"She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it"
About this Quote
Sanger frames childbirth less as a sentimental milestone than as a recurring brush with catastrophe. The phrase "vale of death" raids the vocabulary of scripture and war to reclassify pregnancy as perilous labor, not domestic destiny. In the early 20th century, that was a deliberate act of reframing: maternal mortality was high, reliable contraception was criminalized under Comstock laws, and "motherhood" was routinely invoked as a moral obligation rather than a medical risk borne by one person.
Her key move is linguistic isolation. "Alone" does double duty: it describes the bodily reality of labor while indicting everyone who claims authority over it. Men may father, legislators may moralize, churches may preach, but none of them enter the ordeal. That gap becomes her argument. She isn’t offering a dreamy theory of freedom; she’s building a prosecution case for consent.
The second sentence turns from imagery to jurisprudence, and the pivot is tactical. By pairing "man" with "the state", Sanger collapses private patriarchy and public policy into the same coercive force. The subtext is a warning: when law or custom compels pregnancy, it drafts women into life-threatening service without representation or recourse. "Right" repeats like a drumbeat, insisting that bodily risk is the foundation of bodily authority.
Read in context, the line is also propaganda in the best sense: designed to cut through euphemism, to make contraception and abortion not scandal but self-defense. It works because it refuses to let spectators write the terms of someone else’s danger.
Her key move is linguistic isolation. "Alone" does double duty: it describes the bodily reality of labor while indicting everyone who claims authority over it. Men may father, legislators may moralize, churches may preach, but none of them enter the ordeal. That gap becomes her argument. She isn’t offering a dreamy theory of freedom; she’s building a prosecution case for consent.
The second sentence turns from imagery to jurisprudence, and the pivot is tactical. By pairing "man" with "the state", Sanger collapses private patriarchy and public policy into the same coercive force. The subtext is a warning: when law or custom compels pregnancy, it drafts women into life-threatening service without representation or recourse. "Right" repeats like a drumbeat, insisting that bodily risk is the foundation of bodily authority.
Read in context, the line is also propaganda in the best sense: designed to cut through euphemism, to make contraception and abortion not scandal but self-defense. It works because it refuses to let spectators write the terms of someone else’s danger.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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