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WALLACE: Mrs. Sanger, you have helped to spread the Birth Control Movement, not only here in the United States, but in Europe, and the Orient as well. Why? Why is Birth Control of such vital importance internationally? Is it just to save womens' suffering is that the only reason in your mind?
SANGER: Well, not entirely, the population question is a great concern today and the a the rate at which the birth - births come-in to the a we're saving them now - at one time the children died…they didn't have the food. Today our population all over the world is getting certainly better consideration and better conditions than they had at the time when I was there. I went to every country because I was invited and a--I didn't spread--go into the country myself--I was invited to go to Japan and to speak there, have eight lectures on the question of Birth Control and Peace.
WALLACE: Well, do you believe that Birth Control is essential if we want to keep millions of people across the world from starving is that your thesis?
SANGER: Well, I think that Birth Control--if you keep the population more or less static until you pick up your resources, certainly you'll-- keep--prevent their starving.
WALLACE: Well, what's more important -- Birth Control or picking up the resources?
SANGER: Well, picking up the resources there's just a limit to that too. There's just so much -- take Japan -- and she cannot feed they've had the best experts come there when MacArthur was there and the best experts would say that they have twenty million more people than they can feed; she's got to be fed outside in some -- in some way. She's got to have that kind of help if she's going to keep from fighting.
WALLACE: You say that originally the opposition was in all law and you had to fight against that. Today your opposition stems mainly from where, from what source?
SANGER: Well, I think that the opposition is mainly from the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.
WALLACE: Of the hierarchy of the church. You feel that the parishioners themselves, the lay--people of the church are not against it.
SANGER: They come to all of our clinics just the same as the non-Catholics do. Exactly the same.
WALLACE: Well let's look at the official Catholic position...opposition to Birth-Control. I read now from a church publication called "The Question Box" in forbidding Birth Control it says the following: It says the immediate purpose and primary end of marriage is the begetting of children, when the marital relation is so used as to render the fulfillment of its purposes impossible--that is by Birth Control--it is used unethically and unnaturally. Now what's wrong with that position?
SANGER: Well, it's very wrong, it's not normal it's -- it has the wrong attitude towards marriage, toward love, toward the relationships between men and women.
WALLACE: Well the natural law they say is that first of all the primary function of sex in marriage is to beget children. Do you disagree with that?
SANGER: I disagree with that a hundred percent.
WALLACE: Your feeling is what then?
SANGER: My feeling is that love and attraction between men and women, in many cases the very finest relationship has nothing to do with bearing a child. It's secondary. Many, many times and we know that --you see your birth rates and you can talk to people who have very happy marriages and they're not having babies every year. Yes, I think that's a celibate attitude...
WALLACE: Surely, a celibate attitude but you agree that Catholicism according to the tenets of Catholicism they rule that birth control violates not only the church's position --it isn't the church's position but they say it violates a natural law as I have just explained, therefore birth control is a sin no matter who practices it. Now the violation of the natural law--you certainly can take no issue with the natural law as the hierarchy of the Catholic Church regards it...
SANGER: Oh, I certainly do take issue with it and I think it's untrue and I think it's unnatural. It's an unnatural attitude to take --how do they know? I mean, after all, they're celibates.They don't know love, they don't know marriage, they know nothing about bringing up children nor any of the marriage problems of life, and yet they speak to people as if they were God.
WALLACE: Let me let me ask you this question. Suppose a healthy, well-to-do couple decide for some reason never to have children, use birth control all their lives. Would you say that your methods are being misused, Mrs. Sanger?
SANGER: Not if they were intelligent people and they had some reason for thinking of children as a responsibility, or they -- some disease that they might have, that they wouldn't like to pass on to a child and I think it would be a very unselfish attitude for them to take if there is a disease.
WALLACE: No, I say a healthy, well-to-do couple. A couple that just doesn't want children and for that reason they use birth control all the way. Do you think that is a misuse of your methods?
SANGER: I don't think it's a misuse. I think if they're intelligent adults that they must know what they want, they must manage their lives themselves and certainly there's nothing birth control--than there is in other things that you might deny yourself.
WALLACE: I asked you your motives a little while ago, at the beginning of the program--your motives in working for birth control as hard as you have for as many years as you have. You reject the principle Catholic argument against birth control as being totally invalid. Well what do you think is the reason, the motive of the Church in forbidding birth control?
SANGER: You'd have to ask a Catholic that, I couldn't say what their motive is.
WALLACE: Well ah -- you couldn't say officially what their motive is but you certainly must have an opinion about it, Mrs. Sanger.
SANGER: Well, I don't have much to do with the--with the hierarchy and I know that the people that come to our organization and want to have the same methods, or whatever it is that one can have, to prevent a pregnancy that those women say to us--I, we ask their religion very often and they say, "I am a Catholic, I was raised in the Catholic Church, on this my Church is wrong, on this, this is the the one thing, I will never be anything else but my Church is wrong on this one thing" and that is said over and over and over again. So what the motive is...
WALLACE: But you won't hazard a guess.
SANGER; I don't care to, thank you.
WALLACE: May I ask you why? Now I know that in private and...in--actually in public discussions, I think, prior to this time--you have been willing to state your understanding of what the motives of the Church are and now you would you would rather remain silent. May I ask you why?
SANGER: Well, simply because I don't think that a -- that the Church has changed in its attitude, some of the hierarchy have changed their attitude. You can't say the same thing that you might have said a year ago or two years ago as to your belief, as to your opinions. I'm not going to --
WALLACE: Have you heard it said, that the reason that the Church is against birth control is because they want more Catholics?
SANGER: I've read it.
WALLACE: Do you believe it?
SANGER: Well, if you read their papers, where they point out Boston, that that's what had happened in Boston in Massachusetts. They had simply out-bred the Protestants and they're -- they -- in Boston in Massachusetts they have control. I read that in their own papers
WALLACE: I see...of course the Church's answer--the Church's answer, and I read now from a pamphlet published by the Redemptionist Fathers in Missouri, says as follows: It says "that point of view about wanting more Catholics is nonsense. Quote, "The Catholic Church does not command Catholic husbands and wives to have even one child. The Church considers it more than normally meritorious for them to have no children if they mutually and perpetually give up the use of the marriage right for the Love of God."
SANGER: Alright, I have no quote what they do, so they...I think that the question in my mind is that they may do and order their own people to do as they wish but I object to their having the same rules for people who are not of the same religion.
WALLACE: Well, they believe, you see, that it was a natural law, not a Catholic Law, but a "natural law," and therefore a sin not just for Catholics, but a sin for all peoples...and I think that there are other religious groups, the very very Orthodox Jews, feel the same way about birth control.
Let's look at another argument against Birth Control, Mrs. Sanger, published in Red Book Magazine, in March of 1956. It says "Birth Control is a devastating social force, which tends to weaken the moral fibre of the community. Immunity from parenthood encourages promiscuity, particularly when unmarried persons can so easily avail themselves of the devices." Do you doubt that?
SANGER: I doubt it.
WALLACE: You do…
SANGER: Certainly.
WALLACE: Then let me read from a news story in the Philadelphia Daily News on June 10th, 1942.The story quotes you as urging the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps to give its members quote preventive measures against pregnancy end quote and you add,quote abortion and illegitimacy are bound to result if the Government doesn't recognize human nature. End quote.In other words you were not advocating Christian morality, but rather ways for single women to avoid bearing illegitimate children.
SANGER: Where was it taken from.
WALLACE: Philadelphia Daily News -- June 10, 1942 direct quote from Margaret Sanger.
SANGER: I doubt it. I don't believe I ever made such a remark.
WALLACE: Well, in the same vein in your autobiography --which you cannot disavow-- you wrote the following about Sexologist Havelock Ellis. You said "he's been able to clarify the question of sex and free it from the smudginess connected with it from the beginning of Christianity". Now why --what do you mean by the smudginess connected with sex and why do you blame it on Christianity?
SANGER: Well, there's many reasons of course -- if we had more records of it to go on with Christianity and I think I was speaking of Havelock Ellis as having clarified the question of homosexuals...making the thing a --not exactly a perverted thing, but a thing that a person is born with different kinds of eyes, different kinds of structures and so forth...that he didn't make all homosexuals perverts--and I thought he helped clarify that to the medical profession and to the scientists of the world as perhaps one of the first ones to do that. That was one of things that I meant in that.
WALLACE: Mrs. Sanger do you disagree that Catholics or do you feel that Catholics should not have a right to have a say when the city administration contemplates spending their tax dollars on birth control or the dissemination of birth control information? Something that Catholics believe is sinful.
SANGER: That they have a right to say --
WALLACE: Do you feel that they don't have a right to have a say when a city administration contemplates spending their dollars -- tax dollars on birth control? For instance here in New York Catholics comprise about 45% of our population -- they're the largest single group. Well, don't you think that they should have the democratic right to lobby against having their money spent their tax money spent on something that they consider evil?
SANGER: I suppose they have a right. And they certainly do it -- but so have the others and yet they're only 45% of the population -- and that is not the majority.
WALLACE: But they have a right to get up and...
SANGER: Certainly. I'd have no objection to their having a say about it--but I think we should have the same right. I say "we", I mean non-Catholics .
WALLACE: Well, of course this is a little bit of variance of something you have told our reporter earlier this week, you said earlier this week --"it's not only wrong it should be made illegal for any religious group to prohibit dissemination of birth control -- even among its own members". In other words you would like to see the government legislate religious beliefs in a certain sense.
SANGER: Honestly, -- where are these strange things coming from -- that I said them (LAUGHS)..I should like to know when.
WALLACE: Well, now you know that my reporter spent a good deal of time with you. He's a very accurate young man...
SANGER: Yes..
WALLACE: And this is a this is a specific quote.
SANGER: Well, I don't think I put it quite that way.
WALLACE: What are your religious beliefs, Mrs. Sanger? Do you believe in God in the sense of a Divine Being -- who rewards or punishes people after death?
SANGER: Well, I have a different attitude about--the divine--I feel that we have divinity within us, and the more we express the good part of our lives, the more the divine within us expresses itself.I suppose I would call myself an Episcopalian by religion and there's a--many other, if you travel around the world you get quite a bit of the feeling of all--all religions--have so much alike in the divine part of our own being. And I suppose you just couldn't just put that into a book or you couldn't put it to a phrase or a sentence.
WALLACE: Do you believe in sin -- When I say believe I don't mean believe in committing sin do you believe there is such a thing as a sin?
SANGER: I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world--that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin -- that people can -- can commit..
WALLACE: But sin in the ordinary sense that we regard it -- do you believe or do you not believe.
SANGER: What-what would they be?
WALLACE: Do you believe infidelity is a sin?
SANGER: Well, I'm not going to specify what I think is a sin. I stated what I think is the worst sin.
WALLACE: Yes, but then you asked me to say what--and I said what and ah--you refuse to answer me?
SANGER: I don't know about infidelity, that has many personalities to it--and what a person's own belief is--you can't, I couldn't generalize on any of those things as being sins.
WALLACE: Murder is a sin...
SANGER: Well, I naturally think murder, whether it's a sin or not, is a terrible act.
WALLACE: In just a moment Mrs. Sanger I'd like to ask you about another social problem here in the United States -- Divorce. Nearly four hundred thousand couples get divorced in this country each year. And I'd like to get your views on the cause and possible prevention of this problem. We'll get Mrs. Sanger's answer to that question in just sixty seconds.