As I have now quoted in full her original letter, excepting the address of her society, and the two paragraphs from the Sussex Daily News, my readers may form their own judgment on the following points: Is it possible to maintain that the whole context of her original letter puts a different complexion on her remarks concerning the medical profession? Can either of the paragraphs from the Sussex Daily News be truthfully described as "rather scurrilous," or are they fair comment on a matter of public interest? Moreover, even if a daily paper had published a misleading paragraph about this society, surely that is not a valid reason why its President should make a malignant attack, not on journalists, but on the medical profession?
Section 3. A CAUSE OF UNHAPPINESS IN MARRIAGE
Nor does birth control lead to happiness in marriage. On the contrary, experience shows that the practice is injurious not only to the bodies but also to the minds of men and women. As no method of contraception is infallible, the wife who allows or adopts it may find herself in the truly horrible position of being secretly or openly suspected of infidelity. Again, when a family has been limited to one or two children and these die, the parents may find themselves solitary and childless in old age; and mothers thus bereaved are often the victims of profound and lasting melancholy. The mother of a large family has her worries, many of them not due to her children, but to the social evils of our time: and yet she is less to be pitied than the woman who is losing her beauty after a fevered life of, vanity and self-indulgence, and who has no one to love her, not even a child.
Moreover, these practices have an influence on the relation between husband and wife, on their emotions towards each other and towards the whole sexual nisus. Mr. Bernard Shaw recently stated [71] that when people adopt methods of birth control they are engaging, not in sexual intercourse, but in reciprocal masturbation.
That is the plain truth of the matter. Or, from another point of view, it may be said that the man who adopts these practices is simply using his wife as he would use a prostitute, as indeed was said long ago by St. Thomas Aquinas. [72] The excuse offered for illicit sexual intercourse is not usually pleasure, but that the sex impulse is irresistible: and the same argument is used for conjugal union with prevention. In both cases the natural result of union is not desired, and positive means are taken to prevent it.
And what of the results on the mutual love, if an old-fashioned word be not now out of place, and on the self-respect of two people so associated? Birth control cannot make for happiness, because it means that mutual love is at the mercy of an animal instinct, neither satisfied nor denied. It is an old truth that those who seek happiness for itself never find it. And yet the advocates of birth control have the temerity to claim that these practices lead to happiness. I presume that of the bliss following marriage with contraceptives the crowded lists of our divorce courts are an index. The marriage bond is weakened when a common lasting interest in the care of children is replaced by transient sexual excitement. Once pregnancy is abolished there is no natural check on the sexual passions of husband or wife, for they have learnt how sexual desire may be gratified without the pain, publicity, and responsibility of having children. In the experience of the world marriages based merely on passion are seldom happy, and artificial birth control means passion uncontrolled by nature. These methods are not practised by nations such as Ireland and Spain, who accept the moral rule of the natural law expressed in God's commandments and sanctioned by His judgments; and no man who has ever lived in these countries could truthfully maintain that the people there, on whom the burdens of marriage press as elsewhere, are in reality anxious to obtain facilities for divorce. On the other hand, there are many who allege that the people of England are shouting out for greater facilities for divorce than they now possess. At any rate, it is obvious enough that there are those amongst us who are straining every nerve to force such facilities upon them.
Section 4. AN INSULT TO TRUE WOMANHOOD
It has been said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel; and apparently chivalry is the last refuge of a fool. Some of the advocates of birth control who have never thought the matter out, either passionately or dispassionately, claim to speak on behalf of women. They protest that "many women of the educated classes revolt against the drudgery, anxieties, inconveniences, disease, and disfigurements which attend the yearly child-bearing advocated by the moralist." [73]
What moralist? Who ever said it? Again, they plead for women who "revolt" from the "disfigurement" of the gestation period. The great artist Botticelli did not think this was disfigurement. What true women do? Are they not those of whom Kipling writes, "as pale and as stale as a bone"? And, if so, are these unworthy specimens of their sex worth tears? The vast majority of women bear the discomforts of gestation and the actual perils and pangs of birth with exemplary fortitude: and it is a gross slander for anyone to maintain that a few cowardly and degenerate individuals really represent that devoted sex. But these writers are indeed well out of the ruck of ordinary humanity, because they tell us that "whatever the means employed, and whether righteous or not, the propensity to limit the highest form of life operates silently and steadily amongst the more thoughtful members of all civilized countries," and yet add that "it is not perhaps good taste to consider the means employed to this end." While they thus approve and commend the practice of birth control as natural to "the more thoughtful members," they nevertheless question the "good taste" of discussing the very methods of which they approve, even in the columns of a medical journal! Again, they tell us that "assuredly continence is not, and never will be, the principal" method. That may be possibly true, so long as Christianity is more professed than practised; God knows we are all lacking enough in self-control. And yet throughout the ages moralists have preached the advantages of self-control, and we ordinary men and women know that we could do better, and that others who have gone before us have done better; but it is the self-styled "thoughtful members" who proclaim to the world that self-control in matters of sex is an impossibility, and therefore not to be even attempted. They are no common people—these epicureans, selfish even in their refinement. In addition to losing their morals, they have certainly lost their wits.