Back to the document presented, there’s a loose thread bothering me. So, some people kill their children, abandon, them, or sell them into slavery. This is bad. I agree. But people should not practice birth control, because it’s all about their selfish desires for material gain. Okay. People in the LDS circles I’ve traveled in always talk about folks curtailing or postponing childbirth to buy Lamborghinis and bigger boats for Lake Powell. But I have a tough time believing those parents in the essay sold their children into textile slavery to buy fancy carriages or what have you. I imagine most of them really couldn’t feed/clothe/house their offspring, and acted in desperation. So Sanger said poor people should practice birth control so there weren’t so many poor people. But I thought the author was against Sanger. So, if the poor can’t curtail having children, can’t care for their children, and can’t give them away, are they supposed to let them die of disease and starvation as nature intended?

1. Though not mentioned explicitly in the lesson (all sorts of pleasures?), the vice that most commonly causes sterility is multi-partner sexual license with its incidental, and in 1917 incurable, diseases. Drink, and drug use in general, can interfere at least temporarily with sexual function, though that is compensated for by a lessening of inhibition. Tobacco, and to a lesser extent, marijuana use can lead to cancer and increases in miscarriage and low birth weight (a risk factor for early childhood survival). The long term use of such substances leads to systemic breakdown of all organs and neglect of children. Overindulgence in food also interferes with the libido and can lead to degenerative disease like diabetes which can also impair sexual function and lead to sterility. The vice of fashion is a stretch in our eyes, but even aside from those styles which express sexual freedom (leading in a sense to “all sorts of pleasures”), I can envision some dress fashions causing problems–body binding corsets restricting blood flow and normal growth or excessively large bustles leading to back problems. In the twenties the ideal figure was similar to the recently-in-favor waif look, leading fashionable women to starve themselves to seek social ascendency. Even the toxic shock syndrome and leaking silicone implant episodes of the eighties could be looked at as a fashion related cause of sterility. Looking backwards at a time of less adequate nutrition and pre-natal care, anything that interfered with natural functions could easily be seen as leading to fertility problems.
2. The general solution of the issue of unwed mothers is to minimize their numbers through teaching children the law of chastity and the importance of establishing a stable and lasting (temple) marriage as the basis of family life. “Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.” In specific cases where the unwed conceive children, I see nothing in the lesson suggesting that adoptions should not be allowed, in fact I can’t even find the word. Hasty marriages of unwed parents, even of unready teenagers, used to be strongly encouraged. I see less of that now. I think that is more due to the economics of today than a lessening of the sense of responsibility that leaders were trying to inculcate.

Eugenics was at the core of many progressive era ideas. You see it in this lesson, and in the diametrically opposed concepts of Sanger. The central idea of artificial selection in breeding works great for domesticated animals, why not for humans? The answer is that it takes too many generations to manage. There is no guarantee that the breeding program will be managed to a single end from its inception even for the first generation to reach maturity. Families do it with some success in arranged marriages and establishing expectations leading to wider social norms. One can look at the Ivy League as a breeding ground for Ivy Leaguers, and BYU as a breeding ground for Mormons. But the end result is a caste system of some sort and a new set of problems—in-bred royalty, slave uprisings, etc. And then what do you do with the culls? Put them to work as Dalits? Sanger’s answer was birth control, abortion and sterilization. Hitler’s was the ovens. Breeding people is just not something we should take on. Let’s stay wild and free!

This lesson was not what I thought it would be about. The concept of the “better class” of people producing fewer children while the poor and immigrant families producing more certainly is being played out, in my opinion, in some of the anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe, and I think in the legal/illegal immigration debate here in our country. However, even with all the concerns and wars and bad economies, there are still more of us now than there were 92 years ago.

I guess it’s easy to stick it to the Germans while they’re off being the enemy in the Great War!

Very strange topic for a church lesson. What’s the point? To encourage the men to have lots of children? If so, the point could be made without a tour of history’s infantcidal societies.

Mr. Taylor’s thoughts clash with my thinking on several points:
1) That one race is superior to another
2) That “the best bloodlines” be carefully bred and perpetuate themselves like rabbits.
3) That birth control is as abhorrent as infanticide, child slavery or losing nearly-grown children to famine or war.
4) Reliance on historians and contemporary thought should trump scripture in church lessons.

Then there are these whoppers:
1) Vice (overeating? fashions?!) causes sterility.
2) If birth control is of the devil, giving away your children (adoption) is untenable, and raising them without adequate means is also off the table, what’s his solution to unwed mothers?

I wish I could say that this is just a neat artifact of showing how far society has come; Unfortunately, this line of thought is far from dying out. Check out Pat Buchanan and/or “The Browning of America.”

ANA. At all events, let me take an old woman’s privilege again, and tell you flatly that marriage peoples the world and debauchery does not.

DON JUAN. How if a time comes when this shall cease to be true? Do you not know that where there is a will there is a way—that whatever Man really wishes to do he will finally discover a means of doing? Well, you have done your best, you virtuous ladies, and others of your way of thinking, to bend Man’s mind wholly towards honorable love as the highest good, and to understand by honorable love romance and beauty and happiness in the possession of beautiful, refined, delicate, affectionate women. You have taught women to value their own youth, health, shapeliness, and refinement above all things. Well, what place have squalling babies and household cares in this exquisite paradise of the senses and emotions? Is it not the inevitable end of it all that the human will shall say to the human brain: Invent me a means by which I can have love, beauty, romance, emotion, passion without their wretched penalties, their expenses, their worries, their trials, their illnesses and agonies and risks of death, their retinue of servants and nurses and doctors and schoolmasters.

THE DEVIL. All this, Senor Don Juan, is realized here in my realm.

DON JUAN. Yes, at the cost of death. Man will not take it at that price: he demands the romantic delights of your hell whilst he is still on earth. Well, the means will be found: the brain will not fail when the will is in earnest. The day is coming when great nations will find their numbers dwindling from census to census; when the six roomed villa will rise in price above the family mansion; when the viciously reckless poor and the stupidly pious rich will delay the extinction of the race only by degrading it; whilst the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility.

As a son of “John Bull’s Other Island,” George Bernard Shaw was keen to the role of ethnicity in society, and it has its place in other of his plays, but that doesn’t seem to be what he was writing about here regarding the “extinction of the race.”

I do find it amazing that people were so concerned about the nefarious effects of birth control and the philosophy of “fewer but better” children clear back then — their fears must be realized, because our society embraces both, and the church certainly doesn’t seem to resist them like it used to.

I work for a Chinese company, and it’s been eye-opening with respect to “race suicide”, because the Chinese I’ve spoken with all seem to agree that China had to adopt its one-child policy or the country would have been overrun. They’re grateful to be able to have two in the US, but more than two seems overwhelmingly extravagant They’re so used to pouring resources into a single child to make him/her competitive, they can’t imagine having enough resources to do this with more than two. When they see the picture on my desk of my wife and six children, they’re simply astonished. In their minds, it’s demonstrative of both the wealth and freedom one can acquire in America, and the brazen way Americans consume more than their fair share — and they’re covetous. They wonder if I can really do right by so many children, and yet are amazed that I’d even try. A couple times I’ve been asked which child was my favorite. It’s really interesting to see them react.