18 DECEMBER 1926, Page 7

The Problem of the Family

VII.—Birth Control and National Well-Being

BIRTH control is not a cure for all national ills. A Britain with a sharply declining population would be a decaying Britain. Any reduction that comes through birth control is lopsided. It gives fewer young people, fewer adult workers and a larger proportion of old folk. But while birth control is not a panacea, it is, in many cases, economically and socially, almost inevitable.

The main objections to the systematic limitation of the family are religious, moral, medical and national. The religious argument that birth control is unchristian is one for the individual conscience. Undoubtedly the attitude of the Church of England and of the main Nonconformist Churches has been greatly modified within the past few years. They are more and more accepting some measure of birth control as permissible in morals even though undesirable in practice. Catholicism still remains immovably hostile. The argu- ment that the spread of knowledge of birth control will lead to increased immorality, especially among women who up to now have been deterred by fear of consequences, raises a very real point. This is true, and experience has proved it true. The only remedy is the substitution of a higher code of morality for one that bases itself on fear.

On the medical side, it has been widely stated that the growing practice of birth control has led to an increase of ovarian diseases, particularly of cancer. I have been unable to trace any connexion between these two things.. The consensus of medical opinion can be briefly stated. Childless marriages are undoubtedly bad for the woman.. There should be no interference with the birth of the first child after marriage. Such interference, if too long continued, tends to produce permanent infertility. The. limitation and the regulation of births after the first child does no physical harm, if right methods are used and the interval between births is not too long. In many cases, such regulation is a positive benefit to both mother and child.

Let me quote two authorities. Dr. Mary Scharlieb is a strong opponent of birth control. But when asked by the National Birth Rate Commission if such control causes disease she said that it does not. " I do not believe that it does any harm whatever," said Sir Francis Champneys before the same Commission. " If you mean absolute prevention and not allowing women to have- any children at all, it does produce a deleterious effec on her, but if you mean that she has four children instead of eight, I have never seen any effect produced in that way myself."

It is bad that birth control should be employed mainly by one class of the community. The fact that the birth rate among the upper and middle classes is only half that among the poorest naturally causes uneasiness. This does not mean that the son of the well-to-do is of necessity of more value to the State than the poor man's child. " Prodigious actions may as well be done by weaver's issue as by prince's son." It would be as harmful, because equally ill balanced, to have an excessive birth rate among the black-coated classes and sterility among the poor.

There is much to be said for those who engage in active birth-control propaganda in the slums. The emphatic decision of the Ministry of Health not to permit instruction in this subject at infant welfare centres throws the burden on volunteer 'effort. Voluntary clinics in poor parts save many poor women from going to dangerous quacks, whose methods are more harmful than any limitation could be.

The question whether children from large or small families do better in after life is incapable of statistical answer. The familiar argument for the small family is that parents can afford to give one child or two children a better start in life than several. My personal observa- tion is that most successful men come from large not small families. But I have no authority behind my own circle for this view. The single-child home stands on a different footing. It is sometimes a real necessity, for medical reasons ; it is often an imagined necessity ; it is always a deplorable necessity. The married couple who deliberately adopt childlessness rob themselves of the supreme realization of their lives, add fully 50 per cent. to their prospects of marital unhappiness (see the records of the Divorce Court in proof) and do their best to ensure for themselves a lonely old age. This is true, however lofty the motives from which they act.

Turn from the individual to the national and inter- national aspects of the question. We find abundant evidence that imperialism and the big family run in double harness. A virile, active race, seeking to dominate its neighbours, usually has a high birth rate, and this high birth rate is one of its weapons for advance. Finland is the most striking example of this. There two races live side by side, the Finlanders of Swedish descent and the Finns. Fifty years ago the Finlanders dominated the land, and Swedish was the general language among educated people. The Finns have a high birth rate, the Swedish Finlanders a low one. To-day the Swedish Finns are a rapidly declining people, being absorbed by their more virile fellow-countrymen. Swedish speech is giving place to Finnish ; whole communities once Swedish are now Finnish in language, and under a nominal equality in law the Finns dominate the Republic. Inter-marriage now means, in most cases, that the Swedish side is absorbed by the Finnish. The Finns formerly lived mainly in the interior and the north. In recent years they have been steadily migrating to the coast, absorbing the Swedes in their advance. Russia, the most imperialistic and aggressive nation of to-day (despite its denunciation of capitalist im- perialism) is once more a land of rapidly increasing population. I do not give figures, because the Russian statistics are admittedly imperfect and incomplete, but the increase will be questioned, I imagine, by few who know Soviet Russia to-day. Poland, young and ambitious, has proportionally doubled the children of her quiet Scandinavian neighbours. Sweden, in the days when Gustavus Adolphus led his victorious armies into the heart of Europe, had a birth rate of over 36 per thousand (modified, it is true, by an infant death rate of 200 per thousand). Sweden to-day, pacifist and placid, has a birth rate less than half of them. Mussolini preaches the full cradle. France, overweighted by individual love of comfort and threatened by declining population, is taking counsel how to increase her homes. Birth promotion has become a public question, Southern France sees itself, in imagination, absorbed by the more fecund Italian. The actual French birth rate (after allowing for certain foreign elements) is 18.7 per thousand. The infant death rate is high. The rate of increase has fallen almost to nothing.

The French Canadian, one of the most fertile of peoples, holds his own strongly and increasingly against the British immigrants in the Dominion. The population of the Japanese Empire has risen

The check of the declining birth rate in Britain would be a small thing in itself. Ten feeble children brought up by a slum mother, most of them doomed from birth to be a burden on the nation, are a loss, not a gain to us. But if England is to hold her own she must have abundant and strong children. Here we find the birth-rate question inextricably mixed up with the problems of the slums, of taxation, and of education. On the one hand we must teach the pride of family,- the glory and honour of motherhood, the strength of home life. But this is mere mockery unless at the same time we as a nation, see that our people have homes in which decent life is possible, a reasonable assurance of work, and a possibility of maintaining their families without overwhelming hardship. Were the affairs of the nation run logically, we would prohibit, by every means, the reproduction of feeble-minded and dangerously diseased, encourage the limitation of families among idlers and the very poor, and foster the families of the real workers of every class.

[Concluded] F. A. MACKENZIE.