On Proper family size.

A portion of this quote has been moving around the web and on Facebook. 

“"The most merciful thing a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." Margaret Singer

It took me less time to find and locate the book this quote came from, thanks to Google, then it took to format, and compose this response.    

My mother faced the same dilemma in creating her own family.  My youngest brother was born impaled by an intrauterine device.  She had seen the effects of having many children on her mother’s family.  It was one of her biggest fears. She knew she was fertile, like her mother, and could have a very large family, with a child born every 14 months.   Her first three babies came between January 1964 and February 1967.  Still, she mourned the loss of Dana Allen Bassett the remainder of her days.

“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 for twelve months.

“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. Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes of large families reared in poverty further contribute to this condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor so that the child who must struggle for health in competition with other members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted for.

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 feeble minded cries out against the evils of too prolific breeding among wage workers. We shall see when we come to consider the relation of voluntary motherhood to the rights of labor and to the prevention of war that the large family of the worker makes possible his oppression, and that it also is the chief cause of such human holocausts as the one just closed after the four and a half bloodiest years in history. No such extended consideration is necessary to indicate from what source the young slaves in the child-labor factories come. They come from large impoverished families—from families in which the older children must put their often feeble strength to the task of supporting the younger. “   

Sanger, M. (2014). Woman and the new race. Middletown, DE: Creatspace Independent Publishing Platform.

Now I am in no way advocating abortion for the regulation of family size.  Every child has the right to be raised in a family that has sufficient resources to care and raise them.

I am an adoptive parent.  I was fortunate to be given two babies by a woman who loved her children.   She still does. She sees them on many occasions and follows them on Facebook.

I am saying let us regulate our families sizes and if necessary make the hard choice to place our children where they have the best opportunity to thrive.