The Manawatu Herald. Thursday, August 1, 1912. MATERNITY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1077, 1 August 1912, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. Thursday, August 1, 1912. MATERNITY.

Thk maternity nurse has become necessary, because medical "science” has insisted on interference. The interference has come about because it is necessary for specialised interferes to make a living. In natural communities the cow has no place in the sustenance of a child, and there is no need for the midwife. Civilised people might revert to natural conditions to-morrow if it were permitted. The unfit would die, perhaps, as nature intended. Otherwise the world would proceed as usual, and there would be few problems. These are merely simple truths that no man can deny. Because almost every activity of now-a-days is unnatural, because we depend more and more on invented specialists, we look upon "humanitarian” politics as a necessary phase of the national life. Because of our sublime faith in man’s variation of natural laws, we become a toothless and perverse generation. We are as full of physical troubles as an egg is full of "meat.” Physical inability produces the whining navvy who protests that he is being badly done by because he has to work a third ot his time. This is the age of the feather bed, the period of the pill, the era of plasters, potions, and wild sprints for the doctor. The whole of the physical troubles of the people date from the cradle. Ninety-nine per cent, of children are born into the world with a perfect chance of survival to old age—to a survival with every faculty and every tooth intact. Because oi our artificiality ninety-nine per cent, of people die unnatural deaths, filled to the neck with drugs and helped out of the world with medicine. Irritant minerals take the place ol fresh air, sunshine and food. Stuffiness and ignorance is a fashion, and medical "science” does not cry out, because it earns its bread by the loss of instinct exhibited in every civilised nation. The annihilation as a force in New Zealand of the maternity nurse would throw the onus on the mothers of undertaking the natural duties of materuity, but it is inconceivable that a nation which has been reared for many years in artificiality would regard it as anything btr a national catastrophe. The human animal in igi2 is' precisely the human animal of 912. There is no essential difference cither in physical or mental ability. The difference is that the animal of 1912 has learned to lean heavily ou shib boleths, has pushed aside its instincts, has become enfeebled because it calls man and not nature to help it in the struggle for life. The cycles ol nature are irrevocable. Neglect of artificial methods have always led to revival of instinct. In times of great national emergencies, nature has reasserted itself, and the midwife and the apothecary have been unnecessary, because unavailable. In a country where mathematical experiments and artificial amelioration of natural conditions are attempted (because they please abnormal

sections of people), a reversal of self dependence, even in the matter of child-bearing , seems almost impossible. We see the result in the too large proportion of mentally unfit, in the appalling proportion of people who wear crockery instead of teeth, in the innumerable maladies of childhood, and in the general reliance on empirics, frauds, pakeha “tohungas,” and help from stronger relatives. The production of children is a matter in this country that must only be referred to with baited breath, and it is always considered a little indecent to mention procreation. No subject is so important or so avoided, and no perversion is so pronounced as the perversion of the procreative instinct. The State idea of keeping the cradle full is to create institutions that increase artificiality, and the number of women who incline to the unnatural and not to the natural, and who demand large wages for the assistance they give to artificiality. In countries which we despise—we will say China, Japan, Russia—there is no diminution of the birthrate, and no rush ot skilled mechanics to aid nature. In those countries motherhood is regarded as the highest aim ot woman. In New Zealand where a woman produces a child without recourse to two mechanicians she is regarded as a quite extraordinary person, who in fact may not be absolutely respectable. The idea of God looking after His own work is highly offensive to many folk.