Sam Levenson Quotes
Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.
Levenson, Sam. In One Era and Out the Other. Simon and Schuster, 1973.
History has shown that as girls and women get educated and learn about family planning, their children are healthier and have better chances of survival and despite the lower death rate the population trend slows as a result of family planning.
The argument she made is that a woman should not be required to risk her life if she does not want to. Other than military conscription, there is no other aspect of American law whereby the society forces a citizen to risk their life.
At the time, condoms and other forms of contraceptives were illegal to buy, sell, possess or own. As late as 1963 a Connecticut druggist was sentenced to jail for filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms and selling them to a married couple even thought the woman might die if she again became pregnant. The Supreme Court (Griswald v. Connecticut) established that a woman had a right to control her own reproductive cycle and the government had no business interfering with a privacy right possessed by a couple. Roe v. Wade established the right to an abortion. The same moral compunctions used with abortion were, and still are used by some to oppose any form of artificial birth control. They argued: preventing a life was as serious a moral failure as taking one. Many Catholics, many evangelical and fundamentalist protestants, and some orthodox Muslims are today morally opposed to birth control and believe that the government should ban birth control as it once was in the United States.
Samuel Levenson was an American humorist, writer, teacher, television host, and journalist.
