THE BIRTH RATE.

Hokitika Guardian, 11 September 1924, Page 1

THE BIRTH RATE.

DISgiTKTING FEATURES. WELLINGTON, Sent. !>. “Chief among the disquieting leatii res affecting public health is the very low birth rate,” states Dr Yalintine, Director-General, ill his annual report, presented to Parliament today. Dr Valin tine regrets the difficulty of impressing oil mothers the fact that childbirth is not a disease but a normal physiological process. In 1923 the hirtli rate was 21.9-1, the lowest ever experienced with the exception of 1919, when the rate was 21.31 per 1000 of population. There were 27,907 living children registered last year, as against 29,000 the previous year. The highest rate of still-births yet recorded, 32 per 1009 of live births, is admittedly a mat ter for concern. On the other hand the crude dentil rate of 9.03 places New Zealand in a more favourable light, as does, indeed, its infant mortality of 13.8 per 1000 births.” Dr Truhy King’s comment is that: “We have in New Zealand an utterly unjustifiable still-born rate and infantile mortality rate within a week of birth, but the large number of survivors, more or less gravely damaged for life, involves really a much graver wrong. Obstetricians in general have always tended to make light ol birth injuries to a child, but such views are not seriously tenable in llie light of modern investigations and knowledge. The interest of tlie child has been strangely ignored when dealing with the saving of some immediate pain lr> the mother, and the hastening of delivery. In spite of a more than encouraging reduction in the total infantile death rate after one month, and in the death rate due to what was formerly the one great scourge of early life in New Zealand as elsewhere, vi/.., infantile diarrhoea, we still have to face the painful fact that our loss of mothers and babies, within a few weeks of childbirth, is still finite unjustifiably high and utterly out, ol proportion to the singularly low infantile death rate from the end of the first to the twelfth month. Alore than half our total infantile mortality actually occurs within eight days of birth, say 020 deaths out of a total of 1200 deaths in the course of a year. Nothing multi possibly bo more sijjjiiilieaiit and suggestive than this fact, coupled with our disproportionately hi'-di maternal death rate. Alothcr and child are indeed one and indivisible at Hie start. Anything that injures the mother injures and imperils her child.”

Dr ATilintine says he lias no doubt the attention the medical profession is giving to ibis question of maternal mortality will result in an appreciable lowering of tlie death rate among mothers, and also the high rate of still-births and the infant death rate under one month, to which il bears so close a relationship. The reports ol the Aledieal OlTiceis „f Health show that the Department lias been giving the question very eaicfu| attention and regulations gazetted for the conduct of private maternity hospitals should, if reasonably earned out, lutve a good effect.