Introduction
With Japan thoroughly engaged in internationalism in the immediate postwar period, there was surprisingly little criticism in the press of Sanger's missionary approach to educating the Japanese about population issues and birth control. This editorial is one of the few that expresses resentment toward Sanger for her colonialist and racist assumptions about Asia and imperialism.
[p. 4]
BIRTH CONTROL
Quite recently an American lady has been hailed on our shore. She is not content with the propagation of her petty gospel of "Birth Control" among her own people. She must travel far and wide to the corners of the world, teaching and preaching how to depart from nature's way and step into a very dangerous spot where angels fear to tread.
Her doctrine is explained in a nutshell in the following quotation from a recent number of The American Medicine, which said in part:
"Japan has modernized itself in many respects, but its social organization and its family system are very ancient and primitive, involving an extreme domestication of women and the maximum of babies. The troubles arising from excessive fecundity within a country does not justify aggressive imperialism on the part of that country, but makes a sufficient amount of birth control within its proper boundaries imperative."
Again it says: "The next war will be a war brought about by the problem of population. Japan is teeming and she must expand, and unless modern social and political organization supplies a new and more humane process of adjustment before it is too late, Japan will go to war."
If the white race will only practice what it preaches to others, and if our sons and daughters should enjoy the equal opportunity in other parts of the world as the white race insists upon in China, there is yet sufficient room on the earth to which to go and in which to settle comfortably. Imperialism is to be cursed, but what good argument is there to check illegitimately the peaceful expansion of a race, unless one believes that God made one law to govern the white race and the other the rest? A very humane treatment for the adjustment of the excessive birth rate would be to abandon the dog-in-the-manger attitude and extend the equality of opportunity to all in all lands.
If dissemination of the knowledge of the birth control in relation to the Malthusian doctrine of population is substituted for with a wisdom that will decrease the death rate among children, the world would certainly become a safer and purer place to live in for all mankind.
Other attitude sounds to us as another extravagant example of the anachronism of the age. The ignorant as well as the educated seem similarly laboring under the spell of the infectious illusion of the present day.