"The Song of the Unborn"
Amelia Josephine Burr

There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great
problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are
agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to
their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics
from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally
high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are
continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground
for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile. "We protect the
members of a weak strain," says Davenport, "up to the period of
reproduction, and then let them free upon the community, and encourage
them to leave a large progeny of `feeble-minded': which in turn,
protected from mortality and carefully nurtured up to the reproductive
period, are again set free to reproduce, and so the stupid work goes on
of preserving and increasing our socially unfit strains."

The philosophy of Birth Control points out that as long as civilized
communities encourage unrestrained fecundity in the "normal" members
of the population--always of course under the cloak of decency and
morality--and penalize every attempt to introduce the principle of
discrimination and responsibility in parenthood, they will be faced with
the ever-increasing problem of feeble-mindedness, that fertile parent
of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism. Small as the percentage of the
imbecile and half-witted may seem in comparison with the normal members
of the community, it should always be remembered that feeble-mindedness
is not an unrelated expression of modern civilization. Its roots strike
deep into the social fabric. Modern studies indicate that insanity,
epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism, and mental defect, are