have long admired the clear, logical and wise e xpositions by
Christopher Hollis of the problem kcif The 13omb, but in his recent article on The Pill le.icaamrlysad to see that his religious convictions have distorted his approach to a problem which is every bit as pressing and a great deal more real to millions of men and women the world over.
To say that there are 'considerable pockets of
undernourishment is surely a masterly understate- Plent, when more than a thousand million people la the world are in. fact undernourished. Of course contraception is not the only answer to the world's economic problems; of course there must be in- f,.illtelY greater exploitation of the world's resources 1 food; of course distribution must be regulated. ,ut if this happy state of affairs could eventually brought about it still would not solve the problem ;rimy of individual parents who do not know -how ° limit their families nor to space the births of their children so as to Save them from ill-health and misery and the effects of their own unceasing ''''°1-ry and fear. • N'Ir• Hollis implies that it is the West which is 'Posing upon unwilling Eastern peoples its own solution of birth control. This is nonsense: the great countries of the East were prattising birth control W,beri Mr. Hollis's forebears were living in caves. various herbs and recipes were handed down from _Mother to daughter, and when all else failed there W45 always infanticide. It is only modern, scientific methods of contraception which have come from the West and which are being introduced to their c,e°Ples by the governments of Egypt. India,
akistan, Ceylon and China.
1,11) what way can the provision of family-planning cullics within a government health service 'interfere With the Oriental's most intimate private life'? For the first time in the East the knowledge for which Millions of women have longed is being made avail- able to them; they need not make use of it, but the dvice is there for those who want it. No one, b'east of all the Mr. Hollises of this world, who Y the mere accident of birth know nothing of the tnisery and fears of these women, has the right to ueny them this knowledge and the freedom to use °F reject it. And if he were to see—even in this City where living standards are higher than any- here else in the East—a mother of thirty-two years °I age who in eleven years of married life had
had ten children and whose husband earned less than £3 a week; or another of thirty-one who had five children and had had seven induced abortions in four years or another of thirty-eight who had had fourteen pregnancies and had given away several of her babies; and if be were then to hear their invariable reaction to the advice given to them at a family-planning clinic—'If only I had known!'— he would understand better, perhaps, that the spreading of knowledge of birth control is vitally important to millions of individual men and women and filch children. This is not simply a vast economic problem—it is a human one It is people who matter—not populations.—Yours faithfully,
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