BIRTH CONTROL

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4821, 6 April 1925, Page 3

BIRTH CONTROL

EXPERIMENTAL MARRIAGES. STARTLING AMERICAN PROPOSAL. For a generation (says the “Daily Telegraph,” London) eminent Americans have been warning their country that it is parsing into alien hands. The old stocks of New England and Southern States have become less and less fertile. Western European blood under the American sky ceases to bo prolific, while immigrants of races which are on a lower level of comfort and culture exhibit in the new land all, or more than all, their old capacity for multiplication. So, as the last statement of the case puts it, if some means of increasing the birthrate of the older elements in the population is not found “the lower racejs will soon control the United States,”

But the remedy now proposed is startling. All marriages, it is suggested, should be experimental for a period of two years.’ If at the end rd that time no child has been born the marriage would be automatically dissolved. Whether the parties w«ould be at librety to marry each other again does not appear. It would seem reasonable, but with these proposals to manipulate the birth rate nothing i« certain. Perhaps a couple divorced for childlessness would be thereafter within the forbidden degrees.

The' most remarkable thing about the scheme is that a number of people of importance seem to have taken, it seriously. Of course, it is not new. Probably no one so late ill the world’s history will ever invent any variation oil marriage w’hich has not already been in fashion somewhere. From the dawn of time childlessness has been held to justify a man in acquiring another wife, with or without the elimination of the first. But m these feminist United States such barbaric doctrines ought not .to be in favour. It is true that the wife of the gentleman who devised the scheme of automatic divorce has pointed out to him that by his own principles their marriage was extinct some time since. Strange to say, this has not induced him to recant. The lady’is point is that their first child was not born till they had been married more than two years. Whether she has other reasons for objecting to the scheme does not appear. But all the opnosition seems chiefly concerned with the time limit. If brides and bridegrooms were allowed five years to produce! a child before the decree became absolute the scheme, it seems to be thought, would do very well. We venture to predict that it would do nothing at all. People who want children would still, in general, have them: People who did not w’ould still, generally, do without. The forces, whatever they are, which govern the ripe and fall of birth rates never have been, and never will be, controlled by legislation.

The problem of the United States is, we suspect, not fundamentally-racial. The classes with a small birth ratfe arc those which are comfortable. The classes with a low standard of comfort are those with a high standard of families. The phenomenon is observed in countries which have no racial complications. And a little study of hfetory will suggest, that whether by natural law or design, when a nation is-careful of health and of material well-being, its blrtn rale is apt to be small.