Turning to the specific problem of Birth Control, Lord Dawson declared, “that Birth Control is here to stay.  It is an established fact, and for good or evil has to be accepted.  Although the extent of its application can be and is being modified, no denunciations will abolish it.  Despite the influence and condemnations of the Church, it has been practised in France for well over half a century, and in Belgium and other Roman Catholic countries is extending.  And if the Roman Catholic Church, with its compact organization, its power of authority, and its disciplines, cannot check this procedure, it is not likely that Protestant Churches will be able to do so, for Protestant religions depend for their strength on the conviction and esteem they establish in the heads and hearts of their people.  The reasons which lead parents to limit their offspring are sometimes selfish, but more often honorable and cogent.”

A report of the Fabian Society (5) on the morality of Birth Control, based upon a census conducted under the chairmanship of Sidney Webb, concludes:  “These facts—­which we are bound to face whether we like them or not—­will appear in different lights to different people.  In some quarters it seems to be sufficient to dismiss them with moral indignation, real or simulated.  Such a judgment appears both irrelevant and futile....  If a course of conduct is habitually and deliberately pursued by vast multitudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming probably a majority of the whole educated class of the nation, we must assume that it does not conflict with their actual code of morality.  They may be intellectually mistaken, but they are not doing what they feel to be wrong.”

The moral justification and ethical necessity of Birth Control need not be empirically based upon the mere approval of experience and custom.  Its morality is more profound.  Birth Control is an ethical necessity for humanity to-day because it places in our hands a new instrument of self-expression and self-realization.  It gives us control over one of the primordial forces of nature, to which in the past the majority of mankind have been enslaved, and by which it has been cheapened and debased.  It arouses us to the possibility of newer and greater freedom.  It develops the power, the responsibility and intelligence to use this freedom in living a liberated and abundant life.  It permits us to enjoy this liberty without danger of infringing upon the similar liberty of our fellow men, or of injuring and curtailing the freedom of the next generation.  It shows us that we need not seek in the amassing of worldly wealth, not in the illusion of some extra-terrestrial Heaven or earthly Utopia of a remote future the road to human development.  The Kingdom of Heaven is in a very definite sense within us.  Not by leaving our body and our fundamental humanity behind us, not by aiming to be anything but what we are, shall we become ennobled or immortal.  By knowing ourselves, by expressing ourselves, by realizing ourselves more completely than has ever before been possible, not only shall we attain the kingdom ourselves but we shall hand on the torch of life undimmed to our children and the children of our children.