This has been the great defect of sex education as it has been practised in recent years.  Based on a superficial and shameful view of the sexual instinct, it has sought the inculcation of negative virtues by pointing out the sinister penalties of promiscuity, and by advocating strict adherence to virtue and morality, not on the basis of intelligence or the outcome of experience, not even for the attainment of rewards, but merely to avoid punishment in the form of painful and malignant disease.  Education so conceived carries with it its own refutation.  True education cannot tolerate the inculcation of fear.  Fear is the soil in which are implanted inhibitions and morbid compulsions.  Fear restrains, restricts, hinders human expression.  It strikes at the very roots of joy and happiness.  It should therefore be the aim of sex education to avoid above all the implanting of fear in the mind of the pupil.

Restriction means placing in the hands of external authority the power over behavior.  Birth Control, on the contrary, implies voluntary action, the decision for one’s self how many children one shall or shall not bring into the world.  Birth Control is educational in the real sense of the word, in that it asserts this power of decision, reinstates this power in the people themselves.

We are not seeking to introduce new restrictions but greater freedom.  As far as sex is concerned, the impulse has been more thoroughly subject to restriction than any other human instinct.  “Thou shalt not!” meets us at every turn.  Some of these restrictions are justified; some of them are not.  We may have but one wife or one husband at a time; we must attain a certain age before we may marry.  Children born out of wedlock are deemed “illegitimate”—­even healthy children.  The newspapers every day are filled with the scandals of those who have leaped over the restrictions or limitations society has written in her sexual code.  Yet the voluntary control of the procreative powers, the rational regulation of the number of children we bring into the world—­this is the one type of restriction frowned upon and prohibited by law!

In a more definite, a much more realistic and concrete manner, Birth Control reveals itself as the most effective weapon in the spread of hygienic and prophylactic knowledge among women of the less fortunate classes.  It carries with it a thorough training in bodily cleanliness and physiology, a definite knowledge of the physiology and function of sex.  In refusing to teach both sides of the subject, in failing to respond to the universal demand among women for such instruction and information, maternity centers limit their own efforts and fail to fulfil what should be their true mission.  They are concerned merely with pregnancy, maternity, child-bearing, the problem of keeping the baby alive.  But any effective work in this field must go further back.  We have gradually come to see, as Havelock Ellis has pointed out, that comparatively little can