THE MALE BIRTHRATE

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 80, 30 December 1918, Page 6

THE MALE BIRTHRATE

HOW IT CAN BE RAISED. (By Dr. Arabella Kenealy in London "Daily Mail/') '. The increase of male births during war—now exciting widespread interestis simply explained. / Because of men s greater risks to life, Nature provides that tu every 1000 girls born normally from 10-15 to 1051 boys are born. Our deplorable preponderance of women is 'aggravated by frustrating this important dispensation.

Tho sex offspring, is determined by the relative parental power of tho parents. When tho lather possesses greater constitutional or vital power, daughters predominate. When the mother possesses greater vital power eons are born. ' s -■ Men making greater efforts as breadwinners, women's power is- , moro conserved. Henco tho natural surplus of hoys. Tho lather being thus the parent of the-female child, so to speak, and the mother the pareut of the male, eacli sex becomes endowed with a degree of the characteristics of the other sex. Whereas, were inheritance from father to son and from mother to daughter, iriale nd ; female characteristics, instead of being blended in both sexes and valuably modifying and enriching one another; would have become so much exaggerated from generation to generation in the opposite sexes as to have produced tivo incomplete and lop-sided species.. Parental power. is not power available for output, however. It is power conserved, anil locked up in constitutioninvested vital capital, not vital income available for every-day expenditure. And this it is, as with iin.anrinl resources, that serves as heritage for offspring. But just as to meet an increase of d;iiy cash expenditure one must realise financial ■ investments, so to meet increased activities of brain ■ or body one must draw on constitutional capital—by converting vital investments into vital , currency. Now, the stress of. war falls mpst heavily on men, and to meet increased doiuiiiids they draw on their vital re6ervM. Hence the constitutional (and the parental) power'of men is impoverished by war conditions.

Women's vital (anil parental) power is diminished, too., by war activities, but in less degree. The parental power of women in general becoming thus relatively greater than men's, mole births increase. :

The strain—educational, athletic, and industrial—put of late years upon adolescent girls has progressively raised the femolc birth-rate by decreasing women's maternal power and thus increasing relatively the parental power of males. In the cultured classes particularly strenuous games , during; (he years of development, when vital investments are being made in them for the next generation, have so impoverished women's constitutional and maternal power as to cause a huge excess of girl-over-boy births. And of boys born, many are puny and weakly and more or less feebleDrained. An alarming increase of male infant mortality was coincident with the pre-war increase of girl births. ■

By forbidding all strenuous activities, social or athletic—but, particularly athletic—before and after marriage, .'[ have succeeded frequently in securing male offspring in patients whose stock had for generations .produced girl infants' exclusively.

This will not servo whei constitutional deterioration has occurred in vohien as the result of strenuous pursuits.

In the christening of vessels launched from the shipyards of Portland, Ore-' gon, loganberry juice is to be substituted for champagne. It would bo far better, eays an American commentator, to abandon the silly custom of breaking bottles containing anything, or devoid of contents, across the bows of vessels about to be shot from the. if sensible people must go about n change in this direction gradually, perhaps a bottle of loganberry juice may as well be used as any other commodity. But the proceeding, in any event, will involve wastage at a time when everybody is aslcod, unwilled to. argued with, cautioned, and warned, to save. Nurse J. fe'iinder.s, of the ■Melnwsinn Mission sloff, nnd formerly of the Pnlmeraton North Hospital, who arrived, by the Southern Cross jp "December fi, after nearly four years lit the Maravovo Station, is still at the Motuilii Quarantine Station, Auckland, having placed her services at the disposal of tho eick.