Birth control has liberated many women—and men—from
the burdens of unplanned parenthood. In that sense it can
be called a liberal reform. But in many significant ways
birth control has served conservative ends. Nothing more
pointedly illustrated the potentially conservative impli-
cations of her cause than the enthusiastic reception that
those eugenicists interested in biological control of allegedly
inferior immigrants first gave to Margaret Sanger. The
Protestant churches also found conservative utility in birth
control when they endorsed it as an instrumentality to aid
in the preservation of the family. And the federal govern-
ment finally gave its quiet support to birth control in the
interests of social control in the depression and conser-
vation of human resources in wartime. ^1.

Mrs. Sanger herself, after her early immersion in radical-
ism, spent the rest of her life preaching not to the poor
but to the middle class. Though after World War I birth
control reformers continued to be concerned with the plight
of the prolific poor, in time that concern proceeded less
from sympathy with the lower class than from anxiety in
the middle class. The poor—especially the Negro and alien
poor—became primarily a problem. Birth control, as the
means to implement eugenic ideas, seemed the proper so-
lution. But that hope, ultimately, proved chimerical. The
Americans who came increasingly to practice birth control