We'll admit it: a garden of children isn't really our ideal garden. It honestly sounds a little hectic, a little sticky, and a lot bit full of temper tantrums. Our ideal is more like Busch Gardens—roller coasters, meerkats, and a nacho stand on every corner.

Sanger's description of childhood as a garden, in Sentences 2-19, has its roots in the Victorian and Edwardian idealization of children and childhood (and also a little bit in the Victorian and Edwardian obsession with gardening). Ellen Key, one of many reformers of education around the turn of the century, describes the beautiful garden in her book The Century of the Child, from which Sanger derives the title of her speech, "The Children's Era."

The Victorians and Edwardians had this idea that children were at once perfect little cherubs and nasty little devils who needed the original sin beaten out of them. (Yeah, it didn't really make a lot of sense at the time, either, but people went with it.)

What we're trying and failing to create, says Sanger, is this beautiful world where children can be happy and loved:

You have got to give your seeds a proper soil in which to grow. You have got to give them sunlight and fresh air. You have got to give them space and the opportunity (if they are to lift their flowers to the sun), to strike their roots deep into that soil. (14-16)

Ultimately, that happy world can't exist if there are too many children for their parents and society to care for, and Sanger's answer to that problem is—you got it—birth control.