STATE AND MARRIAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 January 1939, Page 6

STATE AND MARRIAGE

BRITISH PROFESSOR PREDICTS CONTROL.

The State control of all marriages within the next twenty-five years as a necessary meastire to preserve the quality of the race, is forecast, by Sir Farquhar Buzzard. Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, says the “Yorkshire Post."

Sir Farquhar was speaking on “Fitness and Eugenics" at the Ideal Home exhibition in the series of doctors' lectures organised by the British Medical zissocialion as a contribution to lhe National Fitness Campaign.

“The Slate interferes with the liberty of a criminal because he is harmful to ■ the community." he said. “There can be no doubt that the consequences of ill-advised marriages are equally damaging, much further reaching. and almost impossible to estimate.”

Discussing the need to raise the standard of national health. Sir Farquhar said the population might be divided into three categories. Perhaps 50 pei cent were individuals who might be regarded as of average or normal fitness. 20 per cent might be super-nor-mal. and 30 per cent subnormal. “Under present economic conditions," he continued, “the subnormal have every encouragement to produce large families, long-term endowment to finance research, and supernormal are charged with the burden of supporting the subnormal, and are tempted or even forced to remain sterile or limit the number of their children. “It does not require the brains of a senior wrangler to calculate the ultimate effect of such a system. We are confronted not only with a declining birth rate, already an established fact, but with tile prospect of a population in which the unfit will outnumber lhe fit. The proposals he ' put forward to: avert this danger were: An intensive study of human here-1 dity in a geographic:!ll.v limited area. 1 and a long, term cndowmeiil to finance research. The more general education of children in biology, the science of life, with r,pedal reieronco , lo heredity. The inlrodnetiun of form of statutory anlhorily for 'm..i | riage, involving an investigalion of the personal and tarnily health of tliej contracting parties. Some torm of normc encouragement towards raising

lil I’amily. “ The medical man." he summed up. “camml be blind to lhe amount of illii<\illli and unhappiness due to herediLii't caiiso::, mid therefore looks kiiigingly In lhe lime when more l.iiiiv, l<-dge of mi more intelligent apijhi.'_ition of eugenic principles cornmne to eliminate-one great source or human suffering.”