Assassins of the Family - Birth Contol

Chesterton wrote an essay of Social Reform versus Birth Control which in light of news that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, (who some try to pass as "pro-life" because he is a Mormon) filed a bill on the opening day of the new Congress that will provide more government money for birth control seems truly prescient. Ironically we were constantly told all last election cycle that we needed to vote for the Democrats because they were the politicians concerned about welfare, job creation and the other socio-economic issues. But when new jobless figures are released, with the highest levels in years, and many cities and states facing economic deficits placing more jobs at risk, Sen. Reid has as a priority increased spending for birth control. Perhaps we can understand this better after reading the following excerpt from Chesterton.

If anybody doubts that this is the very simple motive, let him test it by the very simple statements made by the various Birth-Controllers like the Dean of St. Paul's. They never do say that we suffer from a too bountiful supply of bankers or that cosmopolitan financiers must not have such large families. They do not say that the fashionable throng at Ascot wants thinning, or that it is desirable to decimate the people dining at the Ritz or the Savoy. Though, Lord knows, if ever a thing human could look like a sub-human jungle, with tropical flowers and very poisonous weeds, it is the rich crowd that assembles in a modern Americanized hotel.

But the Birth-Controllers have not the smallest desire to control that jungle. It is much too dangerous a jungle to touch. It contains tigers. They never do talk about a danger from the comfortable classes, even from a more respectable section of the comfortable classes. The Gloomy Dean is not gloomy about there being too many Dukes; and naturally not about there being too many Deans. He is not primarily annoyed with a politician for having a whole population of poor relations, though places and public salaries have to be found for all the relations. Political Economy means that everybody except politicians must be economical.

The Birth-Controller does not bother about all these things, for the perfectly simple reason that it is not such people that he wants to control. What he wants to control is the populace, and he practically says so. He aways insists that a workman has no right to have so many children, or that a slum is perilous because it is producing so many children. The question he dreads is "Why has not the workman a better wage? Why has not the slum family a better house?" His way of escaping from it is to suggest, not a larger house but a smaller family. The landlord or the employer says in his hearty and handsome fashion: "You really cannot expect me to deprive myself of my money. But I will make a sacrifice, I will deprive myself of your children."