The law of the reduction of reproduction in response to the improvement of environment is a natural law, arising from fixed biological principles. This is because when we improve the environment we improve the individual situated in that environment; and the improvement of the individual has always resulted in a check upon reproduction. We must remember, however, that this change is not the result of conscious or voluntary action; instead it is the result of unconscious activities and instinctive urge. As Sir Shirley Murphy has said: "Birth Control is a natural process, and though in civilized men, endowed with high intelligence, it necessarily works in some measure voluntarily and deliberately, it is probable that it also works, as in the evolution of the lower animals, to some extent automatically."
Science shows us that even among the most primitive micro-organisms; when placed under unfavorable conditions as to food and environment, they tend to pass into a reproductive phase and by sporulation or otherwise begin to produce new individuals rapidly. This, of course, because of the fact that their death-rate is increased, and an increased birth-rate must be manifested in order to maintain a balance. If the environment be improved, the death-rate decreases, and this is followed by a fall in the birth-rate, according to the constant laws of Nature manifesting in such cases.
The same law is seen to be manifested in the case of Man. Improve his environment, and his death-rate drops, which is accompanied by a falling birth-rate. Here, once more we see the application of the scientific axiom "Improve the environment and reproduction is checked." As Leroy-Beaulieu has said: "The tendency of civilization is to reduce the birth-rate." And as Professor Benjamin Moore has said: "Decreased reproduction is the simple biological reply to good economic conditions." And as Havelock Ellis has said: "Those who desire a higher birth-rate are desiring, whether they know it or not, the increase of poverty, ignorance, and wretchedness."
Among men, Birth Control has now evolved from the unconscious and instinctive phase, and is now unfolding and manifesting on the plane of conscious and voluntary activity. The influence of deliberate intention and conscious design is now one of the important factors in the process. Here at this point we reach a totally new aspect of reproduction. In the past stages of evolution the original impetus toward reproduction has been checked and directed by Nature, working along instinctive and unconscious lines; and the result has been an extreme diminution of the number of off-spring; a prolongation of the time devoted to the breeding and care of each new member of the family, in harmony with its greatly prolonged life; a spacing out of the intervals between the offspring; and, as a result, a vastly greater development of each individual, and an ever better equipment for the task of living. All this was slowly attained automatically, without any conscious volition on the part of the individuals, even when they were human beings, who were the agents.
Now, however, we are confronted with a change which we may regard as, in some respects, the most momentous sudden advance in the whole history of reproduction, namely, the process of reproductive progress now become conscious and deliberately volitional. Birth control, no longer automatic, is now being directed by human mind and will precisely to the attainment of ends which Nature has been struggling after for millions of years; and, being consciously and deliberately directed, it is now enabled to avoid many of the pitfalls into which the unconscious method fell.
Havelock Ellis says: "The control and limitation of reproductive activity by conscious and volitional effort is an attempt by open-eyed intelligence and foresight to attain those ends which Nature through untold generations has been painfully yet tirelessly struggling for. The deliberate co-operation of Man in the natural task of Birth Control represents an identification of the human will with what we may, if we choose, regard as the divinely appointed law of the world. We can well believe that the great pioneers, who, a century ago, acted in the spirit of this faith may have echoed the thought of Kepler when, on discovering his great planetary law, he exclaimed in rapture: 'O God! I think Thy thoughts after Thee!'"
The following brief general history of the modern Birth Control movement is quoted from Havelock Ellis, and will be of interest to students of the subject: "The pioneers of modern Birth Control were English. Among them Malthus occupies the first place. That distinguished man, in his great and influential work, 'The Principles of Population,' in 1798, emphasized the immense importance of foresight and self-control in procreation, and the profound significance of birth limitation for human welfare. Malthus, however, relied on ascetic self-restraint, a method which could only appeal to the few; he had nothing to say for the regulation of conception in intercourse. That was suggested twenty years later, very cautiously by James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica.' Four years afterwards, Mill's friend, the Radical reformer, Francis Place, advocated this method more clearly. Finally, in 1831, Robert Dale Owen, the son of the great Robert Owen, published his 'Moral Physiology,' in which he set forth the ways of preventing conception; while a little later the Drysdale brothers, ardent and unwearying philanthropists, devoted their energies to a propaganda which has been spreading ever since and has now conquered the whole civilized world.
"It was not, however, in England but in France, so often at the head of an advance in civilization, that Birth Control first firmly became established, and that the extravagantly high birth rate of earlier times began to fall; this happened in the first half of the nineteenth century, whether or not it was mainly due to voluntary control. In England the movement came later, and the steady decline in the English birth-rate, which is still proceeding, began in 1877. In the previous year there had been a famous prosecution of Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant for disseminating pamphlets describing the methods of preventing conception; the charge was described by the Lord Chief Justice, who tried the case, as one of the most ill-advised and injudicious ever made in a court of justice. But it served an undesigned end by giving enormous publicity to the subject and advertising the methods it sought to suppress. There can be no doubt, however, that even apart from this trial the movement would have proceeded on the same lines. The times were ripe, the great industrial expansion had passed its first feverish phase, social conditions were improving, education was spreading. The inevitable character of the movement is indicated by the fact that at the very same time it began to be manifested all over Europe, indeed in every civilized country of the world.
"At the present time the birth-rate (as well as usually the death-rate) is falling in every country of the world sufficiently civilized to possess statistics of its own vital movement. The fall varies in rapidity. It has been considerable in the more progressive countries; it has lingered in the more backward countries. If we examine the latest statistics for Europe, we find that every country, without exception, with a progressive and educated population, and a fairly high state of social well-being, presents a birth-rate below 30 per 1,000. We also find that every country in Europe in which the mass of the people are primitive, ignorant, or in a socially unsatisfactory condition (even although the governing classes may be progressive or ambitious) shows a birth-rate of above 30 per 1,000. France, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, and Switzerland are in the first group. Russia, Austro-Hungary, Italy, Spain, and the Balkan countries are in the second group. The German Empire was formerly in the second group, but now comes within the first group, and has carried on the movement so energetically that the birth-rate of Berlin is already below that of London, and that at the present rate of decline the birth-rate of the German Empire will before long sink to that of France. Outside Europe, in the United States just as much as in Australia and New Zealand, the same progressive movement is proceeding with equal activity."
The same authority sums up the present attitude of the advocates of scientific and rational Birth Control, as follows: "The wide survey of the question of birth limitation has settled the question of the desirability of the adoption of preventing conception, and finally settled those who would waste out time with their fears that it is not right to control conception. We know now on whose side are the laws of God and Nature. We realize that in exercising control over the entrance gate of life we are not fully performing, consciously and deliberately, a great human duty, but carrying on rationally a beneficial process which has, more blindly and wastefully, been carried on since the beginning of the world. There are still a few persons ignorant enough or foolish enough to fight against the advance of civilization in this matter; we can well afford to leave them severely alone, knowing that in a few years all of them will have passed away. It is not our business to defend the control of birth, but simply discuss how we may most wisely exercise that control."