y. Children born out of wedlock are deemed
"illegitimate"--even healthy children. The newspapers every day are
filled with the scandals of those who have leaped over the restrictions
or limitations society has written in her sexual code. Yet the voluntary
control of the procreative powers, the rational regulation of the number
of children we bring into the world--this is the one type of restriction
frowned upon and prohibited by law!

In a more definite, a much more realistic and concrete manner, Birth
Control reveals itself as the most effective weapon in the spread of
hygienic and prophylactic knowledge among women of the less fortunate
classes. It carries with it a thorough training in bodily cleanliness
and physiology, a definite knowledge of the physiology and function
of sex. In refusing to teach both sides of the subject, in failing to
respond to the universal demand among women for such instruction and
information, maternity centers limit their own efforts and fail to
fulfil what should be their true mission. They are concerned merely with
pregnancy, maternity, child-bearing, the problem of keeping the baby
alive. But any effective work in this field must go further back. We
have gradually come to see, as Havelock Ellis has pointed out, that
comparatively little can 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