The Children's Era: The Unborn Child

    The Children's Era: The Unborn Child

      Sanger asks her audience to imagine for a moment that an unborn child has the power to choose its fate and interview its parents. Yeah: it's an eerie sci-fi moment thrown into what is pretty much a straightforward speech about women's rights.

      If there is going to be any Civil Service examination [for parenthood], let it be conducted by the Unborn Child, the Child-to-be. (64)

      She lets her imagination run wild and dreams up an interview in which the Unborn Child and its father discuss the conditions in which the child will be born, and the Unborn Child concludes:

      No, thank you! I don't care to be born at all if I cannot be well-born. Good-bye! (89)

      Whoa. That is one well-spoken (and polite!) little tyke.

      Sanger's depiction of the Unborn Child attempts to prove to her audience that birth control is good for children as well as parents…as well as providing the outline for a really great speculative fiction book about weirdly mature-sounding kids that talk to their parents even before they've grown opposable thumbs. (Somebody please write this book?)