Birth Control.
And now, if you will permit me, I will pass on to consider the all-important question of Birth Control.
First, I will put forward with confidence the view that birth control is here to stay. It is an established fact, and for good or evil has to be accepted. Although the extent of its application can be and is being modified, no denunciations will abolish it.
Despite the influence and condemnations of the Church, it has been practised in France for well over half a century, and in Belgium and other Catholic countries is extending. And if the Roman Catholic Church, with its compact organisation, its power of authority, and its discipline, cannot check this procedure, is it likely that Protestant Churches will be able to do so?—for Protestant religions depend for their strength on the conviction and esteem they establish in the heads and hearts of their people.
The reasons which lead parents to limit their offspring are sometimes selfish, but more often honourable and cogent. The desire to marry and to rear children well equipped for life’s struggle, limited incomes, the cost of living, burdensome taxation, are forcible motives; and, further, amongst the educated classes there is the desire of women to take a part in life and their husband’s careers, which is incompatible with oft-recurring pregnancies. Absence of birth control means late marriages, and these carry with them irregular unions and all the baneful consequences.
It is idle to decry illicit intercourse and interpose obstacles to marriage at one and the same time.
But, say many whose opinions are entitled to our respect: “Yes—birth control may be necessary, but the only birth control which is justifiable is voluntary abstention from connubial relations.” Such abstention would be either ineffective or, if effective, impracticable and harmful to health and happiness.
To limit the size of a family to, say, four children during a child-bearing period of 20–25 years, would be to impose on a married couple an amount of abstention which for long periods would almost be equivalent to celibacy, and when one remembers that owing to economic reasons the abstention would have to be most strict during the earlier years of married life when desires are strongest, I maintain a demand is being made which for the mass of people it is impossible to meet; that the endeavours to meet it would impose a strain hostile to health and happiness and carry with them grave dangers to morals.
Imagine a young married couple in love with each other—the parents, say, of one child, who feel they cannot afford another child for, say, three years—being expected to occupy the same room and to abstain for two years. The thing is preposterous. You might as well put water by the side of a man suffering from thirst and tell him not to drink it.
And further than that, if the efforts to abstain are seriously made the strain involved is harmful to the health and temper—if the efforts do not succeed the minds of husband and wife are troubled by doubts and anxieties which are damaging to their intimate relationships. And, moreover, if this harmful restraint succeeds in preventing conception there eventuates the inevitable prevalence of sex excitement followed by abortive and half-realised satisfaction, and the enhanced risk of the man or woman yielding to outside sex temptations.