One of the chief aims of the present volume is to stimulate American intellectuals to abandon the mental habits which prevent them from seeing human nature as a whole, instead of as something that can be pigeonholed into various compartments or classes.  Birth Control affords an approach to the study of humanity because it cuts through the limitations of current methods.  It is economic, biological, psychological and spiritual in its aspects.  It awakens the vision of mankind moving and changing, of humanity growing and developing, coming to fruition, of a race creative, flowering into beautiful expression through talent and genius.

As a social programme, Birth Control is not merely concerned with population questions.  In this respect, it is a distinct step in advance of earlier Malthusian doctrines, which concerned themselves chiefly with economics and population.  Birth Control concerns itself with the spirit no less than the body.  It looks for the liberation of the spirit of woman and through woman of the child.  To-day motherhood is wasted, penalized, tortured.  Children brought into the world by unwilling mother suffer an initial handicap that cannot be measured by cold statistics.  Their lives are blighted from the start.  To substantiate this fact, I have chosen to present the conclusions of reports on Child Labor and records of defect and delinquency published by organizations with no bias in favour of Birth Control.  The evidence is before us.  It crowds in upon us from all sides.  But prior to this new approach, no attempt had been made to correlate the effects of the blind and irresponsible play of the sexual instinct with its deep-rooted causes.

The duty of the educator and the intellectual creator of public opinion is, in this connection, of the greatest importance.  For centuries official moralists, priests, clergymen and teachers, statesmen and politicians have preached the doctrine of glorious and divine fertility.  To-day, we are confronted with the world-wide spectacle of the realization of this doctrine.  It is not without significance that the moron and the imbecile set the pace in living up to this teaching, and that the intellectuals, the educators, the archbishops, bishops, priests, who are most insistent on it, are the staunchest adherents in their own lives of celibacy and non-fertility.  It is time to point out to the champions of unceasing and indiscriminate fertility the results of their teaching.

One of the greatest difficulties in giving to the public a book of this type is the impossibility of keeping pace with the events and changes of a movement that is now, throughout the world, striking root and growing.  The changed attitude of the American Press indicates that enlightened public opinion no longer tolerates a policy of silence upon a question of the most vital importance.  Almost simultaneously in England and America, two incidents have broken through the prejudice and the guarded silence of centuries.