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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - III. Population and Migration - 7. Population - 6. The Case for Controlling the Negro Birth Rate - 7. Birth Control Facilities for Negroes
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178 An American Dilemma
all reported births among nonwhites in 1936, and 2.0 per cent among
whites. The illegitimate child is under many handicaps and seldom has the
opportunity to develop into a desirable citizen. Even if he has a good
mother, she cannot give him the proper care since she must usually earn
her own living and cannot afford to place him under proper supervision.
The absence of a father is detrimental to the development of a child’s
personality, as is the mockery from the outside world which the illegiti-
mate child is sometimes forced to experience.*’ Too, the unwed mother tends
—^although there are many exceptions—^to have looser morals and lower
standards, and in this respect does not provide the proper milieu for her
child. It would be better both for society in general and for the mother if
she had no child.
In all these respects the extra strength of the reasons for birth control
among Negroes is due only to the fact that, as a group, they arc more
touched by poverty, disease, and family disorganization than is common
among the whites in America. If caste with all its consequences were to
disappear, there would, from these viewpoints, be no more need for birth
control among Negroes than among whites. But the general reasons for
family limitation would remain, and they would have a strength depending
upon the extent to which society was reformed to become a more favor-
able environment for families with children.®® Until these reforms are
carried out, and as long as the burden of caste is laid upon American
Negroes, even an extreme birth control program is warranted by reasons
of individual and social welfare.
7. Birth Control Facilities for Negroes
The birth control movement in America was one which had the support
of liberals but met the fiercest opposition of the Catholic Church and other
organized groups with conservative leanings. It also had to deal with the
inertia and puritanical morality of the masses.®® Only in the last fifteen
years has it become possible to discuss the subject publicly without being
criticized or condemned as immoral. Only in the last five years has the
legal prohibition against dissemination of information about birth control
let up significantly, and there are still all sorts of legal obstacles to the
movement.®’
In the last decade some significant changes have occurred. Public opinion,
as measured by polls, is increasingly in favor of birth control. National
magazines have had frank articles on it. The number of contraceptive clinics
rose from 34 in 1930 to 803 in 1942.®^ In three states—North Carolina,
South Carolina, and Alabama—’public health authorities have taken the
lead in bringing birth control clinics to rural areas, where they are most
* There is much less social derogation of the illegitimate child among Negroes than among
whites. See Chapter 43, Section a.
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