lusions from these painful human documents, I prefer
to present a number of typical cases recorded in the reports of the
United States Government, and in the evidence of trained and impartial
investigators of social agencies more generally opposed to the doctrine
of Birth Control than biased in favor of it.

A perusal of the reports on infant mortality in widely varying
industrial centers of the United States, published during the past
decade by the Children's Bureau of the United States Department of
Labor, forces us to a realization of the immediate need of detailed
statistics concerning the practice and results of uncontrolled breeding.
Some such effort as this has been made by the Galton Laboratory of
National Eugenics in Great Britain. The Children's Bureau reports only
incidentally present this impressive evidence. They fail to coordinate
it. While there is always the danger of drawing giant conclusions from
pigmy premises, here is overwhelming evidence concerning irresponsible
parenthood that is ignored by governmental and social agencies.

I have chosen a small number of typical cases from these reports. Though
drawn from widely varying sources, they all emphasize the greatest crime
of modern civilization--that of permitting motherhood to be left to
blind chance, and to be mainly a function of the most abysmally ignorant
and irresponsible classes of the community.

Here is a fairly typical case from Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A woman
of thirty-eight years had undergone thirteen pregnancies in seventeen
years. Of eleven live births and two premature stillbirths, only two
children were alive at the time of the government agent's visit. The
second to eighth, the eleventh and the thirteenth had died of bowel
trouble, at ages ranging from three weeks to four months. The only cause
of these deaths the mother could give was that "food did not agree with
them." She confessed quite frankly that she believed in feeding babies,
and gave them everything anybody told her to give them. She began to
give them at the age of one month, bread, potatoes, egg, crackers, etc.
For the last baby that died, this mother had bought a goat and gave its
milk to the baby; the goat got sick, but the mother continued to give
her baby its milk until the goat went dry. Moreover, she directed the
feeding of her daughter's baby until it died at the age of three months.
"On account of the many children she had had, the neighbors consider her
an au