be done by improving merely the living conditions of adults; that improving conditions for children and babies is not enough.  To combat the evils of infant mortality, natal and pre-natal care is not sufficient.  Even to improve the conditions for the pregnant woman, is insufficient.  Necessarily and inevitably, we are led further and further back, to the point of procreation; beyond that, into the regulation of sexual selection.  The problem becomes a circle.  We cannot solve one part of it without a consideration of the entirety.  But it is especially at the point of creation where all the various forces are concentrated.  Conception must be controlled by reason, by intelligence, by science, or we lose control of all its consequences.

Birth Control is essentially an education for women.  It is women who, directly and by their very nature, bear the burden of that blindness, ignorance and lack of foresight concerning sex which is now enforced by law and custom.  Birth Control places in the hands of women the only effective instrument whereby they may reestablish the balance in society, and assert, not only theoretically but practically as well, the primary importance of the woman and the child in civilization.

Birth Control is thus the stimulus to education.  Its exercise awakens and develops the sense of self-reliance and responsibility, and illuminates the relation of the individual to society and to the race in a manner that otherwise remains vague and academic.  It reveals sex not merely as an untamed and insatiable natural force to which men and women must submit hopelessly and inertly, as it sweeps through them, and then accept it with abject humility the hopeless and heavy consequences.  Instead, it places in their hands the power to control this great force; to use it, to direct it into channels in which it becomes the energy enhancing their lives and increasing self-expression and self-development.  It awakens in women the consciousness of new glories and new possibilities in motherhood.  No longer the prostrate victim of the blind play of instinct but the self-reliant mistress of her body and her own will, the new mother finds in her child the fulfilment of her own desires.  In free instead of compulsory motherhood she finds the avenue of her own development and expression.  No longer bound by an unending series of pregnancies, at liberty to safeguard the development of her own children, she may now extend her beneficent influence beyond her own home.  In becoming thus intensified, motherhood may also broaden and become more extensive as well.  The mother sees that the welfare of her own children is bound up with the welfare of all others.  Not upon the basis of sentimental charity or gratuitous “welfare-work” but upon that of enlightened self-interest, such a mother may exert her influence among the less fortunate and less enlightened.

Unless based upon this central knowledge of and power over her own body and her own instincts, education for woman is valueless.  As long as she remains the plaything of strong, uncontrolled natural forces, as long as she must docilely and humbly submit to the decisions of others, how can woman every lay the foundations of self-respect, self-reliance and independence?  How can she make her own choice, exercise her own discrimination, her own foresight?