LEGISLATING WOMAN'S MORALS
One of the important duties before those women who are demanding birth
control as a means to a New Race is the changing of our so-called
obscenity laws. This will be no easy undertaking; it is usually much
easier to enact statutes than to revise them. Laws are seldom exactly
what they seem, rarely what their advocates claim for them. The
"obscenity" statutes are particularly deceptive.
Enacted, avowedly, to protect society against the obscene and the
lewd, they make no distinction between the scientific works of human
emancipators like Forel and Ellis and printed matter such as they are
ostensibly aimed at. Naturally enough, then, detectives and
narrow-minded judges and prosecutors who would chuckle over pictures that
would make a clean-minded woman shudder, unite to suppress the
scientific works and the birth-control treatises which would enable
men and women to attain higher physical, mental, moral and spiritual
standards.
Woman, bent upon her freedom and seeking to make a better world, will
not permit the indecent and unclean forces of reaction to mask
themselves forever behind the plea that it is necessary to keep her in
ignorance to preserve her purity. In the birth-control movement, she
has already begun to fight for her right to have, without legal
interference, all knowledge pertaining to her sex nature. This is the
third and most important of the epoch-making battles for general
liberty upon American soil. It is most important because it is to
purify the very fountain of the race and make the race completely
free.
The first and most dramatic of the three great struggles for liberty
reached its apex, as we know, in the American Revolution. It had for
its object the right to hold such political beliefs as one might
choose, and to act in accordance with those beliefs. If this political
freedom is now lost to us, it is because we did not hold strongly
enough to those liberties fought for by our forefathers.
Nearly a hundred years after the Revolution the battle for religious
liberty came to a climax in the career of Robert G. Ingersoll. His
championship of the much vaunted and little exercised freedom of
religious opinion swept the blasphemy laws into the lumber room of
outworn tyrannies. Those yet remaining upon the statute books are
invoked but rarely, and then the effort to enforce them is ridiculous.
Within a few years the tragic combination of false moral standards and
infamous obscenity laws will be as ridiculous in the public mind as
are the now all but forgotten blasphemy laws. If the obscenity laws
are not radically revised or repealed, few reactionaries will dare to
face the public derision that will greet their attempts to use them to
stay woman's progress.
The French have a saying concerning "mort main"--the dead hand. This
hand of the past reaches up into the present to smother the rising
flame of modern ideals, to reforge our chains when we have broken
them, to arrest progress. It is the hand of such as have lived on
earth but have not loved humanity. At the call of those who fear
progress and freedom, it rises from the gloom of forgotten things to
oppress the living.
It is the dead hand that holds imprisoned within the obscenity laws
all direct information concerning birth control. It is the dead hand
that thus compels millions of American women to remain in the bondage
of maternity.
Previous to the year 1868, the obscenity laws of the various states in
the Union contained no specific prohibition of information concerning
contraceptives. In that year, however, the General Assembly of New
York passed an act which specifically included the subject of
contraceptives. The act made it exactly as great an offense to give
such information as to exhibit the sort of pictures and writings at
which the legislation was ostensibly aimed.
In 1873, the late Anthony Comstock, who with a list of contributors,
most of whom did not realize the real effects of his work, constituted
the so-called Society for the Suppression of Vice, succeeded in
obtaining the passage of the federal obscenity act. This act was
presented as one to prevent the circulation of pornographic literature
and pictures among school children. As such, it was rushed through
with two hundred sixty other acts in the closing hours of the
Congress. This act made it a crime to use the mails to convey
contraceptives or information concerning contraceptives. Other acts
later made the original law applicable to express companies and other
common carriers, as well as to the mails.
With this precedent established--a precedent which a majority of the
congressmen could hardly have understood because of the hasty passage
of the act--Comstock secured the enactment of state laws to the same
effect. Meanwhile, the provisions regarding contraceptives had been
dropped from the amended New York State law of 1872. In 1873, however,
a new section, said to have been drafted by Comstock himself, was
substituted for the one enacted in 1872, and that section is
essentially the substance of the present law. None of these acts made
it an offense to prevent conception--all of them provided punishment
for anyone disseminating information concerning the prevention of
conception. In the federal statutes, the maximum penalties were fixed
at a fine of $5,000 or five years imprisonment, or both. The usual
maximum penalty under a state law is a fine of $1,000 or one year's
imprisonment, or both.
Comstock has passed out of public notice. His body has been entombed
but the evil that he did lives after him. His dead hand still reaches
forth to keep the subject of prevention of conception where he placed
it--in the same legal category with things unclean and vile. Forty
years ago the laws were changed and the chief work of Comstock's life
accomplished. Those laws still live, legal monuments to ignorance and
to oppression. Through those laws reaches the dead hand to bring to
the operating table each year hundreds of thousands of women who
undergo the agony of abortion. Each year this hand reaches out to
compel the birth of hundreds of thousands of infants who must die
before they are twelve months old.
Like many laws upon our statute books, these are being persistently
and intelligently violated. Few members of the well-to-do and wealthy
classes think for a single moment of obeying them. They limit their
families to one, two or three well-cared-for children. Usually the
prosecutor who presents the case against a birth-control advocate,
trapped by a detective hired by the Comstock Society, has no children
at all or a small family. The family of the judge who passes upon the
case is likely to be smaller still. The words "It is the law" sums it
all up for these officials when they pass sentence in court. But these
words, so magical to the official mind, have no weight when these same
officials are adjusting their own private lives. They then obey the
higher laws of their own beings--they break the obsolete statutes for
themselves while enforcing them for others.
This is not the situation with the poorer people of the United States,
however. Millions of them know nothing of reliable contraceptives.
When women of the impoverished strata of society do not break these
laws against contraceptives, they violate those laws of their inner
beings which tell them not to bring children into the world to live in
want, disease and general misery. They break the first law of nature,
which is that of self preservation. Bound by false morals, enchained
by false conceptions of religion, hindered by false laws, they endure
until the pressure becomes so great that morals, religion and laws
alike fail to restrain them. Then they for a brief respite resort to
the surgeon's instruments.
For many years the semi-official witch hunting of the Comstock
organization had a remarkable and a deadly effect. Everyone, whether
it was novelist, essayist, publicist, propagandist or artist, who
sought to throw definite light upon the forbidden subject of sex, or
upon family limitation, was prosecuted if detected. Among the many
books suppressed were works by physicians designed to warn young men
and women away from the pitfalls of venereal diseases and sexual
errors. The darkness that surrounded the whole field of sex was made
as complete as possible.
Since then the feeling of the awakened women of America has
intensified. The rapidity with which women are going into industry,
the increasing hardship and poverty of the lower strata of society,
the arousing of public conscience, have all operated to give force and
volume to the demand for woman's right to control her own body that
she may work out her own salvation.
Those who believe in strictly legal measures, as well as those who
believe both in legal measures and in open defiance of these brutal
and unjust laws, are demanding amendments to the obscenity statutes,
which shall remove information concerning contraceptives from its
present classification among things filthy and obscene.
An amendment typical of those offered is that drawn up for the New
York statutes under the direction of Samuel McClure Lindsey, of
Columbia University. The words and sentences in italics are those
which it proposed to add:
"(Section 1145.) Physicians' instruments _and information_. An article
or instrument used or applied by physicians lawfully practicing, or by
their direction or prescription, for the cure or prevention of
disease, is not an article of indecent or immoral nature or use,
within this article. The supplying of such articles to such physicians
or by their direction or prescription, is not an offense under this
article. _The giving by a duly licensed physician or registered nurse
lawfully practicing, of information or advice in regard to, or the
supplying to any person of any article or medicine for the prevention
of, conception is not a violation of any provision of this article._"
This proposed amendment should without doubt include midwives as well
as nurses. There are thousands of women who never see a nurse or a
physician. Under this section, even as it now stands, physicians have
a right to prescribe contraceptives, but few of them have claimed that
right or have even known that it has existed. It does exist, however,
and was specifically declared by the New York State Court of Appeals,
as we shall see when we consider that court's opinion in the Sanger
case, farther on in the book. It can do no harm to make the intent of
the law as regards physicians plainer, and it would be an immense step
forward to include nurses and midwives in the section. With this
addition it would remove one of the most serious obstacles to the
freedom and advancement of American womanhood. Every woman interested
in the welfare of women in general should make it her business to
agitate for such a change in the obscenity laws.
The above provision would take care of the case of the woman who is
ill, or who is plainly about to become ill, but it does not take care
of the vast body of women who have not yet ruined their health by
childbearing and who are not yet suffering from diseases complicated
by pregnancy. If this amendment had been attached to the laws in all
the states, there would still remain much to be done.
Shall we go on indefinitely driving the now healthy mother of two
children into the hands of the abortionist, where she goes in
preference to constant ill health, overwork and the witnessing of
dying and starving babies? It is each woman's duty to herself and to
society to hasten the repeal of all laws against the communication of
birth-control information now that she has the vote, she should use
her political influence to strike, first of all, at these restrictive
statutes. It is not to her credit that a district attorney, arguing
against a birth control advocate, is able to show that women have made
no effort to wipe out such laws in states where they have had the
ballot for years.
It is time that women assert themselves upon this fundamental right,
and the first and best use they can make of the ballot is in this
direction. These laws were made by men and have been instruments of
martyrdom and death for unnumbered thousands of women. Women now have
the opportunity to sweep them into the trash heap. They will do it at
once unless, like men, they use the ballot for those political honors
which many years of experience have taught men to be hollow.
It is only a question of how long it will take women to make up their
minds to this result. The law of woman's being is stronger than any
statute, and the man-made law must sooner or later give way to it. Man
has not protected woman in matters most vital to her--but she is
awaking and will sooner or later realize this and assert herself. If
she acts in mass now, it will be another cheering evidence that she is
moving consciously toward her goal.