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Newspaper Page Text
MARGARET SANGER SAYS OFFICIALS MIGHT JUST AS WELL ACCEPT BIRTH CONTROL BY GEORGE MARTIN N New York, Oct 21. "The poor, century-behind the times public of ficials of this country might, just as well forget their moss-grown stat utes and accept birth control as an established fact. My new national plan makes it as inevitable as night and day." Mrs. Margaret Sanger, short and smiling, with a" tinge of red in her hair and more than that in her eye, sat in her little two-by-four hotel bedroom and said that here today. Within the last 48 hours she has es tablished semi-secretly in this city, the first out-and-out birth control clinic inthe United States, the law, a federal indictment and numerous arrests all over the country to the contrary notwithstanding. "The police are hunting my clinic today," she went on. "They can't find it If they should they can't hurt it. It is an oral clinic and the law says nothing about not spreading birth control information orally. If they do try to interfere I am legally prepared to carry a hard and bitter fight to the highest tribunal in the land with the best legal talent there is. "Four more secret climes will be running in New York within a week. In less than a year there will be clin ics in Washington, Cleveland, De troit, St. Paul, MineapoUs, Milwau kee, Denver, St Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, Spokane and Butte. They are every one organized and ready to open the minute I say the wqrd. The Washington clinic will open within a few days. "Do the women like it? Say, you ought to go down in the neighbor hood we have canvassed with secret circulars the last 48 hours. The women have been coming in by the dozens. You can hear them calling from house to house in the congest ed districts: 'Oh, Mrs. Rosenbaum, you ought to see this; this is some thing fine.' "Within two years every man and woman in this country will know how many children they can afford to have. And when they know that, I predict that two generations of birth control will wipe out all the slums, eliminate the birth of mental defectives, minimize the number of humans in our insane asylums and automatically put a stop to child la bor and prostitution. "I say it will wipe out child labor because statistics show that 97 per cent of our child labor is recruited from families that are too large to be cared for by the parents. "I say it will wipe out the worst of prostitution because statistics proye that 95 per cent of the girls taken from lives of prostitution and placed in industrial homes come from poor parents with nine or more children. "IJoyerty doesn't force these girls into prostitution, but the lack of at tention they get, with so many chil dren at home and the general sordid tone of their .lives, naturally leads them to such a life. "My friends and myself are going to bring the people of this country to realize that a man making only $15 a week cannot afford to marry, much less have children. And they'll learn that the average workingman's fam ily should not exceed two children, even under the most favorable phys ical conditions. "This is the work the law and pub lic officials are trying to stop." o o Washington. Admiral Pond is proceeding at full speed aboard the gunboat Prairie to aid steamer Sew ard, aground off Cape Haitien. New York. Macaroni workers on strike. Factories have plenty of holes to wrap macaroni around, but no one to do r " " essaimjammmmmmmmm