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.
No--birth control by abstention is either ineffective, or, if effective,
is pernicious.