Monday, February 18, 2013 8:03:46 PM
Mahatma Gandhi: Birth control is criminal!
(Credit: Salon/Benjamin Wheelock)
In an amazing 1939 essay, he argues against "receiving seed" with the intention of letting it "run to waste"
By Mahatma Gandhi
[this piece posted] Monday, Feb 18, 2013 08:45 AM CST
It is the fashion in some quarters nowadays for the young to discredit whatever may be said by old people. I am not prepared to say that there is absolutely no justification for this belief. But I warn the youth of all the countries against always discounting whatever old men or women may say for the mere fact that it is said by such persons.
Even as wisdom often comes from the mouths of babes, so does it often come from the mouths of old people. The golden rule is to test everything in the light of reason and experience, no matter from whom it comes.
I want to discuss the subject of birth control by contraceptives. It is dinned into one’s ears that gratification of the sex urge is a solemn obligation, like the obligation of discharging debts lawfully incurred, and that not to do so would involve the penalty of intellectual decay. This sex urge has been isolated from the desire for progeny, and it is said by protagonists of the use of contraceptives that conception is an accident to be prevented except when the parties desire to have children.
I venture to suggest that this is a most dangerous doctrine to preach anywhere, much more so in a country like India, where the middle-class male population has become imbecile through abuse of the creative function.
If satisfaction of the sex urge is a duty, unnatural vice would be commendable. Even persons of note have been known to approve of what is commonly known as sexual perversion. The reader may be shocked at that statement. But if it somehow or other gains the stamp of respectability, it will be the rage among boys and girls to satisfy their urge among members of their own sex.
To me the use of contraceptives is not far removed from the means to which persons have hitherto resorted for the gratification of their sexual desire with the results that very few know. And I betray no confidence when I inform the reader that there are unmarried girls of impressionable age in schools and colleges who study birth-control literature and magazines with avidity and even possess contraceptives.
It is impossible to confine their use to married women.
Marriage loses its sanctity when its purpose and highest use is conceived to be the satisfaction of the animal passion without contemplating the natural result of such satisfaction. I have no doubt that those learned men and women who are carrying on propaganda with missionary zeal in favor of their use of contraceptives are doing irreparable harm to the youth of the world under the false belief that they will be thereby the poor women who may be obliged to bear children against their will. Those who need not limit their children will not be easily reached by them.
Our poor Indian women have not the knowledge or training that the women of the West have. Surely the propaganda is not being carried on in behalf of the middle-class women, for they do not need the knowledge, at any rate, so much as the poorer classes do.
The greatest harm, however, done by the propaganda lies in its rejection of the old ideal and substitution in its place of one which, if carried out, must spell the moral and physical extinction of the race.
The horror with which ancient literature has regarded the fruitless use of the vital fluid was not a superstition born of ignorance. What shall we say of a husbandman who will sow the finest seed in his possession on a stony ground, or of the owner of a field who will receive in his field rich with fine soil good seed under conditions that will make it impossible for it to grow?
God has blessed man with seed that has the highest potency and women with a field richer than the richest earth to be found anywhere on this globe. Surely it is criminal folly for man to allow his most precious possession to run to waste. And so is a woman guilty of criminal folly who will receive the seed in her life-producing field with the deliberate intention of letting it run to waste. Both he and she will be judged guilty of misuse of the talents given to them and they will be dispossessed of what they have been given.
Sex urge is a fine and noble thing. There is nothing to be ashamed of in it. But it is meant only for the act of creation. Any other use of it is a sin against God and humanity.
It was reserved for our generation to glorify vice by calling it virtue. The greatest disservice protagonists of contraceptives are rendering to the youth of today is to fill their minds with what appears to me to be wrong ideology.
Let the young men and women who hold their destiny in their hands beware of this false god and guard the treasure with which God has blessed them and use it, if they wish, for the only purpose for which it is intended.
Excerpted from “My Sex Life, And Other Thoughts on Sex, Love and Temptations,” available in the Liberty magazine [ http://www.libertymagazine.com/ ] digital archive and as a Kindle e-book [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B4WPP7Q ]. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher and Madwell.
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/18/mahatma_gandhi_birth_control_is_criminal/ [with comments]
--
Margaret Sanger: Birth control is freedom!
(Credit: Salon/Benjamin Wheelock)
In a response to Gandhi's Liberty magazine essay, she discounts his idea that abstinence is a realistic policy
By Margaret Sanger
[this piece posted] Monday, Feb 18, 2013 08:45 AM CST
Yes: it is quite true that the rising generations are beginning to discredit and to discount those prejudices voiced by the elders which too often have been accepted as traditional “wisdom.”
They are being born into a world of confusion and chaos. They are confronted on all sides by misery, poverty, insecurity, crime. Dictators whip up class hatred, race hatreds, national hatreds among their slaves, most of whom were born of men and women close to the starvation point and themselves were undernourished children. It has been well said that starving men are always angry men. Even more menacing to the established order is a generation of undernourished children. Such a background becomes the soil out of which dictators emerge. Is it any wonder therefore that the younger generations can no longer revere the wisdom of those who have permitted international chaos to become worldwide?
We advocate birth control by means of contraception, not to encourage reckless sex gratification but to place in the hands of young and responsible married couples a scientific instrument by means of which they may fulfill their duties to their children. To their children already born and to those who come.
We advocate intelligent control of the procreative faculties in the very same manner that all intelligent and civilized persons control all the physiological functions of the human body – in the interests of health, hygiene, and the development of higher purposes and uses.
The legitimate use of contraception implies foresight and co-operation. Instead of being in any sense a secret vice, it is the extreme opposition from heedless sex gratification.
Birth control is synonymous with discipline, foresight, the conquest of heedless, selfish impulses, and the channeling of one of the most imperative forces of all nature to the common good – to the best interests of the individual, the community at large, and the ultimate destiny of the human race.
Intelligently utilized, the instrument of contraception has brought freedom to the lives of thousands. It has removed fear from married love; it has and shall continue to reduce the maternal death rate among mothers too ill and feeble to bear the burden of a long series of undesired pregnancies. It is saving the lives of many infants and children, because it is giving them more “vital space” in which to grow and to be properly fed. Remember that the ranks of crime are recruited mainly from the high-birth-rate groups.
Mr. Gandhi, if I understand him, advocates birth control by the method of abstinence. This indeed is an argument that can appeal only to the aged. It is based upon an obsolete conception of the marriage relationship. I see no idealism in such a policy. To limit the marital relation to exclusively procreative purpose would debase the noblest and most idealistic human relationship to the level of stock-breeding. It would send humanity back along the road from which it has so painfully emerged. It would place such narrow limitations upon the marriage as to generate untold misery, unhappiness, and discord upon parents, and their unhappiness must automatically be reflected in the lives of their children.
Mr. Gandhi has fought long and fearlessly for the emancipation of women of India, and I would be the first to recognize the nobility of his consecration to human freedom.
But, with all due respect and reverence, one may ask of what value such freedom can be, if women are denied the primary and fundamental freedom of their own bodies, if they are denied the right to decide, if, when, and under what conditions they are to assume the responsibility of motherhood? To advocate the freedom of women, yet to withhold the knowledge of contraception, is to indulge in idle rhetoric.
India has practiced little birth control. In no other country (with the possible exception of China, another high-birth-rate territory) have women been so heedlessly sacrificed to the Juggernaut of futile childbearing. In no other country has so great a proportion of mankind been debased to a level lower than the beasts.
Contrast the status of women and children among these groups, states, and countries where scientific contraception has been accepted and legitimized. Birth may be spaced out according to the strength and desires of mother and father. Families can be planned; and racial progress may be controlled in the very manner traffic is controlled on our highways.
Birth control is a problem that is bound up with civilization itself. It is the instrument whereby mankind can master the imperious forces of his internal nature, as today he is mastering those of the external world.
Excerpted from “My Sex Life, And Other Thoughts on Sex, Love and Temptations,” available in the Liberty magazine [ http://www.libertymagazine.com/ ] digital archive and as a Kindle e-book [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B4WPP7Q ]. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher and Madwell.
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/18/margaret_sanger_birth_control_is_freedom/ [with comments]
--
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=84685236 and preceding (and any future following)
(Credit: Salon/Benjamin Wheelock)
In an amazing 1939 essay, he argues against "receiving seed" with the intention of letting it "run to waste"
By Mahatma Gandhi
[this piece posted] Monday, Feb 18, 2013 08:45 AM CST
It is the fashion in some quarters nowadays for the young to discredit whatever may be said by old people. I am not prepared to say that there is absolutely no justification for this belief. But I warn the youth of all the countries against always discounting whatever old men or women may say for the mere fact that it is said by such persons.
Even as wisdom often comes from the mouths of babes, so does it often come from the mouths of old people. The golden rule is to test everything in the light of reason and experience, no matter from whom it comes.
I want to discuss the subject of birth control by contraceptives. It is dinned into one’s ears that gratification of the sex urge is a solemn obligation, like the obligation of discharging debts lawfully incurred, and that not to do so would involve the penalty of intellectual decay. This sex urge has been isolated from the desire for progeny, and it is said by protagonists of the use of contraceptives that conception is an accident to be prevented except when the parties desire to have children.
I venture to suggest that this is a most dangerous doctrine to preach anywhere, much more so in a country like India, where the middle-class male population has become imbecile through abuse of the creative function.
If satisfaction of the sex urge is a duty, unnatural vice would be commendable. Even persons of note have been known to approve of what is commonly known as sexual perversion. The reader may be shocked at that statement. But if it somehow or other gains the stamp of respectability, it will be the rage among boys and girls to satisfy their urge among members of their own sex.
To me the use of contraceptives is not far removed from the means to which persons have hitherto resorted for the gratification of their sexual desire with the results that very few know. And I betray no confidence when I inform the reader that there are unmarried girls of impressionable age in schools and colleges who study birth-control literature and magazines with avidity and even possess contraceptives.
It is impossible to confine their use to married women.
Marriage loses its sanctity when its purpose and highest use is conceived to be the satisfaction of the animal passion without contemplating the natural result of such satisfaction. I have no doubt that those learned men and women who are carrying on propaganda with missionary zeal in favor of their use of contraceptives are doing irreparable harm to the youth of the world under the false belief that they will be thereby the poor women who may be obliged to bear children against their will. Those who need not limit their children will not be easily reached by them.
Our poor Indian women have not the knowledge or training that the women of the West have. Surely the propaganda is not being carried on in behalf of the middle-class women, for they do not need the knowledge, at any rate, so much as the poorer classes do.
The greatest harm, however, done by the propaganda lies in its rejection of the old ideal and substitution in its place of one which, if carried out, must spell the moral and physical extinction of the race.
The horror with which ancient literature has regarded the fruitless use of the vital fluid was not a superstition born of ignorance. What shall we say of a husbandman who will sow the finest seed in his possession on a stony ground, or of the owner of a field who will receive in his field rich with fine soil good seed under conditions that will make it impossible for it to grow?
God has blessed man with seed that has the highest potency and women with a field richer than the richest earth to be found anywhere on this globe. Surely it is criminal folly for man to allow his most precious possession to run to waste. And so is a woman guilty of criminal folly who will receive the seed in her life-producing field with the deliberate intention of letting it run to waste. Both he and she will be judged guilty of misuse of the talents given to them and they will be dispossessed of what they have been given.
Sex urge is a fine and noble thing. There is nothing to be ashamed of in it. But it is meant only for the act of creation. Any other use of it is a sin against God and humanity.
It was reserved for our generation to glorify vice by calling it virtue. The greatest disservice protagonists of contraceptives are rendering to the youth of today is to fill their minds with what appears to me to be wrong ideology.
Let the young men and women who hold their destiny in their hands beware of this false god and guard the treasure with which God has blessed them and use it, if they wish, for the only purpose for which it is intended.
Excerpted from “My Sex Life, And Other Thoughts on Sex, Love and Temptations,” available in the Liberty magazine [ http://www.libertymagazine.com/ ] digital archive and as a Kindle e-book [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B4WPP7Q ]. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher and Madwell.
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/18/mahatma_gandhi_birth_control_is_criminal/ [with comments]
--
Margaret Sanger: Birth control is freedom!
(Credit: Salon/Benjamin Wheelock)
In a response to Gandhi's Liberty magazine essay, she discounts his idea that abstinence is a realistic policy
By Margaret Sanger
[this piece posted] Monday, Feb 18, 2013 08:45 AM CST
Yes: it is quite true that the rising generations are beginning to discredit and to discount those prejudices voiced by the elders which too often have been accepted as traditional “wisdom.”
They are being born into a world of confusion and chaos. They are confronted on all sides by misery, poverty, insecurity, crime. Dictators whip up class hatred, race hatreds, national hatreds among their slaves, most of whom were born of men and women close to the starvation point and themselves were undernourished children. It has been well said that starving men are always angry men. Even more menacing to the established order is a generation of undernourished children. Such a background becomes the soil out of which dictators emerge. Is it any wonder therefore that the younger generations can no longer revere the wisdom of those who have permitted international chaos to become worldwide?
We advocate birth control by means of contraception, not to encourage reckless sex gratification but to place in the hands of young and responsible married couples a scientific instrument by means of which they may fulfill their duties to their children. To their children already born and to those who come.
We advocate intelligent control of the procreative faculties in the very same manner that all intelligent and civilized persons control all the physiological functions of the human body – in the interests of health, hygiene, and the development of higher purposes and uses.
The legitimate use of contraception implies foresight and co-operation. Instead of being in any sense a secret vice, it is the extreme opposition from heedless sex gratification.
Birth control is synonymous with discipline, foresight, the conquest of heedless, selfish impulses, and the channeling of one of the most imperative forces of all nature to the common good – to the best interests of the individual, the community at large, and the ultimate destiny of the human race.
Intelligently utilized, the instrument of contraception has brought freedom to the lives of thousands. It has removed fear from married love; it has and shall continue to reduce the maternal death rate among mothers too ill and feeble to bear the burden of a long series of undesired pregnancies. It is saving the lives of many infants and children, because it is giving them more “vital space” in which to grow and to be properly fed. Remember that the ranks of crime are recruited mainly from the high-birth-rate groups.
Mr. Gandhi, if I understand him, advocates birth control by the method of abstinence. This indeed is an argument that can appeal only to the aged. It is based upon an obsolete conception of the marriage relationship. I see no idealism in such a policy. To limit the marital relation to exclusively procreative purpose would debase the noblest and most idealistic human relationship to the level of stock-breeding. It would send humanity back along the road from which it has so painfully emerged. It would place such narrow limitations upon the marriage as to generate untold misery, unhappiness, and discord upon parents, and their unhappiness must automatically be reflected in the lives of their children.
Mr. Gandhi has fought long and fearlessly for the emancipation of women of India, and I would be the first to recognize the nobility of his consecration to human freedom.
But, with all due respect and reverence, one may ask of what value such freedom can be, if women are denied the primary and fundamental freedom of their own bodies, if they are denied the right to decide, if, when, and under what conditions they are to assume the responsibility of motherhood? To advocate the freedom of women, yet to withhold the knowledge of contraception, is to indulge in idle rhetoric.
India has practiced little birth control. In no other country (with the possible exception of China, another high-birth-rate territory) have women been so heedlessly sacrificed to the Juggernaut of futile childbearing. In no other country has so great a proportion of mankind been debased to a level lower than the beasts.
Contrast the status of women and children among these groups, states, and countries where scientific contraception has been accepted and legitimized. Birth may be spaced out according to the strength and desires of mother and father. Families can be planned; and racial progress may be controlled in the very manner traffic is controlled on our highways.
Birth control is a problem that is bound up with civilization itself. It is the instrument whereby mankind can master the imperious forces of his internal nature, as today he is mastering those of the external world.
Excerpted from “My Sex Life, And Other Thoughts on Sex, Love and Temptations,” available in the Liberty magazine [ http://www.libertymagazine.com/ ] digital archive and as a Kindle e-book [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B4WPP7Q ]. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher and Madwell.
Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/18/margaret_sanger_birth_control_is_freedom/ [with comments]
--
(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=84685236 and preceding (and any future following)
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
