Birth control and the state

by C. P. Blacker

Among uncivilized peoples it is the biologically superior type which is most prolific. In advanced civilized countries, which are democratic in social organization, the reverse obtains. Thus among most primitive people, the Chief—i.e. the man with most courage, initiative, resourcefulness and power of leadership—enjoys the possession of most wives, and therefore produces most offspring. The analogue of the drunken unemployable of to-day would probably not be permitted to marry.

In England now, however, the drunken unemployable finds his nearest approach to an occupation in endowing his ill-fated wife with a stream of children, the regular succession of which is only eventually interrupted by the breakdown, age, or premature death of the wife, or by the death of the husband. And the only discouragement extended to such a man is forthcoming from the strictures passed upon him by his slum neighbours. None is forthcoming from the Government, and none from the hospital, which gratuitously delivers the wife of her children. In fact, information as to how she may arrest this devastating succession of children is deliberately withheld from her by nearly all hospitals, because it is felt that the condition of public opinion, upon which the hospitals largely depend for their finances, is averse from her being enlightened in this respect.

The organization for relief in this country is now so comprehensive and far-reaching that every necessity can be obtained gratis by those who cannot afford to pay for it. Thus the wife of the poor man is delivered of her children free of charge; the children are educated for nothing; if employment is not available for them at the time of leaving school, they are supplied with doles and relief free of obligation. And when they become senile, they are given old age pensions gratuitously. The funds necessary for the administration of these works are levied from the middle and upper classes, in rates and taxes.

Now the Englishman possesses a strong sentiment for institutions. A man who has himself received a certain kind of education, and who has been brought up according to a certain tradition, likes to provide the same education and the same tradition for his children. And if in the face of the increase in taxation, the rise in the cost of living, and the expenses of education, he cannot afford this, sooner than have children to whom he must deny what he considers a good start in life, he prefers to limit his family. This obtains of the man who suffers from a sense of obligation towards his children. The opposite holds good of the unemployed man at the other end of the social scale. He feels that he has sunk as low as is possible for him while still remaining out of prison. Insidiously his ambition and his self-respect become sapped by the soul-killing experience of finding himself a useless parasite upon the community. Frequently, as prison reports show, he takes to crime or drink. And slowly he is overcome by that sense of irresponsibility, of bitterness, of carelessness of the future, of improvident fatalism that takes possession of those living under continuously adverse circumstances.

It is a matter of indifference to him how many children are born to him since with each one his dole is increased. None of the restraints which enter into the longer view of the future held by the middle classes is felt by him. And so he goes ahead, and has as many children as time and the health of his wife (of which last he does not always show excessive consideration) will permit.

The following figures clearly illustrate this state of things. Whereas the number of children produced annually by a thousand teachers is 95, by Church of England ministers is 101, by doctors is 103, the average number produced by general labourers is 231. And among these general labourers it is the least desirable individuals—those, with least self-restraint, least foresight and with least consideration for their wives or the future of their children—who have largest families. And the undesirability may be of another kind. Mental defectives generally are very prolific. Girls of this condition, if left unwatched, are constantly becoming pregnant, there being apparently no shortage of men prepared to take advantage sexually of such unfortunate victims. It is to be noted that the economic situation following war is especially favourable to this discrepancy of fertility between classes. It would seem that the recent experience of the significance of war, the existing sense of social instability, the universal prevalence of unrest, hatred and international discord, make the more considerate parents feel that the world is not a very desirable place to bring children into. And this feeling is emphasized if they have to pay in taxation four times what they had to pay before, after which what money remains is worth about sixty-five per cent. of its previous value. But these considerations hardly affect the classes whose occupation is manual labour, or who have accustomed themselves to no occupation at all.

Thus from a social point of view it is to be observed that quantitatively, in relation to the present resources of the country, England is at the present day considerably over-populated; and qualitatively that many persons of all classes possessing inferior physique are now artificially kept alive to perpetuate their stock, while at the same time those elements of the population who, by lack of intelligence or thrift or steadiness, or who by possession of other defects have been reduced to the lowest level of the social structure, to-day constitute the most fertile strain in the country.

(c) Individual.—The argument has frequently been heard that it is desirable to communicate knowledge of Birth Control to the poorer classes in the interests of the mother and the children.

It is difficult to know what percentage of the unwanted children born in the poorer quarters of our large towns are conceived as the result of a culpable aggression on the part of the husband upon his wife—as when he returns home drunk on Saturday night and threatens her with physical violence if she refuses to submit to his conjugal rights—or as the result of an ignorance of Birth Control methods which are familiar to the more educated classes. Certain it is that a large percentage of the children born are unwanted, and equally certain that among the very poor ignorance of contraception is such as to appear incredible to those who have not had personal experience of it.