are their due in political, economic, social and sexual spheres.

3. Birth Control i.e. greater sense of responsibility in the begetting of children. We believe in making harmless contraceptives known, combat on the other hand both abortion and the penalizing of abortion.

4. Eugenics in the sense of Nietzsche's words: "You shall not merely continue the race, but move it upward!"

5. A fair judgment of those who are unsuited to marriage, above all the intermediate sexual types.

6. Tolerance of free sexual relations, especially protection of the unmarried mother and the child born out of wedlock.

7. The prevention of prostitution and venereal disease.

8. The conception of aberrations of sexual desire not as criminal, sinful or vicious but as a more or less pathological phenomenon.

9. The setting up of a code of sexual law, which does not interfere with the mutual sexual will of grown-up persons.

10. The question of sexual education and enlightenment.

"All these points have in the last fifty years been the subject of lively discussions, which have not only often fundamentally altered the whole conception, but also the whole organization of sexual life. We can in this sense speak of a sexual crisis. The old morality with its terrible sexual misery still has the upper hand, and the human prejudices and condemnation are still heaped higher."

"News Notes." Birth Control Review, Volume XII, Number 7 (July 1928), page 215.


1930

"The refusal of contraceptive information to the unmarried ... is a highly expensive policy to the taxpayer. It is an even more expensive policy from the point of view of the Eugenist. If the laws of heredity are valid, it frequently means an insistence on the continuance of poor stock, and a multiplication of those least fitted to pass on the torch of life to future generations."

Annie G. Porritt. "A Question of Morality." Birth Control Review, Volume XIV, Number 3 (March 1930), pages 74 and 75.


"Adultery should not be considered as a grounds for divorce. Adultery in the physical sense, at least, should be considered a natural consequence of a modern marriage. Where in the past, only men were adulterous, and that clandestinely, women should not have the same privilege of having extramarital sex affairs. Russell believes that these adulteries, when once we recognize the wisdom of them, will facilitate rather than mar marriage as an institution ... "What has Russell said that has caused such a furore of concern and confusion? To begin with he has stressed the wisdom of pre-marital intercourse, and pointed out that women who are virgins are seldom equipped to choose fitting husbands for their marriage. The virgin is naive, and, therefore, without that sexual experience and wisdom which are necessary to an intelligent selection of a mate."

Favorable review of Bertrand Russell's book Marriage and Morals in V.F. Calverton. "Morals in Search of an Answer." Birth Control Review, Volume XIV, Number 3 (March 1930), pages 75 and 76.


"Furthermore, it is his [William J. Robinson's] conviction that the profession of prostitution should be declared perfectly legal and legitimate, which would tend to eliminate the evils that are now incidental to its practice ... Cease hounding, persecuting and humiliating her ... and she will at once begin to resist the terrible exploitation to which she is subjected on all sides."

William J. Fielding. "Prostitution ) Past, Present and Future." Birth Control Review, Volume XIV, Number 10 (October 1930), page 285.


"The great ideal is still a happy love, leading into marriage and parenthood. But it is precisely that they may gain that ideal that so many of them [college women] are deciding that marriage must not be confounded either with love or with sex. They would remove the confusion of sex as far as possible from parenthood. For a good lover may not be a good husband, and a good husband may not make a good father. The trouble with the present system is that it has attempted to imprison love in sex and in marriage.

"I do not think that youth is tending toward immorality, nor that is [sic] can do so while its ideals are set so high. Out of the temporary confusion due to changing customs, there must emerge a higher morality. Youth would set free what has been long a captive. May the marriages of tomorrow find a new freedom!"

"An Unofficial Questionnaire: Seventy College Girls Express Their Opinions." Birth Control Review, Volume XIV, Number 10 (October 1930), page 287.


"The gale of laughter which swept the magistrate's court in New York when Judge Rosenbluth asked if doctors required marriage licenses before treating patients should have disposed for good and all of the desire among birth controllers to pass legislation restricting information to married people ... An unwanted child in an unmarried woman's home is not in a more enviable position than most unwanted children in legal families."

"A Symposium on Nullification and Repeal." Birth Control Review, Volume XIV, Number 11 (November 1930), page 309.


1931

"The greater facility of divorce aids the formation of the most satisfactory union. A greater freedom between the sexes before marriage, even if it has sometimes led to license, is not only itself beneficial, but the proper method of preparing for a more intimate permanent union. And the exercise of contraceptive control is the indispensable method of selecting the best possibilities of offspring and excluding from the world those who ought never to be born."

Havelock Ellis. "Marriage ) An Enduring Institution." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 6 (June 1931), pages 166 and 167.

"I find myself in complete agreement with Havelock Ellis in his article on Marriage ) An Enduring Institution. I believe that monogamy is the ideal to which society should approximate. There should be nothing compulsory about it. Marriage should be made harder and divorce easier. Plenty of sex education and probably sane and decent sex experience should precede permanent marriage. The new sexology, far from destroying marriage and the family, is the

only thing which can make possible a happy and enduring marriage for the majority of mankind. Most marital discord is due to absence of sex knowledge and to sexual maladjustment, both of which would be eliminated if we were civilized enough to disseminate scientific knowledge on sex matters and to permit pre-conjugal sex experience.

"... Obviously, the bonds of theological and legal intimidation are bursting. The new family order must rest upon intelligence, freedom, and adequate information."

Harry Elmer Barnes. "Comments on Ellis' Article: Freedom and Knowledge Needed." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 7 (July 1931), page 210.


"... And Mr. Packard seems to believe that the medical men are in some way capable of being policemen of our private affairs. Is it not just as "benighted, illogical and absurd" for one to assume that contraception can, or ought to be, restricted to married people as it is to oppose all ideas of birth control? ... I sympathize immensely with nullification [mass disobedience of the law]. All liberals must practice such nullification of many laws ..."

Gordon McWhirter of Berkeley, California. Letter to the Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 10 (October 1931), page 302.


"In an effort to secure representative opinion on the supposedly promiscuous tendencies of women of today, with sidelights on the attitude of men, the writer interviewed Mrs. Marjorie Prevost, assistant to Margaret Sanger in the newly established Marriage Relationship Clinic, Dr. Isabel Beck, a gynecologist whose work includes instruction in Social Hygiene in the Y.W.C.A., and Mr. J. Edward Sproul, Program Section Secretary of the National Council of Y.M.C.A.'s. All of these authorities agreed that modern conditions have brought into existence not a new type, rather a new outlook and a new attitude; none was ready to admit that modern men and women differ from their predecessors except in superficialities."

Howard K. Hollister. "The Disappearing Double Standard." Birth Control Review, Volume XV, Number 11 (November 1931), page 314.


1932

"It [birth control] has the authority of that upon which all the rest of civilization is constructed, and to which intelligence directs us, the authority of sensuous enjoyment not merely physical pleasure, but esthetic satisfaction, which can only be had through physical pleasure."

Gordon McWhirter. "The Fundamental Reason for Birth Control." Birth Control Review, Volume XVI, Numbers 7 and 8 (July-August 1932), page 222.


"It appears, to say the least, highly improbable that in a radically rationalized society sexual reactions and behavior will acquire a uniformity which has never existed in the most coercive societies. With the disappearance of the most coercive moral and economic values, promiscuous behavior will become easier. But so, on the other hand, will relatively monogamous association. To an enormous extent the conditions fatal to the latter and its common failure are the effects of an un-rational and coercive society. With the disappearance of those irrational conditions more than half of the causes which wreck the close association of human relations between men and women would no longer exist.

"There can be little doubt that in a more rationalized society the relations between the sexes will present a combination of promiscuous and monogamous behavior ) as they do now, and as they have done in every period of mankind's career. Promiscuity will perhaps be more general, though probably less in degree. It will have lost the attraction which revolt against moral and social coercion's imparts to it. The contrast between it and uncoerced monogamous relations will have lost the fierce opposition imparted to it by moral zeal and by revolt against it.

"From the moment that such a contrast becomes shifted from the field of moral to that of hedonistic values, from a matter of obligation to one of freedom to do as one pleases, it ceases to have the portentous importance with which it has been invested by moral authoritarianism. To disapprove of people's tastes is not the same as to disapprove of their morals. Condemnation or commendation of either monogamy or promiscuity becomes irrelevant."

Robert Griffault. "Will Monogamy Die Out?" Birth Control Review, Volume XVI, Numbers 7 and 8 (July-August 1932), page 223.


"Another international gathering, the Fifth Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform on a Scientific Basis, was held in Brno, Czechoslovakia, September 20-26. According to the preliminary program, qualitative and quantitative Birth Control, Population Problems, Marriage Reform, Sexual Education, and Prostitution were fully discussed. The chief points of the League's policy are:

1. Political, economic, and sexual equality of men and women.

2. The liberation from marriage (and especially divorce) from the present Church and State tyranny.

3. Birth Control, so that procreation may be undertaken only deliberately, and with a due sense of responsibility.

4. Race betterment by the application of the knowledge of Eugenics.

5. Protection of the unmarried mother and the illegitimate child."

"News Notes." Birth Control Review, Volume XVI, Number 10 (October 1932), page 250.


1933

"Mr. [Havelock] Ellis advances as his basic thesis that all sex activities that lead to normal sex fulfillment are normal."

Henry G. Alsberg's review of Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis. Birth Control Review, Volume XVII, Number 7 (July 1933), page 178.