women, for bringing abortion into honour and repute, so that it may be
carried out openly and with the aid of the best physicians. This
movement has been supported by lawyers and social reformers of high
position. It may be admitted that women have an abstract right to
abortion and that in exceptional cases that right should be exerted.
Yet there can be very little doubt to most people that abortion is a
wasteful, injurious, and almost degrading method of dealing with the
birth-rate, a feeble apology for recklessness and improvidence. A
society in which abortion flourishes cannot be regarded as a healthy
society. Therefore, a community which takes upon itself to encourage
abortion is incurring a heavy responsibility. I am referring more
especially to the United States, where this condition of things is most
marked. For, there cannot be any doubt about it, just as all those who
work for birth control are diminishing the frequency of abortion, so
_every attempt to discourage birth control promotes abortion_. We have
to approach this problem calmly, in the light of Nature and reason. We
have each of us to decide on which side we shall range ourselves. For
it is a vital social problem concerning which we cannot afford to be
indifferent.
There is here no desire to exaggerate the importance of birth control.
It is not a royal road to the millennium, and, as I have already
pointed out, like all other measures which the course of progress
forces us to adopt, it has its disadvantages. Yet at the present moment
its real and vital significance is acutely brought home to us.
Flinders Petrie, discussing those great migrations due to the
unrestricted expansion of barbarous races which have devastated Europe
from the dawn of history, remarks: "We deal lightly and coldly with the
abstract facts, but they represent the most terrible tragedies of all
humanity--the wreck of the whole system of civilisation, protracted
starvation, wholesale massacre. Can it be avoided? That is the
question, before all others, to the statesman who looks beyond the
present time."[16] Since Petrie wrote, only ten years ago, we have had
occasion to realise that the vast expansions which he described are not
confined to the remote past, but are at work and producing the same
awful results, even at the very present hour. The great and only
legitimate apology which has been put forward for the aggressive
attitude of Germany in the present war has been that it was the
inevitable expansive outcome of the abnormally high birth-rate of
Germany in recent times; as Dr. Dernburg, not long ago, put it: "The
expansion of the German nation has been so extraordinary during the
last twenty-five years that the conditions existing before the war had
become insupportable." In other words, there was no outlet but a
devastating war. So we are called upon to repeat, with fresh emphasis,
Petrie's question: _Can it be avoided_? All humanity, all civilisation,
call upon us to take up our stand on this vital question of birth
control. In so doing we shall each of us be contributing, however
humbly, to
"one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves."
[1] J.M. Coulter, _The Evolution of Sex in Plants_, 1915; Geoffrey
Smith, "The Biology of Sex," _Eugenics Review_, April, 1914.
[2] See, _e.g._, Geddes and Thomson, _The Evolution of Sex_, Ch. XX.;
and T.H. Morgan, _Heredity and Sex_, Ch. I.
[3] To quote one of the most careful investigators of this point,
Northcote Thomas, among the Edo-speaking people of Nigeria, found
that the average number of living children per husband was 2.7;
including all children, alive and dead, the average number was per
husband 4.5, and per wife 2.7. "Infant mortality is heavy" (Northcote
Thomas, _Anthropological Report of Edo-speaking People of Nigeria_,
1910, Part I., pp. 15, 63).
[4] The same end has been rather more mercifully achieved in earlier
periods by infanticide (see Westermarck, _Origin and Development of the
Moral Ideas_, Vol. I., Ch. 17). It must not be supposed that infanticide
was opposed to tenderness to children. Thus the Australian Dieyerie,
who practised infanticide, were kind to children, and a mother found
beating her child was herself beaten by her husband.
[5] See Havelock Ellis, _The Nationalisation of Health_.
[6] Similar results appear to follow in China where also the birth-rate
is very high and the mortality very great. It is stated that physical
development is much inferior and pathological defects more numerous
among Chinese as compared with American students. (_New York Medical
Journal_, Nov. 14th, 1914, p. 978.) The bad conditions which produce
death in the weakest produce deterioration in the survivors.
[7] The law is thus laid down by P. Leroy-Beaulieu (_La Question de la
Population_, 1913, p. 233): "The first degree of prosperity in a rude
population with few needs develops prolificness; a later degree of
prosperity, accompanied by all the feelings and ideas stimulated by
the development of education and a democratic environment, leads to
a gradual reduction of prolificness."
[8] This is too often forgotten. Birth control is a natural process,
and though in civilised men, endowed with high intelligence, it
necessarily works in some measure voluntarily and deliberately, it is
probable that it still also works, as in the evolution of the lower
animals, to some extent automatically. Sir Shirley Murphy (_Lancet_,
Aug. 10th, 1912), while admitting that intentional restriction has
been operative, remarks: "It does not appear to me that there is any
more reason for ignoring the likelihood that Nature has been largely
concerned in the reduction of births than for ignoring the effects of
Nature in reducing the death-rate. The decline in both has points of
resemblance. Both have been widely manifest over Europe, both have in
the main declined in the period of 1871-1880, and indeed both appear
to be behaving in like manner."
[9] I do not overlook the fact that the artificial clothing of primitive
man is in its origin mainly ornament, having myself insisted on that
fact in discussing this point in "The Evolution of Modesty" (_Studies
in the Psychology of Sex_, Vol. I.). It is to be remembered that, in
animals--and very conspicuously, for instance, in birds--natural
clothing is also largely ornament of secondary sexual significance.
[10] At the end of the eighteenth century there were in France four
children on the average to a family; a movement of rapid increase
in the population reached its climax in 1846; by 1860 the average
number of children to a family had slowly fallen to but little over
three. Broca, writing in 1867 ("Sur la Prétendue Dégénérescence de la
Population Francaise"), mentioned that the slow fall in the birth-rate
was only slightly due to prudent calculation and mainly to more general
causes such as delay in marriage.
[11] Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, Vol. VI., "Sex
in Relation to Society," Ch. XI., The Art of Love.
[12] The exact results are presented by F. Boas (abstract of Report on
_Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants_, Washington, 1911,
p. 57), who concludes that "the physical development of children, as
measured by stature, is the better the smaller the family."
[13] R.J. Ewart, "The Influence of Parental Age on Offspring," _Eugenics
Review_, Oct., 1911.
[14] In New Zealand the birth-rate is very low; but the death-rate of
children in the first year is only 58 per thousand as against 130 in
England.
[15] E.M. Elderton, _Report on the English Birth-rate_, Part I.,
1914. See also the collection of narratives of their experiences by
working-class mothers, published under the title of _Maternity_
(Women's Co-operative Guild, 1915).
[16] Flinders Petrie, _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_,
1906, p. 220.