Birth Control : For and Against
28. 6d.)
BIRTH control, Mr. Ludovici says, is " night-hoeing "— selecting in the dark, since the qualities of the children cannot be judged before they are born.
His whole book is a slashing attack upon the " controllers," who, if only for their own health, need some such vigorous opposition of a coherent and non-religious character. He also opposes birth control because, he says, the marital relation initiates in the woman a cycle of profound reactions which should normally continue for at least eighteen Months. Contraception starts that cycle, but forbids its normal fulfilment in conception, gestation, and lactation. Such interference with one of the deepest and most far- reaching functions of the female being cannot but have bad results. There is as yet no evidence of those disastrous results ; but the point bears the stamp of biological pos- ability, and deserves investigation.
" Michael Fielding " is the pseudonym of an experienced medical man whose object is to supply contraceptive know- ledge as soundly, shortly, unemotionally, and cheaply as possible. He has succeeded. Mr. H. G. Wells, in a preface, writes : " People who do not want to practise birth-control, particularly who want to oppose it altogether, ought to possess the minimum of knowledge here conveyed. How can they oppose what they do not understand ? How can they restrain, they don't know what ? "
One can sympathize with both writers on this difficult and momentous subject, especially with Mr. " Fielding's " attitude that normal adults are entitled to choose for themselves whether to breed or not to breed. On the other hand, Mr. Ludovici considers not the individual, but the State. Emphasizing the need for eugenic selection, he does not shirk the issue of over-population. This he declares to be due to the superabundance of degenerates. It is they who should be sterilized or induced to use birth control.
There is much meat in this—so much, indeed, that only by an extension of birth control can the breeding of degenerates be checked. As a dysgenic tendency it has already done all the harm it can. His " night-hoeing " argument appears sounder than it is. The science of heredity is already far enough advanced to enable us to know desirable from unde- sirable stocks, and by the wise control of births to breed only the types we want. It is the method of the practical and scientific animal breeder, and a quicker and surer way of achieving permanent results than is Mr. Ludovici's method of breeding from the best individuals of all stocks. Again, he furnishes an imposing list of great men who were born late in large families, and implies that the world would have been the poorer by their loss had birth control ruled in their day. But a corresponding proportion of individuals who were not great also came late in large families in those days. If smaller families had been the order of the day there would, it is true, have been fewer great men to leaven the lump of humanity ; but the lump to be leavened would have been correspondingly smaller.
Both writers make a well-justified attack upon those super- ficial eugenists who believe that the poorer classes come of poor stock. Obviously, they do not. But—and it is this important point which gives rise to the confusion—degenerates, originating in all classes, rapidly drift down and accumulate at the bottom. There they live and of course sometimes marry with decent working-class stocks. Theirs is the tragedy and theirs the over-reproduction for which birth control and other measures are the remedy.
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