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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.
– Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood[/quote]

Read it in context. Remember that this was written in 1920, eight years before we had penicillin G. Strep throat, pneumonia, even ear infections often proved fatal in the first year of life.

She wrote about a study that showed the 11th and 12th child in a family were more likely to die in the first year than survive. And that's just the ones who died -- life was suffering for those that survived with morbidity of various causes, even if not mortality. She cited the likelihood of children born in very large families spending much of their lives in debtors' prison or almshouses -- and recall these prisons were closer to Dickens' setup than our own.

This was also written almost two decades before the first US child labor laws. Child labor was horrific at that time.

You can disagree with her, but she was not arguing from a place of triviality. It was very much a text of the times, when life was nasty and brutish, as well as being short.

https://www.bartleby.com/1013/5.html

[quote]Margaret Sanger (1879–1966).  Woman and the New Race.  1920.

V. The Wickedness of Creating Large Families

THE MOST serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children. These statements may startle those who have never made a thorough investigation of the problem. They are, nevertheless, well considered, and the truth of them is abundantly borne out by an examination of facts and conditions which are part of everyday experience or observation.    1 
...
Yet the poverty and neglect which drives a girl into prostitution usually has its source in a family too large to be properly cared for by the mother, if the girl is not actually subnormal because her mother bore too many children, and, therefore, the more likely to become a prostitute.
...
Excessive childbearing is now recognized by the medical profession as one of the most prolific causes of ill health in women. There are in America hundreds of thousands of women, in good health when they married, who have within a few years become physical wrecks, incapable of mothering their children, incapable of enjoying life.    4 
...
In the United States, some 300,000 children under one year of age die each twelve months. Approximately ninety per cent of these deaths are directly or indirectly due to malnutrition, to other diseased conditions resulting from poverty, or to excessive childbearing by the mother.    7

The direct relationship between the size of the wage-earner’s family and the death of children less than one year old has been revealed by a number of studies of the infant death rate. One of the clearest of these was that made by Arthur Geissler among miners and cited by Dr. Alfred Ploetz before the First International Eugenic Congress. 1  Taking 26,000 births from unselected marriages, and omitting families having one and two children, Geissler got this result:

Deaths During First Year

1st born children     23% 
...
10th    "    "            41% 
11th    "    "            51% 
12th    "    "            60%

Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live twelve months.    8 
  This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a year die before they reach the age of five.    9 
...  
The probability of a child handicapped by a weak constitution, an overcrowded home, inadequate food and care, and possibly a deficient mental equipment, winding up in prison or an almshouse, is too evident for comment. Every jail, hospital for the insane, reformatory and institution for the feebleminded cries out against the evils of too prolific breeding among wage-workers.   11 
...
The immorality of bringing large families into the world is recognized by those who are combatting the child-labor evil. 
...  
"How many are too many?… Any more than the mother can look after and the father make a living for … Under present conditions as soon as there are too many children for the father to feed, some of them go to work in the mine or factory or store or mill near by.[/quote] 
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