I assert that the control of our thinking on ethical questions by
minds enslaved to tradition and priestcraft is an unmitigated
curse to the race. The armory of science is full of weapons which
might be used to slay the monsters of disease and vice--but these
weapons are not allowed to be employed, sometimes not even to be
mentioned. Consider the misery which is piling itself up in the
slams of our great cities---the degenerate, the defective, the
insane, who are multiplying as never before in history. There
exists a perfectly harmless and painless method of sterilizing
the hopelessly unfit, so that they can not reproduce their
hopeless unfitness; but religion objects to this operation, and
so the law does not make use of this knowledge. There exists a
simple, entirely harmless, and practically costless method of
preventing conception, which would enable us to check the blind
and futile fecundity of Nature, and to multiply as gods instead
of as animals. Consider the festering mass of misery in the slums
of our great cities; consider the millions of terrified,
poverty-hounded women, bearing one half-nurtured infant after
another, struggling desperately to feed and care for them, and
seeing them drop into the grave as fast as they are born-until
finally the mother, worn out with the Sisyphean labor, gives up
and follows her misbegotten offspring. Consider how many women,
in their agony and despair, make use of the methods of the
primitive savage, to escape from Nature's curse of fecundity. Dr.
Wm. J. Robinson has estimated that in the United States alone
there are a million abortions every year; and consider that all
this hideous mass of suffering--a bloody European war going on
continually, unheeded by any newspaper correspondent--might be
avoided by the use of a simple sterilizing formula, which we are
not permitted to give! The Federation of Catholic Societies have
placed a law upon the statute-books of the nation, and of all the
states as well; the whole power of police and courts and jails is
at the service of religious bigots, and a young girl is sent to
prison and forcibly fed with a tube through the nose for telling
poverty-ridden, slum-women how to keep from becoming pregnant!
And go among the sleek, cynical men of the world, the judges and
district attorneys, the commissioners of correction and doctors
who perpetrated this infamy under a so-called "reform"
administration in New York City--and what do you find? The first
thing you find is that they themselves, one and all, practice
birth-control with their wives or their mistresses. The second
thing you find is that the statute-books are crowded with other
laws which they make no pretense of enforcing; for example, the
law which forbids the saloons to be open on Sunday--which law
they take the liberty of understanding to mean that the saloons
shall not have their front doors open on Sunday. You will find
that they are not at all afraid of the religious taboos; they are
afraid of the religious vote--and even more they are afraid of
the campaign contributions of sweat-shop manufacturers and
landlords, who cannot see what would become of prosperity if the
women of the slums were to cease to breed. So once more we
discover the wolf in sheep's clothing, the trader, making use of
Tradition-worship; hiding behind the skirts of devout old maiden
aunts and grandmothers, who repeat the instructions which God
gave to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the
earth." As if God were as blind as a Fifth Avenue preacher, and
could see no difference between the Garden of Eden, full of all
fruits that grow and all creatures that run and fly and swim, and
a modern East Side tenement-room, with an oil stove and no
windows and no water-closet, and the price of cabbage seven cents
a pound!