Reading analysis

Family Planning (1926)

Margaret Sanger was a controversial figure in her day. She introduced the term birth

control to American couples, she encouraged people to explore the pleasures of passionate and

sexual love, and she wrote frankly about the topic. She advocated the use of contraceptives for

working class people, to control family growth at an economically manageable level, and also to

the middle class, to postpone the arrival of children so the couple could build their relationship

on the pleasure of intimate knowledge of each other. Source: Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriage

(1926) pp. 191-203.

PREMATURE PARENTHOOD AND WHY TO AVOID IT

Coming together with widely differing likes and dislikes, varying inheritances and often

with widely divergent training and ideals, the two young people who many will not be long in

discovering mat they may have much less in common man they had ever dreamed possible.

When Society has tossed them a marriage certificate and the Church has concluded the

ceremony which has legally united them, they are then forced back upon their own resources.

Society, so to speak, has washed its hands of the young couple, or cast this man and this woman

into the deep waters of matrimony, where they are left to sink or swim as best they may.

The certificate of marriage solves nothing. Rather it accentuates the greater and more

complex problems of life. To find a solution to this great problem of living together and growing

together requires all me combined intelligence and the foresight both man and woman can

command. Drifting into this relation will offer no solution, for very often those who drift into

marriage, drift out of it in the same aimless fashion.

Others, who have not realized that the marriage of a man and woman is not merely a legal

sanction for parenthood, but that it is an important relation in itself—the most important one in

human life—often find themselves defeated and forced into an accidental and premature

parenthood for which they are not financially or spiritually prepared.

Two years at least are necessary to cement the bonds of love and to establish the marriage

relation. Parenthood should therefore be postponed by every young married couple until at least

the third year of marriage.

Why is this advisable?

When the young wife is forced into maternity too soon, both are cheated out of marital

adjustment and harmony that require time to mature and develop. The plunge into parenthood

prematurely with all its problems and disturbances, is like the blighting of a bud before it has

been given time to blossom.

Even in the fully matured healthy wife pregnancy has a disturbing physiological and

nervous reaction. Temporarily the whole character and temperament of the woman undergoes

profound changes. Usually nausea, headaches, irritability, loss of appetite, ensue. At the

beginning of this period there develop temporary eccentricities that do not belong to the woman

in her normal condition.

If the bride is enforced into an unwilling or accidental pregnancy during the honeymoon

or the early stages of their marital love, the young husband is deprived of the possible

opportunity of knowing his wife during one of the most interesting stages of her development He

has known her in the exciting days of courtship and during the heightened though brief period of

the honeymoon, and now, alas, she enters all too soon the ominous days of early pregnancy.

Never under such conditions can he know her in the growing beauty and ripening of mature

womanhood. He has known her as a romantic girl before marriage—and now as a mother-to-be,

frightened, timorous, and physically and nervously upset by the great ordeal she must go

through.

Here often begins a spiritual separation between husband and wife. Conscious of his own

helplessness, likewise of his own responsibility, the young husband feels it his duty to leave her

alone. This enforced separation is spiritual rather man physical. Outwardly the relation may seem

the same. It may be a separation only in die sense that no real unity or welding has been attained.

Engrossed by this new problem, the young wife may resign herself to the inevitable and enters a

state of passive resignation that is deadening to her love-life. She is in no condition to enjoy

companion ship. Beneath the superficial and conventional expression of happiness at the

approaching parenthood, there may rankle a suppressed resentment at the young husband's

careless pride in becoming an Esther. The young bride knows that she is paying too great a price

for the brief and happy days of her honeymoon. She has been swept too rapidly from girlhood to

motherhood. Love and romance, as many young wives have confessed to me, were but traps

leading her to endless travail and enslavement. And this hidden rankling is often directed toward

the husband, whom the wife holds responsible for her accidental pregnancy.

This unhappy condition would not have occurred if they had time to become one^ if there

were a period of two years during which the bonds of love might be firmly cemented, for time

alone can produce this unity. It is a process of growth. Married love does not spring full grown

into life. It is a delicate plant and it grows from the seed. It must be deeply and firmly rooted,

nourished by the sunlight of tenderness, courtship and mutual consideration, before it can

produce fine flowers and fruits. This period is as essential for human development as die period

of body-building and adolescence.

It is a period of mutual adjustment, it is a period of spiritual discovery and exploration, of

finding one's self and one's beloved. It is a period for the full and untroubled expression of

passionate love. It is a period for cultural development. It thrusts forward its own complex

problems-problems, let it be understood, intricately complex in themselves. Husband and wife

must solve many problems only by living through them, not by any cut and dried rules and

regulations. For marriage brings with it problems mat are individual and unique for each couple.

If instead of solving these problems of early parenthood, in which the life of a third

person is immediately involved, a child thrusts itself into the lives of young husband and wife,

these fundamental problems of marriage are never given the attention they deserve. A new

situation arises, and in innumerable cases, love, as the old adage has it, flies out of the window.

We must recognize that the whole position of womanhood has changed today. Not so

many years ago it was assumed to be a just and natural state of affairs that marriage was

considered as nothing but a preliminary to motherhood. A girl passed from the guardianship of

her father or nearest male relative to that of her husband. She had no will, no wishes of her own.

Hers not to question why, but merely to fulfill duties imposed upon her by the man into whose

care she was given.

Today women are on the whole much more individual. They possess as strong likes and

dislikes as men. They live more and more on the plane of social equality with men. They are

better companions. We should be glad that there is more enjoyable companionship and real

friendship between men and women.

This very fact, it is true, complicates the marriage relation, and at the same time enables it

Marriage no longer means the slavish subservience of the woman to the will of the man. It

means, instead, the union of two strong and highly individualized natures. Their first problem is

to find out just what the terms of this partnership are to be. Understanding full and complete

cannot come all at once, in one revealing flash. It takes time to arrive at a full and sympathetic

understanding of each other, and mutually to arrange lives to increase this understanding. Out of

the mutual adjustments, harmony must grow and discords gradually disappear.

These results cannot be obtained if the problem of parenthood is thrust upon the young

husband and wife before they are spiritually and economically prepared to meet it. For naturally

the coming of the first baby means that all other problems must be thrust aside. That baby is a

great fact, a reality that must be met Preparations must be made for its coming. The layette must

be prepared. The doctor must be consulted. The health of the wife may need consideration. The

young mother will probably prefer to go to the hospital. AH of these preparations are small

compared to the regime after the coming of the infant.

In the wife who has lived through a happy marriage, for whom the bonds of passionate

love have been fully cemented, maternal desire is intensified and matured. Motherhood becomes

for such a woman not a penalty or a punishment, but the road by which she travels onward

toward completely rounded self-development Motherhood thus helps her toward the unfolding

and realization of her higher nature.

Her children are not mere accidents, the outcome of chance. When motherhood is a mere

accident, as so often it is in the early years of careless or reckless marriages, a constant fear of

pregnancy may poison the days and nights of the young mother. Her marriage is thus converted

into a tragedy. Motherhood becomes for her a horror instead of a joyfully fulfilled function.

Millions of marriages have been blighted, not because of any lack of love between the

young husband and wife, but because children have come too soon. Often these brides become

mothers before they have reached even physical maturity, before they have completed the period

of adolescence. This period in our race is as a rule complete around the age of twenty-three.

Motherhood is possible after the first menstruation. But what is physically possible is very often

from every other point of view inadvisable. A young woman should be fully matured from every

point of view—physically, mentally and psychically before maternity is thrust upon her.

Those who advise early maternity neglect the spiritual foundation upon which marriage

must inevitably be built and this takes time. They also ignore the financial responsibility a family

brings.

The young couple begin to build a home. They may have just enough to get along

together. The young wife, as in so many cases of early marriage these days, decides to continue

her work. They are partners in every way—a commendable thing. The young man is just

beginning his career—his salary is probably small. Nevertheless, they manage to get along, their

hardships are amusing, and are looked upon as fun. Then suddenly one day, the young wife

announces her pregnancy. The situation changes immediately. There are added expenses. The

wife must give up her work. The husband must go into debt to pay the expenses of the new and

joyfully received arrival. The novelty lasts for some time. The young wife assumes the

household duties and the ever growing care of the infant. For a time the child seems to bring the

couple closer together. But more often there ensues a concealed resentment on the part of the

immature mother at the constant drudgery and slavery to the unfortunate child who has arrived

too early upon the scene, which has interfered with her love life.

For the unthinking husband, the "proud papa," the blushing bride is converted at once

into the "mother of my children." It is not an unusual occurrence to find that three months after

die birth of the baby, the parents are thinking and speaking to each other as "mumsy" and

"daddy." The lover and sweetheart relation has disappeared forever and the "mamma-papa"

relation has taken its place.

Instead of being a self-determined and self-directing love, everything is henceforward

determined by the sweet tyranny of the child. I know of several young mothers, despite a great

love for the child, to rebel against this intolerable situation. Vaguely feeling that this new

maternity has rendered them unattractive to their husbands, slaves to deadly routine of bottles,

baths and washing, they have revolted. I know of innumerable marriages which have been

wrecked by premature parenthood.

Love has ever been blighted by the coming of children before the real foundations of

marriage have been established. Quite aside from the injustice done to the child who has been

brought accidentally into the world, this lamentable fact sinks into insignificance when compared

to the injustice inflicted by chance upon the young couple, and the irreparable blow to their love

occasioned by premature or involuntary parenthood. For these reasons, in order that harmonious

and happy marriage may be established as the foundation for happy homes and the advent of

healthy and desired children, premature parenthood must be avoided. Birth Control is the

instrument by which this universal problem may be solved.