Moral Principles and Medical Practice: The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence

by Charles Coppens

“The obstetrician finds his vocation disappearing among the American women from the face of the earth.

“It is a fact that the American family with more than one or two children is the exception. From the records of six generations of families in some New England towns, it was found that the families comprising the first generation had on an average between eight and ten children; the next three generations averaged about seven to each family; the fifth generation less than three to each family. The generation now on the stage is not doing so well as that. In Massachusetts the average family numbers less than three persons. In 1885 the census of Massachusetts disclosed that 71.28 per cent of the women of that State were childless. The census of 1885 in the State of New York shows that twenty-five per cent of the women of that State are childless, fifty per cent average less than one child, and seventy-five per cent average only a trifle over one child.

“Southern California has fully as dark a record as New England—that is, in the family where the man and wife are American-born. It goes without saying that the medical profession in this country is composed to a great extent of typical progressive Americans, and I ask you to make mental statistics of the children in the families of the physicians in Southern California, and you will find very few of them containing more than two.

“Had the Rev. T. R. Malthus lived in the United States to-day, he would never have argued about the danger of over-population, as he did in his interesting volume on ‘The Principles of Population.’”

After quoting the views of Plato, Aristotle, and Lycurgus, Dr. Lindley continues: “In Southern California there are, it is true, many children, but the average American family is very small.

“As I sat writing this an evening or two ago, I jotted down the names of twenty-five families of my acquaintance in Los Angeles, taking them as fast as I thought of them. The list was composed entirely of professional and business men ranging in age from thirty-five to fifty. All had been married quite a number of years. The result of my memorandum was that in these twenty-five families there were but eighteen children. These families were wholly unselected, and are about the average Protestant American families outside the rank of laborers.

“What are the causes of this small proportion of children? Disease, preventives of conception, and abortion form the trinity of responsibility in this grave condition. It is true that the first cause (disease) results in many women being barren, but I believe that you will agree with me that the last two causes, preventives of conception and abortion, are the two chief causes.

“The A. P. A. might find food for thought by investigating the infrequency of criminal abortion in Catholic families in the United States. It is the Protestant or agnostic American who too often uses one of the preventives of conception.” (Here the Doctor refers to a foot-note in which he says: “I write this opinion as a Protestant, and should be glad to learn that it is not well founded.”) He continues: “If, through inadvertence, pregnancy should occur, then an abortion is in order. Disease and poverty and war and accident all work together to keep down the population, but we are overcoming these. Plagues and pestilences are rare. The number who die of starvation in California is very small, while war has played but a small part. Through the diffusion of the laws of sanitation, improved dietary, and advanced therapeutics, the longevity of man is increasing, but the American woman’s aversion to child-bearing is blighting our civilization, and can be well named the twentieth-century curse. In this aversion the woman frequently echoes the wish of the husband.

“A large proportion of the American young women who marry do so with the determination that they will have no children. They are abetted in this notion by many elderly women. The cure for this terrible sentiment is education. The home, the press, the schoolroom, and the pulpit should be centres for reviving the ancient idea of the nobility of motherhood. The physician should not underestimate his influence.

“By constantly bearing in mind the danger of the present tendencies, he can do much to change the current. Let us hope that we shall again see the day when thoughtful motherhood shall be considered the highest function of womanhood, and to shirk this natural duty will be deemed a disgrace.”