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The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened. A recent article in Poverty, published by the Child Poverty Action Group, showed that a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and to bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in socio-economic classes IV and V.
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"Speech seen as attempt to swing party to right", The Times, 21 October 1974, p. 1
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Speech at Birmingham, 19 October 1974. The speech called for a "remoralization" of Britain but ended Joseph's chance of winning the Conservative leadership owing to criticism of Joseph's link between births to working-class mothers and promoting birth control.

 

Keith Joseph

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Cut is the Sure Start maternity allowance. Has [the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith] no idea at all that supporting a family and getting the children out of poverty when the babies are born can save money from the public purse for years to come? Instead, he wants to cut support from the babes in their mothers' arms. At least Margaret Thatcher had the grace to wait until the children were weaned before snatching their support.

 

Yvette Cooper

 

How strange! This bed on which I shall lie has been slept on by more than one dying man, but today it does not repel me! Who knows what corpses have lain on it and for how long? But is a corpse any worse than I? A corpse too knows nothing of its father, mother or sisters or Titus. Nor has a corpse a sweetheart. A corpse, too, is pale, like me. A corpse is cold, just as I am cold and indifferent to everything. A corpse has ceased to live, and I too have had enough of life.... Why do we live on through this wretched life which only devours us and serves to turn us into corpses? The clocks in the Stuttgart belfries strike the midnight hour. Oh how many people have become corpses at this moment! Mothers have been torn from their children, children from their mothers - how many plans have come to nothing, how much sorrow has sprung from these depths, and how much relief!... Virtue and vice have come in the end to the same thing! It seems that to die is man's finest action - and what might be his worst? To be born, since that is the exact opposite of his best deed. It is therefore right of me to be angry that I was ever born into this world! Why was I not prevented from remaining in a world where I am utterly useless? What good can my existence bring to anyone? ... But wait, wait! What's this? Tears? How long it is since they flowed! How is this, seeing that an arid melancholy has held me for so long in its grip? How good it feels - and sorrowful. Sad but kindly tears! What a strange emotion! Sad but blessed. It is not good for one to be sad, and yet how pleasant it is - a strange state...

 

Frederic Chopin

 

[About his first-born child] My mother looked at it and said, "Oh, how precious!" I don't know why she said it. Well, I didn't know then. I know now, because my mother put a curse on me. A long time ago, I remember when I was a child what she said, and I later found out that mothers, all mothers, put a curse on their children. They say, "I hope, when you get married, you have some children who act exactly the same way that you act." And this curse WORKS! I mean, it started with that child! My wife and I have not been intellectuals since. Oh, my wife was pretty good for a while, but it didn't last that long. It didn't last two years.

 

Bill Cosby

 

[Charity] conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after time to bring children into the world. It merely says 'Increase and multiply: We are prepared to help you do this.' Whereas the great majority of mothers realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid bringing into the world her eighth. ...Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.

 

Margaret Sanger

 

Today is such a joyous day for me because we have children and we are dealing with children, most of them are born-realised, they are of a very special category, I've told you many a times. But we spoil them because we were not born-realised, so we don't know how to handle these special children, we spoil them. Not only we spoil them but we interfere with the school, we interfere with this, as if we are the wisest parents. Because we are SYogis we have to be much more sensible than other parents. How can you interfere with any school anywhere? But in SYoga you will! It is because there is no wisdom and no understanding of what is good and benevolent for your child. If you love your child then you must think of its benevolence. You must learn from the experience what happens to children if they are left like that. You cannot spoil your child, you cannot. Because its a special category of children they are. They are not children who can become vagabonds, they cannot become thieves. So you'll make them something funny they are neither here not there, they are born realised and they have to be channelised properly to achieve their complete manifestation of their spirit. So the possessiveness, and the stupid attachment to children must be given-up. There is no force on you , if you want to destroy your child you can destroy. But in an advice. If you are Ganeshas you would have understood it, I don't have to explain so much. What is good for your child, because we have to have beautiful children. They are born beautiful children, I tell you, if they are spoiled is because of you, you have spoiled them. You have ruined them. You are responsible. I know of many of so many children, they are very very sweet, I have conference with them also, and I find them much more congenial, I have a much better report that I can have with you: They never argue, never, they never say no, and they have very good information about all of you. [Shri Ganesha Puja in Cabella 15.9.91]

 

Mataji Nirmala Srivastava