Thus in the Autumn of 1924 a group of seven externs, working in the district covered by Guy’s Hospital, made inquiries of the mothers whose confinements they attended as to whether the child just born had been wanted or not. The inquiries were made, when possible, on the tenth day, when the patients were last visited, in such a way that their answers were more likely to be favourably influenced by fondness for the child than unfavourably by recollection of the pains of labour. Furthermore, where any doubt existed, as for instance when a woman replied that she had not particularly desired the baby before it was born, but would not part with it for the world now, she was given the benefit of the doubt and the baby was counted as wanted. In all, inquiries were made in the case of seventy-eight children born. Out of these, forty-seven were definitely not wanted, and thirty-one wanted; and the writer can vouch for the fact that if these figures erred at all, they did so on the side of moderation. Thus, in at least one poor quarter of London, well over half of the children born were emphatically not wanted.
The hardships imposed on the mother by such conditions are sometimes very cruel. Numerous cases have been quoted by advocates of Birth Control in their propaganda which there is not space to reproduce here. The reader can, however, picture to himself the experience of a woman suffering from the sickness, shortness of breath, emotional instability, and deformity of pregnancy, having to maintain life in some squalid slum, house-keeping, cooking, cleaning and tending the children without change of air or scene and without holidays, up till the incidence of the final labour pains. And no sooner is a child born than the husband reasserts his “rights,” and the same dismal cycle repeats itself without prospect or hope of change, or of relief from a body that has ceased to know the easy freedom and self-forgetfulness of good health.
Indifference to the children appears. They are looked after out of a stern sense of duty. The native impulse of spontaneous maternal fondness is killed by the deadly routine, and when, as frequently happens, the child dies, after a few pangs of grief, an easy reconciliation (perhaps not without a deep-seated sense of inward gratitude), is made to what is acknowledged as the “Will of the Almighty.” Sometimes, the mother makes no secret of her relief. But no man who has come for any length of time in contact with these working-class mothers can fail to admire the patience, the stoicism and the grim fortitude with which they face their dreary lot.
Their ignorance of Birth Control, in face of the publicity the subject is now given in the Press, is almost incredible. The same quality of fatalism and resignation felt by the soldier in the war before the prospect of wounds or death, is still evinced by these women in the matter of child-birth. One frequently meets with a sentiment that “we must take what comes without grumbling,” that “what is fated must be,” and even that “we must not fly in the face of the Almighty.” There further exists a superstition that any object requiring internal adjustment, like a pessary, runs the risk of being lost in the woman’s inside.
A further aspect of the problem is the prevalence under the existing system of the practice of abortion. It is difficult, of course, to give any trustworthy figures in this connexion, since in many cases the fact that the mother has attempted to induce an abortion is not revealed to the medical man who attends her, or to the hospital authorities who take her in. The methods usually resorted to are of an amazing crudity. They vary from the pregnant mother jumping three or four times consecutively off a table on to the floor or throwing herself downstairs, to her swallowing large quantities of lead, ergot, quinine and other substances as well as nocuous doses of emetics, irritants and purgatives.
Frequently the woman practises local violence upon herself, or engages the services of a professional abortionist, a class more numerous than is generally supposed. Such a person, after practising his art, is in the habit of instructing the woman as soon as she feels the pain or notices any haemorrhage, to report herself to a medical man or present herself at a hospital where she is taken in as an ordinary case of threatened abortion. The responsibility for what may subsequently happen to the woman is thus effectively removed from the abortionist’s shoulders, it being in the interest of everyone concerned to preserve silence as to the part he has played.
The damage done to the health of many poor women by such practices is enormous, and might largely be avoided by a judicious instruction in Birth Control.
When the effects of all this upon the children are considered, it is at once found that the question of Birth Control is intimately connected with the housing problem. The overcrowding in large slum families is notorious. At an early age the day is passed by these children in the street, where, filthy and untended, they receive little by way of notice from their elders except hard words or blows. Their nights are spent packed, in a fetid atmosphere, several together in the same bed from which they may witness their parents in sexual intercourse, sometimes their mother in labour, and where they are free to indulge in what, later in life, would be called incestuous practices with one another. The writer has on more than one occasion attended a woman in confinement while several children were watching her from a bed in the same room, there being, in the urgency of the situation, no time to dispose of them and nowhere immediately available to send them.
Substantially this is what has been said on each side of this complex question.