INSURING FEMALE LIVES.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume V, Issue 1019, 7 December 1883, Page 3

INSURING FEMALE LIVES.

According to an American paper, Dr Hammond, in a recent article, says that life insurance companies refuse to insure women because they cannot depend upon what women say of themselves. Whether female applicants for life insurance are more truthful than uiatei,fifpplicants is a question the answer to which must necessarily be largely a matter of opinion. They must be pretty untruthful if they are to contest the palm with men for prevarication. Dr Hammond’s statement was, however, weak in; tw.o respects. First, life insurance companies provide against untruthfulness in applicants by making the contract depend upon truthfulness for its validity ; and second, only a few women. The real difficulty with female insured lives is, that they have been taken upon the mortality tables for male live?, and during the a-fiffcqyjHgiages' there-is no correspond-’-fehcefltfetween this assumed mortality and the actual mortality. The arbitrary addition of one-half of one per cent upon the insurance made by some companies, only adds to the injustice and absurdity of the rate. The companies which have made the addition have lost money on women, while companies which have made no discrimination in rates have made money, The statistics of insured female lives in the United States we should consider of very slight importance were they not corroborated by more extended observations in England and Germany. Female lives have not had a fajfek'chjtnce here. It is, however, pfet{y clear that females live longer than f inales,; but that their superiority comes before twenty-five and after fifty. , And it is not untruthfulkills! them between these ages, but the fact that they are females and not males. As to the mortality from maternity we believe it has been greatly • exaggerated, : ahd notwithstanding the positive statement .of one of the interviewed that “ the mortality among American women incident to childbearing is frightful,” we believe that a healthy insurable woman is as likely to ■bear children and yet see a green old ■‘agohs -she’would be if she temained a spinster and avoided the perils about which men talk so much and know so little, i- . ■ •• - •