When a contraceptive method is adopted under satisfactory conditions, with a due regard to the requirements of the individual couple, there is little room to fear that any injurious results will be occasioned. It is quite true that many physicians speak emphatically concerning the injurious results to husband or to wife of contraceptive devices. Although there has been exaggeration, and prejudice has often been imported into this question, and although most of the injurious results could have been avoided had trained medical help been at hand to advise better methods, there can be no doubt that much that has been said under this head is true. Considering how widespread is the use of these methods, and how ignorantly they have often been carried out, it would be surprising indeed if it were not true. But even supposing that the nervously injurious effects which have been traced to contraceptive practices were a thousandfold greater than they have been reported to be—instead of, as we are justified in believing, considerably less than they are reported—shall we therefore condemn contraceptive methods? To do so would be to ignore all the vastly greater evils which have followed in the past from unchecked reproduction. It would be a condemnation which, if we exercised it consistently, would destroy the whole of civilisation and place us back in savagery. For what device of man, since man had any history at all, has not proved sometimes injurious?
Every one of even the most useful and beneficent of human inventions has either exercised subtle injuries or produced appalling catastrophes. This is not only true of man's devices, it is true of Nature's in general. Let us take, for instance, the elevation of man's ancestors from the quadrupedal to the bipedal position. The experiment of making a series of four-footed animals walk on their hind-legs was very revolutionary and risky; it was far, far more beset by dangers than is the introduction of contraceptives; we are still suffering all sorts of serious evils in consequence of Nature's action in placing our remote ancestors in the erect position. Yet we feel that it was worth while; even those physicians who most emphasise the evil results of the erect position do not advise that we should go on all-fours. It is just the same with a great human device, the introduction of clothes. They have led to all sorts of new susceptibilities to disease and even tendencies to direct injury of many kinds. Yet no one advocates the complete disuse of all clothing on the ground that corsets have sometimes proved harmful. It would be just as absurd to advocate the complete abandonment of contraceptives on the ground that some of them have sometimes been misused. If it were not, indeed, that we are familiar with the lengths to which ignorance and prejudice may go we should question the sanity of anyone who put forward so foolish a proposition. Every great step which Nature and man have taken in the path of progress has been beset by dangers which are gladly risked because of the advantages involved. We have still to enumerate some of the immense advantages which Man has gained in acquiring a conscious and deliberate control of reproduction.
III.
BIRTH CONTROL IN RELATION TO MORALITY AND EUGENICS
Anyone who has followed this discussion so far will not easily believe that a tendency so deeply rooted in Nature as Birth Control can ever be in opposition to Morality. It can only seem to be so when we confuse the eternal principles of Morality, whatever they may be, with their temporary applications, which are always becoming modified in adaptation to changing circumstances.
We are often in danger of doing injustice to the morality of the past, and it is important, even in order to understand the morality of the present, that we should be able to put ourselves in the place of those for whom birth control was immoral. To speak of birth control as having been immoral in the past is, indeed, to underestimate the case; it was not only immoral, it was unnatural, it was even irreligious, it was almost criminal. We must remember that throughout the Christian world the Divine Command, "Increase and Multiply," has seemed to echo down the ages from the beginning of the world. It was the authoritative command of a tribal God who was, according to the scriptural narrative, addressing a world inhabited by eight people. From such a point of view a world's population of several thousand persons would have seemed inconceivably vast, though to-day by even the most austere advocate of birth limitation it would be allowed with a smile. But the old religious command has become a tradition which has survived amid conditions totally unlike those under which it arose. In comparatively modern times it has been reinforced from unexpected quarters, on the one hand by all the forces that are opposed to democracy and on the other by all the forces of would-be patriotic militarism, both alike clamouring for plentiful and cheap men.
Even science, under primitive conditions, was opposed to Birth Control. Creation was regarded as a direct process in which man's will had no part, and knowledge of nature was still too imperfect for the recognition of the fact that the whole course of the world's natural history has been an erection of barriers against wholesale and indiscriminate reproduction. Thus it came about that under the old dispensation, which is now for ever passing away, to have as many children as possible and to have them as often as possible—provided certain ritual prescriptions were fulfilled—seemed to be a religious, moral, natural, scientific, and patriotic duty.
To-day the conditions have altogether altered, and even our own feelings have altered. We no longer feel with the ancient Hebrew who has bequeathed his ideals though not his practices to Christendom, that to have as many wives and concubines and as large a family as possible is both natural and virtuous, as well as profitable. We realise, moreover, that the Divine Commands, so far as we recognise any such commands, are not external to us, but are manifested in our own deliberate reason and will. We know that to primitive men, who lacked foresight and lived mainly in the present, only that Divine Command could be recognisable which sanctified the impulse of the moment, while to us, who live largely in the future, and have learnt foresight, the Divine Command involves restraint on the impulse of the moment. We no longer believe that we are divinely ordered to be reckless or that God commands us to have children who, as we ourselves know, are fatally condemned to disease or premature death. Providence, which was once regarded as the attribute of God, we regard as the attribute of men; providence, prudence, self-restraint—these are to us the characteristics of moral men, and those persons who lack these characteristics are condemned by our social order to be reckoned among the dregs of mankind. It is a social order which in the sphere of procreation could not be reached or maintained except by the systematic control of offspring.
We may realise the difference between the morality of to-day and the morality of the past when we come to details. We may consider, for instance, the question of the chastity of women. According to the ideas of the old morality, which placed the whole question of procreation under the authority (after God) of men, women were in subjection to men, and had no right to freedom, no right to responsibility, no right to knowledge, for, it was believed, if entrusted with any of these they would abuse them at once. That view prevails even to-day in some civilised countries, and middle-class Italian parents, for instance, will not allow their daughter to be conducted by a man even to Mass, for they believe that as soon as she is out of their sight she will be unchaste. That is their morality. Our morality to-day, however, is inspired by different ideas, and aims at a different practice. We are by no means disposed to rate highly the morality of a girl who is only chaste so long as she is under her parents' eyes; for us, indeed, that is much more like immorality than morality. We are to-day vigorously pursuing a totally different line of action. We wish women to be reasonably free, we wish them to be trained in the sense of responsibility for their own actions, we wish them to possess knowledge, more especially in that sphere of sex, once theoretically closed to them, which we now recognise as peculiarly their own domain. Nowadays, moreover, we are sufficiently well acquainted with human nature to know, not only that at best the "chastity" merely due to compulsion or to ignorance is a poor thing, but that at worst it is really the most degraded and injurious form of unchastity. For there are many ways of avoiding pregnancy besides the use of contraceptives, and such ways can often only be called vicious, destructive to purity, and harmful to health. Our ideal woman to-day is not she who is deprived of freedom and knowledge in the cloister, even though only the cloister of her home, but the woman who, being instructed from early life in the facts of sexual physiology and sexual hygiene, is also trained in the exercise of freedom and self-responsibility, and able to be trusted to choose and to follow the path which seems to her right. That is the only kind of morality which seems to us real and worth while. And, in any case, we have now grown wise enough to know that no degree of compulsion and no depth of ignorance will suffice to make a girl good if she doesn't want to be good. So that, even as a matter of policy, it is better to put her in a position to know what is good and to act in accordance with that knowledge.
The relation of birth control to morality is, however, by no means a question which concerns women alone. It equally concerns men. Here we have to recognise, not only that the exercise of control over procreation enables a man to form a union of faithful devotion with the woman of his choice at an earlier age than would otherwise be possible, but it further enables him, throughout the whole of married life, to continue such relationship under circumstances which might otherwise render them injurious or else undesirable to his wife. That the influence thus exerted by preventive methods would suffice to abolish prostitution it would be foolish to maintain, for prostitution has other grounds of support. But even within the sphere of merely prostitutional relationships the use of contraceptives, and the precautions and cleanliness they involve, have an influence of their own in diminishing the risks of venereal disease, and while the interests of those who engage in prostitution are by some persons regarded as negligible, we must always remember that venereal disease spreads far beyond the patrons of prostitution and is a perpetual menace to others who may become altogether innocent victims. So that any influence which tends to diminish venereal disease increases the well-being of the whole community.