ON THE LIMITATION OF OFFSPRING.
No part of our subject is more delicate than this. Very few people are willing to listen to a dispassionate discussion of the propriety or impropriety of limiting within certain bounds the number of children in a family. On the one side are many worthy physicians and pious clergymen, who, without listening to any arguments, condemn every effort to avoid large families; on the other, are numberless wives and husbands, who turn a deaf ear to the warnings of doctors and the thunders of divines, and, eager to escape a responsibility they have assumed, hesitate not to resort to the most dangerous and immoral means to accomplish this end.
We ask both parties to lay aside prejudice and prepossession, and examine with us this most important social question in all its bearings.
Let us first inquire whether there is such a thing as over-production—having too many children. Unquestionably there is. Its disastrous effects on both mother and children are known to every intelligent physician. Two-thirds of all cases of womb disease, says Dr. Tilt, are traceable to child-bearing in feeble women. Hardly a day passes that a physician in large practice does not see instances of debility and disease resulting from over-much child-bearing. Even the lower animals illustrate this. Every farmer is aware of the necessity of limiting the offspring of his mares and cows. How much more severe are the injuries inflicted on the delicate organization of woman! A very great mortality, says Dr. Duncan of Edinburgh, attends upon confinements when they become too frequent.
The evils of a too rapid succession of pregnancies are likewise conspicuous in the children. There is no more frequent cause, says Dr. Hillier,—whose authority in such matters none will dispute,—of rickets than this. Puny, sickly, short-lived offspring follows over-production. Worse than this, the carefully compiled statistics of Scotland show that such children are peculiarly liable to idiocy. Adding to an already excessive number, they come to over-burden a mother already overwhelmed with progeny. They cannot receive at her hands the attention they require. Weakly herself, she brings forth weakly infants. 'Thus,' concludes Dr. Duncan, 'are the accumulated evils of an excessive family manifest.'
Apart from these considerations, there are certain social relations which have been thought by some to advise small families. When either parent suffers from a disease which is transmissible, and wishes to avoid inflicting misery on an unborn generation, it has been urged that they should avoid children. Such diseases not unfrequently manifest themselves after marriage, which is answer enough to the objection that if they did not wish children they should not marry. There are also women to whom pregnancy is a nine months' torture, and others to whom it is nearly certain to prove fatal. Such a condition cannot be discovered before marriage, and therefore cannot be provided against by a single life. Can such women be asked to immolate themselves?
It is strange, says that distinguished writer, John Stuart Mill, that intemperance in drink, or in any other appetite, should be condemned so readily, but that incontinence in this respect should always meet not only with indulgence but praise. 'Little improvement' he adds, 'can be expected in morality until the producing too large families is regarded with the same feeling as drunkenness, or any other physical excess.' A well-known medical writer, Dr. Drysdale, in commenting on these words, adds: 'In this error, if error it be, I also humbly share.'
'When dangerous prejudices,' says Sismondi, the learned historian of southern Europe, 'have not become accredited, when our true duties towards those to whom we give life are not obscured in the name of a sacred authority, no married man will have more children than he can bring up properly.'
Such is the language of physicians and statesmen; but a stronger appeal has been made for the sake of morality itself. The detestable crime of abortion is appallingly rife in our day; it is abroad in our land to an extent which would have shocked the dissolute women of pagan Rome. Testimony from all quarters, especially from New England, has accumulated within the past few years to sap our faith in the morality and religion of American women. This wholesale, fashionable murder, how are we to stop it? Hundreds of vile men and women in our large cities subsist by this slaughter of the innocents, and flaunt their ill-gotten gains—the price of blood—in our public thoroughfares. Their advertisements are seen in the newspapers; their soul and body destroying means are hawked in every town. With such temptation strewn in her path, what will the woman threatened with an excessive family do? Will she not yield to evil, and sear her conscience with the repetition of her wickedness? Alas! daily experience in the heart of a great city discloses to us only too frequently the fatal ease of such a course.
In view of the injuries of excessive child-bearing on the one hand, and of this prevalent crime on the other, a man of genius and sympathy, Dr. Raciborski of Paris, took the position that the avoidance of offspring to a certain extent is not only legitimate, but should be recommended as a measure of public good. 'We know how bitterly we shall be attacked,' he says, 'for promulgating this doctrine; but if our ideas only render to society the services we expect of them, we shall have effaced from the list of crimes the one most atrocious without exception, that of child-murder, before or after birth, and we shall have poured a little happiness into the bosoms of despairing families, where poverty is allied to the knowledge that offspring can be born only to prostitution or mendicity. The realization of such hopes will console us under the attacks upon our doctrines.'