David Goldstein, Secretary of the Catholic Truth Guild of Boston, took to task the whole birth control movement as being a detriment to personal morality, domestic felicity, and civil integrity in an address before the Liberal Club at its luncheon yesterday. He held that "birth prevention rather than birth control were a more fitting term by which to designate those artificial processes advocated by the proponents of this reprehensible doctrine." He termed as sophistical the arguments made by Mrs. Sanger before the Club two weeks ago in favor of neo-Malthusianism.
Mr. Goldstein defended the Catholic Church, the institution against which, he held, the "venom of the birth preventers largely centers, because she condemns the practice and bars from the sacraments those, who deign to frustrate the natural law of procreation by artificial means." Mr. Goldstein repudiated the notion that the Catholic Church advocates "an avalanche of babies under any circumstances." When the mother's health, the danger of the loss of life, extreme poverty, or any other legitimate reason exists for limiting the birth rate, it is held to be moral for husband and wife by mutual consent to practice continence, but never is it held to be morally proper to regulate the birth rate by unnatural practices.
Would Increase Vice
It is not overpopulation but depopulation that threatens our country today, asserted Mr. Goldstein. "With birth prevention, and its corrolary, divorce, unfortunately on the increase, the trend of events point the other way. The figures presented recently by Mr. Louis I. Dublin, the insurance statistician, show that America will have to abolish her restrictive immigration laws to keep up to her numbers if the natural laws of generation are not more fully obeyed by our married native population. If our country should legalize the dissemination of anti-procreation information, advocated at this Harvard Liberal Club a couple of weeks ago, a disregard of the right relationship of men and women in marriage would be furthered, not lessened. Bad husbands and wives are the great moral blight which already afflicts our beloyed country."
Mr. Goldstein condemned the advocates of birth control as "race despoilers who, upon mere assumption, hold that the quality of children may be improved by lessening the number of births by unnatural means. This big talk has nothing but mere assumption to rest upon. And it is upon this strange assumption that neither the facts of history nor moral plausibility sustains, that they expect harlot practices to bring forth children with the strength of a Samson, the judgement of a Daniel, the genius of a Shakespeare, the scientific accomplishments of a Pasteur, and the all around Americanism of a Franklin.
"Some of the greatest men the world delights to honor." Mr. Goldstein brought out, "were born in homes where children were many, not few. "Let me enumerate some," he said: "Washington was one of ten children. Napoleon was one of 13, Shakespeare one of eight. Sir Walter Secit one of 11, Fenimore Cooper one of 12. Tennyson one of 12, Carlyle one of ten, Phillips Brooks one of nine, Cardinal O'Connell one of 11. St. Catherine of Siena, one of the greatest women of her day and generation, was one of 22, and Franklin, whom all Americans rightly honor, was the tenth child of a family of 13.
"But after all," said Mr. Goldstein, "these are but superficials of this issue. The primary objection to neo-Malthusianism is that it is contrary to the natural law of human beings, it is therefore a violation of the law of God. It is the sin for which Almighty God slew Onan."
