Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1910. FALLING BIRTH-RATE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10120, 15 October 1910, Page 4

Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1910. FALLING BIRTH-RATE.

'■The falling birth-rate in New Zealand has been the subject of much concern during recent years. The cause is not difficult to trace, but the application I of a remedy is not by any means an easy matter. The decline in the birthrate is, unhappily, not confined to New Zealand alone. It has been a subject of, much discussion in the Old Country. The solution of the problem lias defied even the British Medical Association. At its recent meeting the relation between small families and increased activities on the part of the women was considered by some of the doctors. Dr. Fremantle, medical officer for Herts, remarked that there was serious danger in the fact that the nation was being stocked in an increasing degree j from its less prosperous classes. The principle of limiting families had spread from the upper to the middle classes and girls were undertaking pursuits and amusements that unfitted them for domestic duties. Woman's suffrage in any form, adi ded the doctor, must'be "profoundly inimical to the birth-rate." A lady who was present interjected that the birth-rate was rising in New Zealand, and Dr. Fremantle rather lamely said that he woidd be "pleased afterwards to explain the reason for the growing birth-rate in New Zealand, which was not as suggested." Several lady doctors presented the women's point of view. They said that increased muscular and mental development on the part of women meant the production of healthier children. Economic conditions pi'essed more hardly upon women than upon men, and if the nation wanted more babies and better children it must treat the whole problem as one of economics rather than medicine. Women were being brought into closer contact with industrial life and the burden of living, and they could not be expected to go on rearing children whose lot under present conditions would inevitably be hard. "Don't rush poor people to produce children under unfavourable circumstances,'' added one doctor.