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Goldstein Plea for Birth Law Stirs Dispute

March 13, 1934
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Rabbi Sidney Goldstein, of the Free Synagogue in New York City, is the central figure of a heated discussion here which is concerned with the question of incorporating a birth control program in the N.R.A.

Recently a sub-committee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary listened to advocates of a legalized birth control program. The speakers, including Mrs. Margaret Sanger, chairman of the National Committee on Federal Legislation for Birth Control, asked the enactment of a law which would do away with restrictions now levied against the dissemination of information dealing with contraception.

Rabbi Goldstein’s words in substance said that the instruction of codes in industrial life is valueless if families are “unlimited in size.”

“If the United States,” he said, “does agree to a minimum wage that is based upon a family of a mother and father and three children, which I think is the official family recognized by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, then the Federal government must also recognize the fact that a minimum wage cannot carry more than a limited family. It does seem to us as if the Federal government is at the same time under the obligation to instruct families how to live within the limits of the minimum wage itself. The only way to do it is to reduce the family to the size which the minimum wage can carry.”

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