THE WICKEDNESS OF CREATING LARGE FAMILIES
The most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing
into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day
is breeding too many children. These statements may startle those who
have never made a thorough investigation of the problem. They are,
nevertheless, well considered, and the truth of them is abundantly
borne out by an examination of facts and conditions which are part of
everyday experience or observation.
The immorality of large families lies not only in their injury to the
members of those families but in their injury to society. If one were
asked offhand to name the greatest evil of the day one might, in the light
of one's education by the newspapers, or by agitators, make any one of a
number of replies. One might say prostitution, the oppression of labor,
child labor, or war. Yet the poverty and neglect which drives a girl into
prostitution usually has its source in a family too large to be properly
cared for by the mother, if the girl is not actually subnormal because her
mother bore too many children, and, therefore, the more likely to become a
prostitute. Labor is oppressed because it is too plentiful; wages go up
and conditions improve when labor is scarce. Large families make plentiful
labor and they also provide the workers for the child-labor factories as
well as the armies of unemployed. That population, swelled by
overbreeding, is a basic cause of war, we shall see in a later chapter.
Without the large family, not one of these evils could exist to any
considerable extent, much less to the extent that they exist to-day. The
large family--especially the family too large to receive adequate care--is
the one thing necessary to the perpetuation of these and other evils and
is therefore a greater evil than any one of them.
First of the manifold immoralities involved in the producing of a
large family is the outrage upon the womanhood of the mother. If no
mother bore children against her will or against her feminine
instinct, there would be few large families. The average mother of a
baby every year or two has been forced into unwilling motherhood, so
far as the later arrivals are concerned. It is not the less immoral
when the power which compels enslavement is the church, state or the
propaganda of well-meaning patriots clamoring against "race suicide."
The wrong is as great as if the enslaving force were the unbridled
passions of her husband. The wrong to the unwilling mother, deprived
of her liberty, and all opportunity of self-development, is in itself
enough to condemn large families as immoral.
The outrage upon the woman does not end there, however. Excessive
childbearing is now recognized by the medical profession as one of the
most prolific causes of ill health in women. There are in America
hundreds of thousands of women, in good health when they married, who
have within a few years become physical wrecks, incapable of mothering
their children, incapable of enjoying life.
"Every physician," writes Dr. Wm. J. Robinson in _Birth Control or The
Limitation of Offspring_, "knows that too frequent childbirth, nursing
and the sleepless nights that are required in bringing up a child
exhaust the vitality of thousands of mothers, make them prematurely
old, or turn them into chronic invalids."
The effect of the large family upon the father is only less disastrous
than it is upon the mother. The spectacle of the young man, happy in
health, strength and the prospect of a joyful love life, makes us
smile in sympathy. But this same young man ten years later is likely
to present a spectacle as sorry as it is familiar. If he finds that
the children come one after another at short intervals--so fast indeed
that no matter how hard he works, nor how many hours, he cannot keep
pace with their needs--the lover whom all the world loves will have
been converted into a disheartened, threadbare incompetent, whom all
the world pities or despises. Instead of being the happy, competent
father, supporting one or two children as they should be supported, he
is the frantic struggler against the burden of five or six, with the
tragic prospect of several more. The ranks of the physically weakened,
mentally dejected and spiritually hopeless young fathers of large
families attest all too strongly the immorality of the system.
If its effects upon the mother and the wage-earning father were not
enough to condemn the large family as an institution, its effects upon
the child would make the case against it conclusive. In the United
States, some 300,000 children under one year of age die each twelve
months. Approximately ninety per cent of these deaths are directly or
indirectly due to malnutrition, to other diseased conditions resulting
from poverty, or to excessive childbearing by the mother.
The direct relationship between the size of the wage-earner's family
and the death of children less than one year old has been revealed by
a number of studies of the infant death rate. One of the clearest of
these was that made by Arthur Geissler among miners and cited by Dr.
Alfred Ploetz before the First International Eugenic Congress.
[Footnote: Problems in Eugenics, London, 1913.] Taking 26,000 births
from unselected marriages, and omitting families having one and two
children, Geissler got this result:
Deaths During
First Year.
1st born children 23%
2nd " " 20%
3rd " " 21%
4th " " 23%
5th " " 26%
6th " " 29%
7th " " 31%
8th " " 33%
9th " " 36%
10th " " 41%
11th " " 51%
12th " " 60%
Thus we see that the second and third children have a very good chance
to live through the first year. Children arriving later have less and
less chance, until the twelfth has hardly any chance at all to live
twelve months.
This does not complete the case, however, for those who care to go
farther into the subject will find that many of those who live for a
year die before they reach the age of five.
Many, perhaps, will think it idle to go farther in demonstrating the
immorality of large families, but since there is still an abundance of
proof at hand, it may be offered for the sake of those who find
difficulty in adjusting old-fashioned ideas to the facts. The most
merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members
is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant
mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the
ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the
health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes
of large families reared in poverty further contribute to this
condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor, so that
the child who must struggle for health in competition with other
members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to
meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted
for.
The probability of a child handicapped by a weak constitution, an
overcrowded home, inadequate food and care, and possibly a deficient
mental equipment, winding up in prison or an almshouse, is too evident
for comment. Every jail, hospital for the insane, reformatory and
institution for the feebleminded cries out against the evils of too
prolific breeding among wage-workers.
We shall see when we come to consider the relation of voluntary
motherhood to the rights of labor and to the prevention of war that
the large family of the worker makes possible his oppression, and that
it also is the chief cause of such human holocausts as the one just
closed after the four and a half bloodiest years in history. No such
extended consideration is necessary to indicate from what source the
young slaves in the child-labor factories come. They come from large
impoverished families--from families in which the older children must
put their often feeble strength to the task of supporting the younger.
The immorality of bringing large families into the world is recognized
by those who are combatting the child-labor evil. Mary Alden Hopkins,
writing in Harper's Weekly in 1915, quotes Owen R. Lovejoy, general
secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, as follows:
"How many are too many? ... Any more than the mother can look after
and the father make a living for ... Under present conditions as soon
as there are too many children for the father to feed, some of them go
to work in the mine or factory or store or mill near by. In doing
this, they not only injure their tender growing bodies, but
indirectly, they drag down the father's wage ... The home becomes a
mere rendezvous for the nightly gathering of bodies numb with
weariness and minds drunk with sleep." And if they survive the
factory, they marry to perpetuate and multiply their ignorance,
weakness and diseases.
What have large families to do with prostitution? Ask anyone who has
studied the problem. The size of the family has a direct bearing on
the lives of thousands of girls who are living in prostitution.
Poverty, lack of care and training during adolescence, overcrowded
housing conditions which accompany large families are universally
recognized causes of "waywardness" in girls. Social workers have cried
out in vain against these conditions, pointing to their inevitable
results.
In the foreword to "Downward Paths," A. Maude Royden says: "Intimately
connected with this aspect of the question is that of home and
housing, especially of the child. The age at which children are first
corrupted is almost incredibly early, until we consider the nature of
the surroundings in which they grow up. Insufficient space, over-crowding,
the herding together of all ages and both sexes--these things break
down the barriers of a natural modesty and reserve. Where decency
is practically impossible, unchastity will follow, and follow
almost as a matter of course." And the child who has no place to play
except in the street, who lacks mother care, whose chief emotional
experience is the longing for the necessities of life? We know too
well the end of the sorry tale. The forlorn figures of the shadows
where lurk the girls who sell themselves that they may eat and be
clothed rise up to damn the moral dogmatists, who mouth their
sickening exhortations to the wives and mothers of the workers to
breed, breed, breed.
The evidence is conclusive as regards the large family of the
wage-worker. Social workers, physicians and reformers cry out to stop the
breeding of these, who must exist in want until they become permanent
members of the ranks of the unfit.
But what of the family of the wealthy or the merely well-to-do? It is
among these classes that we find the women who have attained to
voluntary motherhood. It is to these classes, too, that the "race
suicide" alarmists have from time to time addressed specially
emphasized pleas for more children. The advocates of more prolific
breeding urge that these same women have more intelligence, better
health, more time to care for children and more means to support them.
They therefore declare that it is the duty of such women to populate
the land with strong, healthy, intelligent offspring--to bear children
in great numbers.
It is high time to expose the sheer foolishness of this argument. The
first absurdity is that the women who are in comfortable circumstances
could continue to be cultured and of social value if they were the
mothers of large families. Neither could they maintain their present
standard of health nor impart it to their children.
While it is true that they have resources at their command which ease
the burden of child-bearing and child rearing immeasurably, it is also
true that the wealthy mother, as well as the poverty-stricken mother,
must give from her own system certain elements which it takes time to
replace. Excessive childbearing is harder on the woman who lacks care
than on the one who does not, but both alike must give their bodies
time to recover from the strain of childbearing. If the women in
fortunate circumstances gave ear to the demand of masculine
"race-suicide"[A] fanatics they could within a few years be down to the
condition of their sisters who lack time to cultivate their talents
and intellects. A vigorous, intelligent, fruitfully cultured
motherhood is all but impossible if no restriction is placed by that
motherhood upon the number of children.
[Footnote A: Interesting and perhaps surprising light is thrown upon
the origin of the term "race suicide" by the following quotation from
an article by Harold Bolce in the Cosmopolitan (New York) for May,
1909:
"'The sole effect of prolificacy is to fill the cemeteries with tiny
graves, sacrifices of the innocents to the Moloch of immoderate
maternity.' Thus insists Edward A. Ross, Professor of Sociology in the
University of Wisconsin; and he protests against the 'dwarfing of
women and the cheapening of men' as regards the restriction of the
birth rate as a 'movement at bottom salutary, and its evils minor,
transient and curable.' This is virile gospel, and particularly
significant coming from the teacher who invented the term 'race
suicide,' which many have erroneously attributed to Mr. Roosevelt."]
Wage-workers and salaried people have a vital interest in the size of
the families of those better situated in life. Large families among
the rich are immoral not only because they invade the natural right of
woman to the control of her own body, to self-development and to
self-expression, but because they are oppressive to the poorer elements of
society. If the upper and middle classes of society had kept pace with
the poorer elements of society in reproduction during the past fifty
years, the working class to-day would be forced down to the level of
the Chinese whose wage standard is said to be a few handfuls of rice a
day.
If these considerations are not enough to halt the masculine advocate
of large families who reminds us of the days of our mothers and
grandmothers, let it be remembered that bearing and rearing six or
eight children to-day is a far different matter from what it was in
the generations just preceding. Physically and nervously, the woman of
to-day is not fitted to bear children as frequently as was her mother
and her mother's mother. The high tension of modern life and the
complicating of woman's everyday existence have doubtless contributed
to this result. And who of us can say, until a careful scientific
investigation is made, how much the rapid development of tuberculosis
and other grave diseases, even among the well-nurtured, may be due to
the depletion of the physical capital of the unborn by the too
prolific childbearing of preceding generations of mothers?
The immorality of bringing into being a large family is a wrong-doing
shared by three--the mother, the father and society. Upon all three
falls the burden of guilt. It may be said for the mother and father
that they are usually ignorant. What shall be said of society? What
shall be said of us who permit outworn laws and customs to persist in
piling up the appalling sum of public expense, misery and spiritual
degradation? The indictment against the large unwanted family is
written in human woe. Who in the light of intelligent understanding
shall have the brazenness to stand up and defend it?
One thing we know--the woman who has escaped the chains of too great
reproductivity will never again wear them. The birth rate of the
wealthy and upper classes will never appreciably rise. The woman of
these classes is free of her most oppressive bonds. Being free, we
have a right to expect much of her. We expect her to give still
greater expression to her feminine spirit--we expect her to enrich the
intellectual, artistic, moral and spiritual life of the world. We
expect her to demolish old systems of morals, a degenerate prudery,
Dark-Age religious concepts, laws that enslave women by denying them
the knowledge of their bodies, and information as to contraceptives.
These must go to the scrapheap of vicious, cast-off things. Hers is
the power to send them there. Shall we look to her to strike the first
blow which shall wrench her sisters from the grip of the dead hand of
the past?