An Interesting Article From 1907 About Abortion, Contraception, and "Race Suicide"

An Interesting Article From 1907 About Abortion, Contraception, and "Race Suicide"

It is a common assumption that laws prohibiting contraception, such as were struck down in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), and abortion prohibitions, were the consequences of religious objections to both practices. But I found a quite interesting article that makes me wonder how many of these laws may have origins in Social Darwinist concerns about the "inferior races" outbreeding the WASPs. Charles H. Low, M.D., "Race Suicide," New York State Journal of Medicine 7:12 [December, 1907] 491-3, discusses his concerns about the reluctance of "typically American" sorts to have children, and their methods of preventing them:

THERE is no class of people so abundantly able to appreciate the blessing of a family of children as that great class who already have them; and yet all these may not readily agree with our strenuous Mr. Roosevelt concerning the danger of race suicide in its effect on the ultimate condition of our body politic.

It is no doubt true that a large percentage of our parentage is more and more made up of a class of people who are the least assimilable in our form of free government, and that their children will, as a result of such parentage, be less likely to appreciate the spirit of our institutions. This is particularly so as the influence of our native stock becomes less and less felt, on account of the decreasing number of children in our typically American families. Nevertheless, these factors may be compensated for by making the quality of our small truly American families make up for the quantity of the larger ones, thus affording leaders of thought and .action to maintain our ideals.

The whole tone of the article is quite interesting--and it is hard to see the author's primary concern as being a traditional religious morality.