Читать книгу Women, Children, Love, and Marriage - C. Gasquoine Hartley - Страница 12

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It is generally admitted that there is much to be gloomy about in these days of bad trade and post-war morals. And yet, perhaps, the poor old world does improve in some respects.

One of the most hopeful signs of this improvement to me is the very widespread interest that has been taken of late in birth control. Conferences are held, law-suits are fought and won; pamphlets are written and in almost every town lectures are given, and everywhere groups of earnest-minded people come together to discuss and to learn. Our sense of responsibility has been quickened in connection with birth and the bringing a new life into the world. In a deeper and more practical way we have come to know that no child should be born unwanted.

Now, possibly all this suggests no very great moral advance to you. It may be that you regard it as wrong to regulate births in any way. Yet surely it is well for this difficult problem to be carefully considered in open discussion. To avoid error we must have knowledge. For myself, as I have listened to speakers or read of what is being done, though possibly I am in sharp opposition to much that is believed and advised, yet always I am glad when I reflect that only a little while ago the very mention of birth control would have been impossible at any public meeting, nor would any paper have noticed it.

Everywhere since the war the increased interest in the question has been astonishing. Is it, I have asked myself, that the terrible loss of life has forced us at last to have a deeper understanding of the value of life? Certainly all over the world women and men are beginning to understand the right of every child to be well-born.

The relations between the poverty of the family and its size must be considered in connection with this question. Much stress is also rightly laid on the injurious effect on the mother of continuous and unwilling child-bearing, and on the resulting terrible wastage of life in mis-carriages and still-births. Personally, I should always like to hear more of the effect on the children unfortunate enough to live. For the child is unfortunate who is born into a home unwanted by its mother.

To give life well it must be given gladly. There can be no deeper tragedy than an unwilling motherhood.

The moral and religious aspects of family limitation have to be considered. It needs to be emphasised how more and more religion to-day refuses to divorce the spiritual from the material necessities of man, and how it begins to appreciate that the bread-and-butter difficulties of life have the greatest effect on the moral character of the people.

If a criticism on the work of those who advocate birth control may be offered, it is that too much time is spent in saying what everyone agrees with. Propositions, which all who think at all practically accept, are gravely supported with elaborate arguments. More might be accomplished if these elementary questions were left and freer discussions given to the many grave problems which still await investigation. There are so many questions on which far more knowledge needs collecting before any definite conclusions of permanent value can be accepted.

Roughly classified, birth control needs to be studied from three different aspects:—

First, there is the effect upon the married couple.

Second, there is the effect upon the child.

And lastly, there is the effect of voluntary limitation of the birth-rate upon society.

In estimating the consequences to the man and the woman, it is impossible to neglect the psychological results.

The effect upon the mind is far stronger and more lasting than any more direct result. I mean, it is what the individual woman or man feels about limitation that is important for them. It is their own attitude to what they do that will mainly decide the results it will have. This is a question of the deepest complication. And much more knowledge is needed, and the greatest care is called for not to form hasty and unproved opinions. It is, I must insist, an individual question that can never be arbitrarilly decided, even by those competent to form a decision. That is why so much that is said, even by doctors who ought to know better, is so absurd.

Much easier to estimate is the effect upon the child. Here we seem to be on firmer ground. To save the unwanted child from being born or conceived by drunken or syphilitic parents is a work of such plain morality that there would appear to be no room for difference of opinion.

Yet the question is deeper and far more difficult than this; there are, indeed, a whole group of problems connected with it. There is, for instance, the case of the only child, who always suffers grave disadvantages, brought up in a home with adults.

Again the childless or one-child marriage is often not happy for those who love children. This is felt, in particular, when one partner desires children and the other refuses to have them born. And it must not be forgotten that all that affects the parents, must also have its results on any child that is born. Apart from economic necessities, the small, limited family is, in many ways, harder to bring up than the large family.

With regard to the effect of birth control on society, it is now becoming a familiar reflection that often those least fitted to carry out parental duties, because of faults of character or misfortune of circumstances, have the largest families.

Here the main problem is not so much to teach the mere knowledge of how families are to be limited as to induce that control and to stir up such desire as will lead to limitation being practised.

But of course, the alteration of the characters of men and women is a task of too great difficulty to be treated as a side issue.

Yet I would not end with any word of discouragement. As I started by saying, the mere consideration of these difficult questions in the broad light of day must be felt, by all of us who are old enough to remember the attitude in the past, as a wholesome sign of the times.

We care more, and very slowly we are growing more honest.