CHAPTER XII.
THE SCIENCE OF PROCREATION.
The Relationship of the Science of Procreation to the Art of Love—Sexual
Desire and Sexual Pleasure as the Conditions of Conception—Reproduction
Formerly Left to Caprice and Lust—The Question of Procreation as a
Religious Question—The Creed of Eugenics—Ellen Key and Sir Francis
Galton—Our Debt to Posterity—The Problem of Replacing Natural
Selection—The Origin and Development of Eugenics—The General Acceptance
of Eugenical Principles To-day—The Two Channels by Which Eugenical
Principles are Becoming Embodied in Practice—The Sense of Sexual
Responsibility in Women—The Rejection of Compulsory Motherhood—The
Privilege of Voluntary Motherhood—Causes of the Degradation of
Motherhood—The Control of Conception—Now Practiced by the Majority of
the Population in Civilized Countries—The Fallacy of "Racial
Suicide"—Are Large Families a Stigma of Degeneration?—Procreative
Control the Outcome of Natural and Civilized Progress—The Growth of
Neo-Malthusian Beliefs and Practices—Facultative Sterility as Distinct
from Neo-Malthusianism—The Medical and Hygienic Necessity of Control of
Conception—Preventive Methods—Abortion—The New Doctrine of the Duty to
Practice Abortion—How Far is this Justifiable?—Castration as a Method of
Controlling Procreation—Negative Eugenics and Positive Eugenics—The
Question of Certificates for Marriage—The Inadequacy of Eugenics by Act
of Parliament—The Quickening of the Social Conscience in Regard to
Heredity—Limitations to the Endowment of Motherhood—The Conditions
Favorable to Procreation—Sterility—The Question of Artificial
Fecundation—The Best Age of Procreation—The Question of Early
Motherhood—The Best Time for Procreation—The Completion of the Divine
Cycle of Life.
We have seen that the art of love has an independent and amply justifiable
right to existence apart, altogether, from procreation. Even if we still
believed—as all men must once have believed and some Central Australians
yet believe[421]—that sexual intercourse has no essential connection with
the propagation of the race it would have full right to existence. In its
finer manifestations as an art it is required in civilization for the full
development of the individual, and it is equally required for that
stability of relationships which is nearly everywhere regarded as a demand
of social morality.
When we now turn to the second great constitutional factor of marriage,
procreation, the first point we encounter is that the art of love here
also has its place. In ancient times the sexual congruence of any man with
any woman was supposed to be so much a matter of course that all questions
of love and of the art of love could be left out of consideration. The
propagative act might, it was thought, be performed as impersonally, as
perfunctorily, as the early Christian Fathers imagined it had been
performed in Paradise. That view is no longer acceptable. It fails to
commend itself to men, and still less to women. We know that in
civilization at all events—and it is often indeed the same among
savages—erethism is not always easy between two persons selected at
random, nor even when they are more specially selected. And we also know,
on the authority of very distinguished gynæcologists, that it is not in
very many cases sufficient even to effect coitus, it is also necessary to
excite orgasm, if conception is to be achieved.
Many primitive peoples, as well as the theologians of the Middle
Ages, have believed that sexual excitement on the woman's part is
necessary to conception, though they have sometimes mixed up that
belief with false science and mere superstition. The belief
itself is supported by some of the most cautious and experienced
modern gynæcologists. Thus, Matthews Duncan (in his lectures on
Sterility in Women) argued that the absence of sexual desire in
women, and the absence of pleasure in the sexual act, are
powerful influences making for sterility. He brought forward a
table based on his case-books, showing that of nearly four
hundred sterile women, only about one-fourth experienced sexual
desire, while less than half experienced pleasure in the sexual
act. In the absence, however, of a corresponding table concerning
fertile women, nothing is hereby absolutely proved, and, at most,
only a probability established.
Kisch, more recently (in his Sexual Life of Woman), has dealt
fully with this question, and reaches the conclusion that it is
"extremely probable" that the active erotic participation of the
woman in coitus is an important link in the chain of conditions
producing conception. It acts, he remarks, in either or both of
two ways, by causing reflex changes in the cervical secretions,
and so facilitating the passage of the spermatozoa, and by
causing reflex erectile changes in the cervix itself, with slight
descent of the uterus, so rendering the entrance of the semen
easier. Kisch refers to the analogous fact that the first
occurrence of menstruation is favored by sexual excitement.
Some authorities go so far as to assert that, until voluptuous
excitement occurs in women, no impregnation is possible. This
statement seems too extreme. It is true that the occurrence of
impregnation during sleep, or in anæsthesia, cannot be opposed to
it, for we know that the unconsciousness of these states by no
means prevents the occurrence of complete sexual excitement. We
cannot fail, however, to connect the fact that impregnation
frequently fails to occur for months and even years after
marriage, with the fact that sexual pleasure in coitus on the
wife's part also frequently fails to occur for a similar period.
"Of all human instincts," Pinard has said,[422] "that of reproduction is
the only one which remains in the primitive condition and has received no
education. We procreate to-day as they procreated in the Stone Age. The
most important act in the life of man, the sublimest of all acts since it
is that of his reproduction, man accomplishes to-day with as much
carelessness as in the age of the cave-man." And though Pinard himself, as
the founder of puericulture, has greatly contributed to call attention to
the vast destinies that hang on the act of procreation, there still
remains a lamentable amount of truth in this statement. "Future
generations," writes Westermarck in his great history of moral ideas,[423]
"will probably with a kind of horror look back at a period when the most
important, and in its consequences the most far-reaching, function which
has fallen to the lot of man was entirely left to individual caprice and
lust."
We are told in his Table Talk, that the great Luther was accustomed to
say that God's way of making man was very foolish ("sehr närrisch"), and
that if God had deigned to take him into His counsel he would have
strongly advised Him to make the whole human race, as He made Adam, "out
of earth." And certainly if applied to the careless and reckless manner in
which procreation in Luther's day, as still for the most part in our own,
was usually carried out there was sound common sense in the Reformer's
remarks. If that is the way procreation is to be carried on, it would be
better to create and mould every human being afresh out of the earth; in
that way we could at all events eliminate evil heredity. It was, however,
unjust to place the responsibility on God. It is men and women who breed
the people that make the world good or bad. They seek to put the evils of
society on to something outside themselves. They see how large a
proportion of human beings are defective, ill-conditioned, anti-social,
incapable of leading a whole and beautiful human life. In old theological
language it was often said that such were "children of the Devil," and
Luther himself was often ready enough to attribute the evil of the world
to the direct interposition of the Devil. Yet these ill-conditioned people
who clog the wheels of society are, after all, in reality the children of
Man. The only Devil whom we can justly invoke in this matter is Man.
The command "Be fruitful and multiply," which the ancient Hebrews put into
the mouth of their tribal God, was, as Crackanthorpe points out,[424] a
command supposed to have been uttered when there were only eight persons
in the world. If the time should ever again occur when the inhabitants of
the world could be counted on one's fingers, such an injunction, as
Crackanthorpe truly observes, would again be reasonable. But we have to
remember that to-day humanity has spawned itself over the world in
hundreds and even thousands of millions of creatures, a large proportion
of whom, as is but too obvious, ought never to have been born at all, and
the voice of Jehovah is now making itself heard through the leaders of
mankind in a very different sense.
It is not surprising that as this fact tends to become generally
recognized, the question of the procreation of the race should gain a new
significance, and even tend to take on the character of a new religious
movement. Mere morality can never lead us to concern ourselves with the
future of the race, and in the days of old, men used to protest against
the tendency to subordinate the interests of religion to the claims of
"mere morality." There was a sound natural instinct underlying that
protest, so often and so vigorously made by Christianity, and again
revived to-day in a more intelligent form. The claim of the race is the
claim of religion. We have to beware lest we subordinate that claim to our
moralities. Moralities are, indeed, an inevitable part of our social order
from which we cannot escape; every community must have its mores. But we
are not entitled to make a fetich of our morality, sacrificing to it the
highest interests entrusted to us. The nations which have done so have
already signed their own death-warrant.[425] From this point of view, the
whole of Christianity, rightly considered, with its profound conviction of
the necessity for forethought and preparation for the life hereafter, has
been a preparation for eugenics, a schoolmaster to discipline within us a
higher ideal than itself taught, and we cannot therefore be surprised at
the solidity of the basis on which eugenical conceptions of life are
developing.
The most distinguished pioneers of the new movement of devotion
to the creation of the race seem independently to have realized
its religious character. This attitude is equally marked in Ellen
Key and Francis Galton. In her Century of the Child (English
translation, 1909), Ellen Key entirely identifies herself with
the eugenic movement. "It is only a question of time," she
elsewhere writes (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 445), "when the
attitude of society towards a sexual union will depend not on the
form of the union, but on the value of the children created. Men
and women will then devote the same religious earnestness to the
psychic and physical perfectioning of this sexual task as
Christians have devoted to the salvation of their souls."
Sir Francis Galton, writing a few years later, but without doubt
independently, in 1905, on "Restrictions in Marriage," and
"Eugenics as a Factor in Religion" (Sociological Papers of the
Sociological Society, vol. ii, pp. 13, 53), remarks: "Religious
precepts, founded on the ethics and practice of older days,
require to be reinterpreted, to make them conform to the needs of
progressive nations. Ours are already so far behind modern
requirements that much of our practice and our profession cannot
be reconciled without illegitimate casuistry. It seems to me
that few things are more needed by us in England than a revision
of our religion, to adapt it to the intelligence and needs of
this present time.... Evolution is a grand phantasmagoria, but it
assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge
that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small
measure, capable of guiding its course. Man has the power of
doing this largely, so far as the evolution of humanity is
concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution
of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the
earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be
recognizable from a distance as great as that of the moon.
Eugenics is a virile creed, full of hopefulness, and appealing to
many of the noblest feelings of our nature."
As will always happen in every great movement, a few fanatics
have carried into absurdity the belief in the supreme religious
importance of procreation. Love, apart from procreation, writes
one of these fanatics, Vacher de Lapouge, in the spirit of some
of the early Christian Fathers (see ante p. 509), is an
aberration comparable to sadism and sodomy. Procreation is the
only thing that matters, and it must become "a legally prescribed
social duty" only to be exercised by carefully selected persons,
and forbidden to others, who must, by necessity, be deprived of
the power of procreation, while abortion and infanticide must,
under some circumstances, become compulsory. Romantic love will
disappear by a process of selection, as also will all religion
except a new form of phallic worship (G. Vacher de Lapouge, "Die
Crisis der Sexuellen Moral," Politisch Anthropologische Revue,
No. 8, 1908). It is sufficient to point out that love is, and
always must be, the natural portal to generation. Such excesses
of procreative fanaticism cannot fail to occur, and they render
the more necessary the emphasis which has here been placed on the
art of love.
"What has posterity done for me that I should do anything for posterity?"
a cynic is said to have asked. The answer is very simple. The human race
has done everything for him. All that he is, and can be, is its creation;
all that he can do is the result of its laboriously accumulated
traditions. It is only by working towards the creation of a still better
posterity, that he can repay the good gifts which the human race has
brought him.[426] Just as, within the limits of this present life, many
who have received benefits and kindnesses they can never repay to the
actual givers, find a pleasure in vicariously repaying the like to
others, so the heritage we have received from our ascendents we can never
repay, save by handing it on in a better form to our descendants.
It is undoubtedly true that the growth of eugenical ideals has not been,
for the most part, due to religious feeling. It has been chiefly the
outcome of a very gradual, but very comprehensive, movement towards social
amelioration, which has been going on for more than a century, and which
has involved a progressive effort towards the betterment of all the
conditions of life. The ideals of this movement were proclaimed in the
eighteenth century, they began to find expression early in the nineteenth
century, in the initiation of the modern system of sanitation, in the
growth of factory legislation, in all the movements which have been borne
onwards by socialism hand in hand with individualism. The inevitable
tendency has been slowly towards the root of the matter; it began to be
seen that comparatively little can be effected by improving the conditions
of life of adults; attention began to be concentrated on the child, on the
infant, on the embryo in its mother's womb, and this resulted in the
fruitful movement of puericulture inspired by Pinard, and finally the
problem is brought to its source at the point of procreation, and the
regulation of sexual selection between stocks and between individuals as
the prime condition of life. Here we have the science of eugenics which
Sir Francis Galton has done so much to make a definite, vital, and
practical study, and which in its wider bearings he defines as "the
science which deals with those social eugenics that influence, mentally or
physically, the racial qualities of future generations." In its largest
aspect, eugenics is, as Galton has elsewhere said, man's attempt "to
replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and
not less effective."
In the last chapter of his Memories of My Life (1908), on "Race
Improvement," Sir Francis Galton sets forth the origin and
development of his conception of the science of eugenics. The
term, "eugenics," he first used in 1884, in his Human Faculty,
but the conception dates from 1865, and even earlier. Galton has
more recently discussed the problems of eugenics in papers read
before the Sociological Society (Sociological Papers, vols. i
and ii, 1905), in the Herbert Spencer Lecture on "Probability the
Foundation of Eugenics," (1907), and elsewhere. Galton's numerous
memoirs on this subject have now been published in a collected
form by the Eugenics Education Society, which was established in
1907, to further and to popularize the eugenical attitude towards
social questions; The Eugenics Review is published by this
Society. On the more strictly scientific side, eugenic studies
are carried on in the Eugenics Laboratory of the University of
London, established by Sir Francis Galton, and now working in
connection with Professor Karl Pearson's biometric laboratory, in
University College. Much of Professor Pearson's statistical work
in this and allied directions, is the elaboration of ideas and
suggestions thrown out by Galton. See, e.g., Karl Pearson's
Robert Boyle Lecture, "The Scope and Importance to the State of
the Science of National Eugenics" (1907). Biometrika, edited by
Karl Pearson in association with other workers, contains numerous
statistical memoirs on eugenics. In Germany, the Archiv für
Rassen und Gesellschafts-biologie, and the
Politisch-Anthropologische Revue, are largely occupied with
various aspects of such subjects, and in America, The Popular
Science Monthly from time to time, publishes articles which have
a bearing on eugenics.
At one time there was a tendency to scoff, or to laugh, at the eugenic
movement. It was regarded as an attempt to breed men as men breed animals,
and it was thought a sufficiently easy task to sweep away this new
movement with the remark that love laughs at bolts and bars. It is now
beginning to be better understood. None but fanatics dream of abolishing
love in order to effect pairing by rule. It is merely a question of
limiting the possible number of mates from whom each may select a partner,
and that, we must remember, has always been done even by savages, for, as
it has been said, "eugenics is the oldest of the sciences." The question
has merely been transformed. Instead of being limited mechanically by
caste, we begin to see that the choice of sexual mates must be limited
intelligently by actual fitness. Promiscuous marriages have never been the
rule; the possibility of choice has always been narrow, and the most
primitive peoples have exerted the most marked self-restraint. It is not
so merely among remote races but among our own European ancestors.
Throughout the whole period of Catholic supremacy the Canon law
multiplied the impediments to matrimony, as by ordaining that
consanguinity to the fourth degree (third cousins), as well as spiritual
relationship, is an impediment, and by such arbitrary prohibitions limited
the range of possible mates at least as much as it would be limited by the
more reasonable dictates of eugenic considerations.
At the present day it may be said that the principle of the voluntary
control of procreation, not for the selfish ends of the individual, but in
order to extinguish disease, to limit human misery, and to raise the
general level of humanity by substituting the ideal of quality for the
vulgar ideal of mere quantity, is now generally accepted, alike by medical
pathologists, embryologists and neurologists, and by sociologists and
moralists.
It would be easy to multiply quotations from distinguished
authorities on this point. Thus, Metchnikoff points out (Essais
Optimistes, p. 419) that orthobiosis seems to involve the
limitation of offspring in the fight against disease. Ballantyne
concludes his great treatise on Antenanal Pathology with the
statement that "Eugenics" or well-begetting, is one of the
world's most pressing problems. Dr. Louise Robinovitch, the
editor of the Journal of Mental Pathology, in a brilliant and
thoughtful paper, read before the Rome Congress of Psychology in
1905, well spoke in the same sense: "Nations have not yet
elevated the energy of genesic function to the dignity of an
energy. Other energies known to us, even of the meanest grade,
have long since been wisely utilized, and their activities based
on the principle of the strictest possible economy. This economic
utilization has been brought about, not through any enforcement
of legislative restrictions, but through steadily progressive
human intelligence. Economic handling of genesic function will,
like the economic function of other energies, come about through
a steady and progressive intellectual development of nations."
"There are circumstances," says C. H. Hughes, ("Restricted
Procreation," Alienist and Neurologist, May, 1908), "under
which the propagation of a human life may be as gravely criminal
as the taking of a life already begun."
From the general biological, as well as from the sociological
side, the acceptance of the same standpoint is constantly
becoming more general, for it is recognized as the inevitable
outcome of movements which have long been in progress.
"Already," wrote Haycraft (Darwinism and Race Progress, p.
160), referring to the law for the prevention of cruelty to
children, "public opinion has expressed itself in the public
rule that a man and woman, in begetting a child, must take upon
themselves the obligation and responsibility of seeing that that
child is not subjected to cruelty and hardship. It is but one
step more to say that a man and a woman shall be under obligation
not to produce children, when it is certain that, from their want
of physique, they will have to undergo suffering, and will keep
up but an unequal struggle with their fellows." Professor J.
Arthur Thomson, in his volume on Heredity (1908), vigorously
and temperately pleads (p. 528) for rational methods of eugenics,
as specially demanded in an age like our own, when the unfit have
been given a better chance of reproduction than they have ever
been given in any other age. Bateson, again, referring to the
growing knowledge of heredity, remarks (Mendel's Principles of
Heredity, 1909, p. 305): "Genetic knowledge must certainly lead
to new conceptions of justice, and it is by no means impossible
that, in the light of such knowledge, public opinion will welcome
measures likely to do more for the extinction of the criminal and
the degenerate than has been accomplished by ages of penal
enactment." Adolescent youths and girls, said Anton von Menger,
in his last book, the pregnant Neue Sittenlehre (1905), must be
taught that the production of children, under certain
circumstances, is a crime; they must also be taught the voluntary
restraint of conception, even in health; such teaching, Menger
rightly added, is a necessary preliminary to any legislation in
this direction.
Of recent years, many books and articles have been devoted to the
advocacy of eugenic methods. Mention may be made, for instance,
of Population and Progress (1907), by Montague Crackanthorpe,
President of the Eugenics Education Society. See also, Havelock
Ellis, "Eugenics and St. Valentine," Nineteenth Century and
After, May, 1906. It may be mentioned that nearly thirty years
ago, Miss J. H. Clapperton, in her Scientific Meliorism (1885,
Ch. XVII), pointed out that the voluntary restraint of
procreation by Neo-Malthusian methods, apart from merely
prudential motives, there clearly recognized, is "a new key to
the social position," and a necessary condition for "national
regeneration." Professor Karl Pearson's Groundwork of Eugenics,
(1909) is, perhaps, the best brief introduction to the subject.
Mention may also be made of Dr. Saleeby's Parenthood and Race
Culture (1909), written in a popular and enthusiastic manner.
How widely the general principles of eugenics are now accepted as
the sound method of raising the level of the human race, was well
shown at a meeting of the Sociological Society, in 1905, when,
after Sir Francis Galton had read papers on the question, the
meeting heard the opinions of numerous sociologists, economists,
biologists, and well-known thinkers in various lands, who were
present, or who had sent communications. Some twenty-one
expressed more or less unqualified approval, and only three or
four had objections to offer, mostly on matters of detail
(Sociological Papers, published by the Sociological Society,
vol. ii, 1905).
If we ask by what channels this impulse towards the control of procreation
for the elevation of the race is expressing itself in practical life, we
shall scarcely fail to find that there are at least two such channels: (1)
the growing sense of sexual responsibility among women as well as men, and
(2) the conquest of procreative control which has been achieved in recent
years, by the general adoption of methods for the prevention of
conception.
It has already been necessary in a previous chapter to discuss the
far-reaching significance of woman's personal responsibility as an element
in the modification of the sexual life of modern communities. Here it need
only be pointed out that the autonomous authority of a woman over her own
person, in the sexual sphere, involves on her part a consent to the act of
procreation which must be deliberate. We are apt to think that this is a
new and almost revolutionary demand; it is, however, undoubtedly a
natural, ancient, and recognized privilege of women that they should not
be mothers without their own consent. Even in the Islamic world of the
Arabian Nights, we find that high praise is accorded to the "virtue and
courage" of the woman who, having been ravished in her sleep, exposed, and
abandoned on the highway, the infant that was the fruit of this
involuntary union, "not wishing," she said, "to take the responsibility
before Allah of a child that had been born without my consent."[427] The
approval with which this story is narrated clearly shows that to the
public of Islam it seemed entirely just and humane that a woman should not
have a child, except by her own deliberate will. We have been accustomed
to say in later days that the State needs children, and that it is the
business and the duty of women to supply them. But the State has no more
right than the individual to ravish a woman against her will. We are
beginning to realize that if the State wants children it must make it
agreeable to women to produce them, as under natural and equitable
conditions it cannot fail to be. "The women will solve the question of
mankind," said Ibsen in one of his rare and pregnant private utterances,
"and they will do it as mothers." But it is unthinkable that any question
should ever be solved by a helpless, unwilling, and involuntary act which
has not even attained to the dignity of animal joy.
It is sometimes supposed, and even assumed, that the demand of
women that motherhood must never be compulsory, means that they
are unwilling to be mothers on any terms. In a few cases that may
be so, but it is certainly not the case as regards the majority
of sane and healthy women in any country. On the contrary, this
demand is usually associated with the desire to glorify
motherhood, if not, indeed, even with the thought of extending
motherhood to many who are to-day shut out from it. "It seems to
me," wrote Lady Henry Somerset, some years ago ("The Welcome
Child," Arena, April, 1895), "that life will be dearer and
nobler the more we recognize that there is no indelicacy in the
climax and crown of creative power, but, rather, that it is the
highest glory of the race. But if voluntary motherhood is the
crown of the race, involuntary compulsory motherhood is the very
opposite.... Only when both man and woman have learned that the
most sacred of all functions given to women must be exercised by
the free will alone, can children be born into the world who have
in them the joyous desire to live, who claim that sweetest
privilege of childhood, the certainty that they can expand in the
sunshine of the love which is their due." Ellen Key, similarly,
while pointing out (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, pp. 14, 265) that the
tyranny of the old Protestant religious spirit which enjoined on
women unlimited submission to joyless motherhood within "the
whited sepulchre of marriage" is now being broken, exalts the
privileges of voluntary motherhood, while admitting that there
may be a few exceptional cases in which women may withdraw
themselves from motherhood for the sake of the other demands of
their personality, though, "as a general rule, the woman who
refuses motherhood in order to serve humanity, is like a soldier
who prepares himself on the eve of battle for the forthcoming
struggle by opening his veins." Helene Stöcker, likewise, reckons
motherhood as one of the demands, one of the growing demands
indeed, which women now make. "If, to-day," she says (in the
Preface to Liebe und die Frauen, 1906), "all the good things of
life are claimed even for women—intellectual training, pecuniary
independence, a happy vocation in life, a respected social
position—and at the same time, as equally matter-of-course, and
equally necessary, marriage and child, that demand no longer
sounds, as it sounded a few years ago, the voice of a preacher in
the wilderness."
The degradation to which motherhood has, in the eyes of many,
fallen, is due partly to the tendency to deprive women of any
voice in the question, and partly to what H. G. Wells calls
(Socialism and the Family, 1906) "the monstrous absurdity of
women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and
rearing children, in their spare time, as it were, while they
'earn their living' by contributing some half mechanical element
to some trivial industrial product." It would be impracticable,
and even undesirable, to insist that married women should not be
allowed to work, for a work in the world is good for all. It is
estimated that over thirty per cent. of the women workers in
England are married or widows (James Haslam, Englishwoman,
June, 1909), and in Lancashire factories alone, in 1901, there
were 120,000 married women employed. But it would be easily
possible for the State to arrange, in its own interests, that a
woman's work at a trade should always give way to her work as a
mother. It is the more undesirable that married women should be
prohibited from working at a profession, since there are some
professions for which a married woman, or, rather, a mother, is
better equipped than an unmarried woman. This is notably the case
as regards teaching, and it would be a good policy to allow
married women teachers special privileges in the shape of
increased free time and leave of absence. While in many fields of
knowledge an unmarried woman may be a most excellent teacher, it
is highly undesirable that children, and especially girls, should
be brought exclusively under the educational influence of
unmarried teachers.
The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of
procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life
is by the general adoption, by the educated classes of all countries—and
it must be remembered that, in this matter at all events, all classes are
gradually beginning to become educated—of methods for the prevention of
conception except when conception is deliberately desired. It is no longer
permissible to discuss the validity of this control, for it is an
accomplished fact and has become a part of our modern morality. "If a
course of conduct is habitually and deliberately pursued by vast
multitudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming probably a majority
of the whole educated class of the nation," as Sidney Webb rightly puts
it, "we must assume that it does not conflict with their actual code of
morality."[428]
There cannot be any doubt that, so far as England is concerned,
the prevention of conception is practiced, from prudential or
other motives, by the vast majority of the educated classes. This
fact is well within the knowledge of all who are intimately
acquainted with the facts of English family life. Thus, Dr. A. W.
Thomas writes (British Medical Journal, Oct. 20, 1906, p.
1066): "From my experience as a general practitioner, I have no
hesitation in saying that ninety per cent. of young married
couples of the comfortably-off classes use preventives." As a
matter of fact, this rough estimate appears to be rather under
than over the mark. In the very able paper already quoted, in
which Sidney Webb shows that "the decline in the birthrate
appears to be much greater in those sections of the population
which give proofs of thrift and foresight," that this decline is
"principally, if not entirely, the result of deliberate
volition," and that "a volitional regulation of the marriage
state is now ubiquitous throughout England and Wales, among,
apparently, a large majority of the population," the results are
brought forward of a detailed inquiry carried out by the Fabian
Society. This inquiry covered 316 families, selected at random
from all parts of Great Britain, and belonging to all sections of
the middle class. The results are carefully analyzed, and it is
found that seventy-four families were unlimited, and two hundred
and forty-two voluntarily limited. When, however, the decade
1890-99 is taken by itself as the typical period, it is found
that of 120 marriages, 107 were limited, and only thirteen
unlimited, while of these thirteen, five were childless at the
date of the return. In this decade, therefore, only seven
unlimited fertile marriages are reported, out of a total of 120.
What is true of Great Britain is true of all other civilized
countries, in the highest degree true of the most civilized
countries, and it finds expression in the well-known phenomenon
of the decline of the birthrate. In modern times, this movement
of decline began in France, producing a slow but steady
diminution in the annual number of births, and in France the
movement seems now to be almost, or quite, arrested. But it has
since taken place in all other progressive countries, notably in
the United States, in Canada, in Australia, and in New Zealand,
as well as in Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy, Spain, Switzerland,
Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. In England, it has
been continuous since 1877. Of the great countries, Russia is
the only one in which it has not yet taken place, and among the
masses of the Russian population we find less education, more
poverty, a higher deathrate, and a greater amount of disease,
than in any other great, or even small, civilized country.
It is sometimes said, indeed, that the decline of the birthrate
is not entirely due to the voluntary control of procreation. It
is undoubtedly true that certain other elements, common under
civilized conditions, such as the postponement of marriage in
women to a comparatively late age, tend to diminish the size of
the family. But when all such allowances have been made, the
decline is still found to be real and large. This has been shown,
for instance, by the statistical analyses made by Arthur
Newsholme and T. H. C. Stevenson, and by G. Yule, both published in
Journal Royal Statistical Society, April, 1906.
Some have supposed that, since the Catholic Church forbids
incomplete sexual intercourse, this movement for the control of
procreation will involve a relatively much greater increase among
Catholic than among non-Catholic populations. This, however, is
only correct under certain conditions. It is quite true that in
Ireland there has been no fall in the birthrate, and that the
fall is but little marked in those Lancashire towns which possess
a large Irish element. But in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and other
mainly Catholic countries, the decline in the birthrate is duly
taking place. What has happened is that the Church—always alive
to sexual questions—has realized the importance of the modern
movement, and has adapted herself to it, by proclaiming to her
more ignorant and uneducated children that incomplete intercourse
is a deadly sin, while at the same time refraining from making
inquiries into this matter among her more educated members. The
question was definitely brought up for Papal judgment, in 1842,
by Bishop Bouvier of Le Mans, who stated the matter very clearly,
representing to the Pope (Gregory XVI) that the prevention of
conception was becoming very common, and that to treat it as a
deadly sin merely resulted in driving the penitent away from
confession. After mature consideration, the Curia Sacra
Poenitentiaria replied by pointing out, as regards the common
method of withdrawal before emission, that since it was due to
the wrong act of the man, the woman who has been forced by her
husband to consent to it, has committed no sin. Further, the
Bishop was reminded of the wise dictum of Liguori, "the most
learned and experienced man in these matters," that the confessor
is not usually called upon to make inquiry upon so delicate a
matter as the debitum conjugale, and, if his opinion is not
asked, he should be silent (Bouvier, Dissertatio in sextum
Decalogi præceptum; supplementum ad Tractatum de Matrimonio.
1849, pp. 179-182; quoted by Hans Ferdy, Sexual-Probleme, Aug.,
1908, p. 498). We see, therefore, that, among Catholic as well as
among non-Catholic populations, the adoption of preventive
methods of conception follows progress and civilization, and
that the general practice of such methods by Catholics (with the
tacit consent of the Church) is merely a matter of time.
From time to time many energetic persons have noisily demanded that a stop
should be put to the decline of the birthrate, for, they argue, it means
"race suicide." It is now beginning to be realized, however, that this
outcry was a foolish and mischievous mistake. It is impossible to walk
through the streets of any great city, full of vast numbers of persons
who, obviously, ought never to have been born, without recognizing that
the birthrate is as yet very far above its normal and healthy limit. The
greatest States have often been the smallest so far as mere number of
citizens is concerned, for it is quality not quantity that counts. And
while it is true that the increase of the best types of citizens can only
enrich a State, it is now becoming intolerable that a nation should
increase by the mere dumping down of procreative refuse in its midst. It
is beginning to be realized that this process not only depreciates the
quality of a people but imposes on a State an inordinate financial burden.
It is now well recognized that large families are associated with
degeneracy, and, in the widest sense, with abnormality of every
kind. Thus, it is undoubtedly true that men of genius tend to
belong to very large families, though it may be pointed out to
those who fear an alarming decrease of genius from the tendency
to the limitation of the family, that the position in the family
most often occupied by the child of genius is the firstborn. (See
Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, pp. 115-120). The
insane, the idiotic, imbecile, and weak-minded, the criminal, the
epileptic, the hysterical, the neurasthenic, the tubercular, all,
it would appear, tend to belong to large families (see e.g.,
Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 110; Toulouse, Les Causes de la
Folie, p. 91; Harriet Alexander, "Malthusianism and Degeneracy,"
Alienist and Neurologist, Jan., 1901). It has, indeed, been
shown by Heron, Pearson, and Goring, that not only the
eldest-born, but also the second-born, are specially liable to
suffer from pathological defect (insanity, criminality,
tuberculosis). There is, however, it would seem, a fallacy in the
common interpretation of this fact. According to Van den Velden
(as quoted in Sexual-Probleme, May, 1909, p. 381), this
tendency is fully counterbalanced by the rising mortality of
children from the firstborn onward. The greater pathological
tendency of the earlier children is thus simply the result of a
less stringent selection by death. So far as they show any really
greater pathological tendency, apart from this fallacy, it is
perhaps due to premature marriage. There is another fallacy in
the frequent statement that the children in small families are
more feeble than those in large families. We have to distinguish
between a naturally small family, and an artificially small
family. A family which is small merely as the result of the
feeble procreative energy of the parents, is likely to be a
feeble family; a family which is small as the result of the
deliberate control of the parents, shows, of course, no such
tendency.
These considerations, it will be seen, do not modify the tendency
of the large family to be degenerate. We may connect this
phenomenon with the disposition, often shown by nervously unsound
and abnormal persons, to believe that they have a special
aptitude to procreate fine children. "I believe that everyone has
a special vocation," said a man to Marro (La Pubertà, p. 459);
"I find that it is my vocation to beget superior children." He
begat four,—an epileptic, a lunatic, a dipsomaniac, and a
valetudinarian,—and himself died insane. Most people have come
across somewhat similar, though perhaps less marked, cases of
this delusion. In a matter of such fateful gravity to other human
beings, no one can safely rely on his own unsupported
impressions.
The demand of national efficiency thus corresponds with the demand of
developing humanitarianism, which, having begun by attempting to
ameliorate the conditions of life, has gradually begun to realize that it
is necessary to go deeper and to ameliorate life itself. For while it is
undoubtedly true that much may be done by acting systematically on the
conditions of life, the more searching analysis of evil environmental
conditions only serves to show that in large parts they are based in the
human organism itself and were not only pre-natal, but pre-conceptional,
being involved in the quality of the parental or ancestral organisms.
Putting aside, however, all humanitarian considerations, the serious error
of attempting to stem the progress of civilization in the direction of
procreative control could never have occurred if the general tendencies of
zoölogical evolution had been understood, even in their elements. All
zoölogical progress is from the more prolific to the less prolific; the
higher the species the less fruitful are its individual members. The same
tendency is found within the limits of the human species, though not in an
invariable straight line; the growth of civilization involves a
diminution in fertility. This is by no means a new phenomenon; ancient
Rome and later Geneva, "the Protestant Rome," bear witness to it; no doubt
it has occurred in every high centre of moral and intellectual culture,
although the data for measuring the tendency no longer exist. When we take
a sufficiently wide and intelligent survey, we realize that the tendency
of a community to slacken its natural rate of increase is an essential
phenomenon of all advanced civilization. The more intelligent nations have
manifested the tendency first, and in each nation the more educated
classes have taken the lead, but it is only a matter of time to bring all
civilized nations, and all social classes in each nation, into line.[429]
This movement, we have to remember—in opposition to the ignorant outcry
of certain would-be moralists and politicians—is a beneficent movement.
It means a greater regard to the quality than to the quantity of the
increase; it involves the possibility of combating successfully the evils
of high mortality, disease, overcrowding, and all the manifold misfortunes
which inevitably accompany a too exuberant birthrate. For it is only in a
community which increases slowly that it is possible to secure the
adequate economic adjustment and environmental modifications necessary for
a sane and wholesome civic and personal life.[430] If those persons who
raise the cry of "race suicide" in face of the decline of the birthrate
really had the knowledge and intelligence to realize the manifold evils
which they are invoking they would deserve to be treated as criminals.
On the practical side a knowledge of the possibility of preventing
conception has, doubtless, never been quite extinct in civilization and
even in lower stages of culture, though it has mostly been utilized for
ends of personal convenience or practiced in obedience to conventional
social rules which demanded chastity, and has only of recent times been
made subservient to the larger interests of society and the elevation of
the race. The theoretical basis of the control of procreation, on its
social and economic, as distinct from its eugenic, aspects, may be said to
date from Malthus's famous Essay on Population, first published in 1798,
an epoch-marking book,—though its central thesis is not susceptible of
actual demonstration,—since it not only served as the starting-point of
the modern humanitarian movement for the control of procreation, but also
furnished to Darwin (and independently to Wallace also) the fruitful idea
which was finally developed into the great evolutionary theory of natural
selection.
Malthus, however, was very far from suggesting that the control of
procreation, which he advocated for the benefit of mankind, should be
exercised by the introduction of preventive methods into sexual
intercourse. He believed that civilization involved an increased power of
self-control, which would make it possible to refrain altogether from
sexual intercourse, when such self-restraint was demanded in the interests
of humanity. Later thinkers realized, however, that, while it is
undoubtedly true that civilization involves greater forethought and
greater self-control, we cannot anticipate that those qualities should be
developed to the extent demanded by Malthus, especially when the impulse
to be controlled is of so powerful and explosive a nature.
James Mill was the pioneer in advocating Neo-Malthusian methods, though he
spoke cautiously. In 1818, in the article "Colony" in the supplement to
the Encyclopædia Britannica, after remarking that the means of checking
the unrestricted increase of the population constitutes "the most
important practical problem to which the wisdom of the politician and
moralist can be applied," he continued: "If the superstitions of the
nursery were discarded, and the principle of utility kept steadily in
view, a solution might not be very difficult to be found." Four years
later, James Mill's friend, the Radical reformer, Francis Place, more
distinctly expressed the thought that was evidently in Mill's mind. After
enumerating the facts concerning the necessity of self-control in
procreation and the evils of early marriage, which he thinks ought to be
clearly taught, Place continues: "If a hundredth, perhaps a thousandth
part of the pains were taken to teach these truths, that are taken to
teach dogmas, a great change for the better might, in no considerable
space of time, be expected to take place in the appearance and the habits
of the people. If, above all, it were once clearly understood that it was
not disreputable for married persons to avail themselves of such
precautionary means as would, without being injurious to health, or
destructive of female delicacy, prevent conception, a sufficient check
might at once be given to the increase of population beyond the means of
subsistence; vice and misery, to a prodigious extent, might be removed
from society, and the object of Mr. Malthus, Mr. Godwin, and of every
philanthropic person, be promoted, by the increase of comfort, of
intelligence, and of moral conduct, in the mass of the population. The
course recommended will, I am fully persuaded, at some period be pursued
by the people even if left to themselves."[431]
It was not long before Place's prophetic words began to be realized, and
in another half century the movement was affecting the birthrate of all
civilized lands, though it can scarcely yet be said that justice has been
done to the pioneers who promoted it in the face of much persecution from
the ignorant and superstitious public whom they sought to benefit. In
1831, Robert Dale Owen, the son of Robert Owen, published his Moral
Physiology, setting forth the methods of preventing conception. A little
later the brothers George and Charles Drysdale (born 1825 and 1829), two
ardent and unwearying philanthropists, devoted much of their energy to the
propagation of Neo-Malthusian principles. George Drysdale, in 1854,
published his Elements of Social Science, which during many years had
an enormous circulation all over Europe in eight different languages. It
was by no means in every respect a scientific or sound work, but it
certainly had great influence, and it came into the hands of many who
never saw any other work on sexual topics. Although the Neo-Malthusian
propagandists of those days often met with much obloquy, their cause was
triumphantly vindicated in 1876, when Charles Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant,
having been prosecuted for disseminating Neo-Malthusian pamphlets, the
charge was dismissed, the Lord Chief Justice declaring that so ill-advised
and injudicious a charge had probably never before been made in a court of
justice. This trial, even by its mere publicity and apart from its issue,
gave an enormous impetus to the Neo-Malthusian movement. It is well known
that the steady decline in the English birthrate begun in 1877, the year
following the trial. There could be no more brilliant illustration of the
fact, that what used to be called "the instruments of Providence" are
indeed unconscious instruments in bringing about great ends which they
themselves were far from either intending or desiring.
In 1877, Dr. C. R. Drysdale founded the Malthusian League, and
edited a periodical, The Malthusian, aided throughout by his
wife, Dr. Alice Drysdale Vickery. He died in 1907. (The noble and
pioneering work of the Drysdales has not yet been adequately
recognized in their own country; an appreciative and
well-informed article by Dr. Hermann Rohleder, "Dr. C. R.
Drysdale, Der Hauptvortreter der Neumalthusianische Lehre,"
appeared in the Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, March,
1908). There are now societies and periodicals in all civilized
countries for the propagation of Neo-Malthusian principles, as
they are still commonly called, though it would be desirable to
avoid the use of Malthus's name in this connection. In the
medical profession, the advocacy of preventive methods of sexual
intercourse, not on social, but on medical and hygienic grounds,
began same thirty years ago, though in France, at an earlier
date, Raciborski advocated the method of avoiding the
neighborhood of menstruation. In Germany, Dr. Mensinga, the
gynæcologist, is the most prominent advocate, on medical and
hygienic grounds, of what he terms "facultative sterility," which
he first put forward about 1889. In Russia, about the same time,
artificial sterility was first openly advocated by the
distinguished gynæcologist, Professor Ott, at the St. Petersburg
Obstetric and Gynæcological Society. Such medical
recommendations, in particular cases, are now becoming common.
There are certain cases in which a person ought not to marry at
all; this is so, for instance, when there has been an attack of
insanity; it can never be said with certainty that a person who
has had one attack of insanity will not have another, and persons
who have had such attacks ought not, as Blandford says (Lumleian
Lectures on Insanity, British Medical Journal, April 20, 1895),
"to inflict on their partner for life, the anxiety, and even
danger, of another attack." There are other and numerous cases in
which marriage may be permitted, or may have already taken place,
under more favorable circumstances, but where it is, or has
become, highly desirable that there should be no children. This
is the case when a first attack of insanity occurs after
marriage, the more urgently if the affected party is the wife,
and especially if the disease takes the form of puerperal mania.
"What can be more lamentable," asks Blandford (loc. cit.), "than
to see a woman break down in childbed, recover, break down again
with the next child, and so on, for six, seven, or eight
children, the recovery between each being less and less, until
she is almost a chronic maniac?" It has been found, moreover, by
Tredgold (Lancet, May 17, 1902), that among children born to
insane mothers, the mortality is twice as great as the ordinary
infantile mortality, in even the poorest districts. In cases of
unions between persons with tuberculous antecedents, also, it is
held by many (e.g., by Massalongo, in discussing tuberculosis
and marriage at the Tuberculosis Congress, at Naples, in 1900)
that every precaution should be taken to make the marriage
childless. In a third class of cases, it is necessary to limit
the children to one or two; this happens in some forms of heart
disease, in which pregnancy has a progressively deteriorating
effect on the heart (Kisch, Therapeutische Monatsheft, Feb.,
1898, and Sexual Life of Woman; Vinay, Lyon Medical, Jan. 8,
1889); in some cases of heart disease, however, it is possible
that, though there is no reason for prohibiting marriage, it is
desirable for a woman not to have any children (J. F. Blacker,
"Heart Disease in Relation to Pregnancy," British Medical
Journal, May 25, 1907).
In all such cases, the recommendation of preventive methods of
intercourse is obviously an indispensable aid to the physician in
emphasizing the supremacy of hygienic precautions. In the absence
of such methods, he can never be sure that his warnings will be
heard, and even the observance of his advice would be attended
with various undesirable results. It sometimes happens that a
married couple agree, even before marriage, to live together
without sexual relations, but, for various reasons, it is seldom
found possible or convenient to maintain this resolution for a
long period.
It is the recognition of these and similar considerations which has
led—though only within recent years—on the one hand, as we have seen, to
the embodiment of the control of procreation into the practical morality
of all civilized nations, and, on the other hand, to the assertion, now
perhaps without exception, by all medical authorities on matters of sex
that the use of the methods of preventing conception is under certain
circumstances urgently necessary and quite harmless.[432] It arouses a
smile to-day when we find that less than a century ago it was possible for
an able and esteemed medical author to declare that the use of "various
abominable means" to prevent conception is "based upon a most presumptuous
doubt in the conservative power of the Creator."[433]
The adaptation of theory to practice is not yet complete, and we could not
expect that it should be so, for, as we have seen, there is always an
antagonism between practical morality and traditional morality. From time
to time flagrant illustrations of this antagonism occur.[434] Even in
England, which played a pioneering part in the control of procreation,
attempts are still made—sometimes in quarters where we have a right to
expect a better knowledge—to cast discredit on a movement which, since
it has conquered alike scientific approval and popular practice, it is now
idle to call in question.
It would be out of place to discuss here the various methods which are
used for the control of procreation, or their respective merits and
defects. It is sufficient to say that the condom or protective sheath,
which seems to be the most ancient of all methods of preventing
conception, after withdrawal, is now regarded by nearly all authorities
as, when properly used, the safest, the most convenient, and the most
harmless method.[435] This is the opinion of Krafft-Ebing, of Moll, of
Schrenck-Notzing, of Löwenfeld, of Forel, of Kisch, of Fürbringer, to
mention only a few of the most distinguished medical authorities.[436]
There is some interest in attempting to trace the origin and
history of the condom, though it seems impossible to do so with
any precision. It is probable that, in a rudimentary form, such
an appliance is of great antiquity. In China and Japan, it would
appear, rounds of oiled silk paper are used to cover the mouth of
the womb, at all events, by prostitutes. This seems the simplest
and most obvious mechanical method of preventing conception, and
may have suggested the application of a sheath to the penis as a
more effectual method. In Europe, it is in the middle of the
sixteenth century, in Italy, that we first seem to hear of such
appliances, in the shape of linen sheaths, adapted to the shape
of the penis; Fallopius recommended the use of such an appliance.
Improvements in the manufacture were gradually devised; the cæcum
of the lamb was employed, and afterwards, isinglass. It appears
that a considerable improvement in the manufacture took place in
the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and this improvement was
generally associated with England. The appliance thus became
known as the English cape or mantle, the "capote anglaise," or
the "redingote anglaise," and, under the latter name, is referred
to by Casanova, in the middle of the eighteenth century
(Casanova, Mémoires, ed. Garnier, vol. iv, p. 464); Casanova
never seems, however, to have used these redingotes himself, not
caring, he said, "to shut myself up in a piece of dead skin in
order to prove that I am perfectly alive." These capotes—then
made of goldbeaters' skin—were, also, it appears, known at an
earlier period to Mme. de Sévigné, who did not regard them with
favor, for, in one of her letters, she refers to them as
"cuirasses contre la volupté et toiles d'arraignée contre le
mal." The name, "condom," dates from the eighteenth century,
first appearing in France, and is generally considered to be that
of an English physician, or surgeon, who invented, or, rather,
improved the appliance. Condom is not, however, an English name,
but there is an English name, Condon, of which "condom" may well
be a corruption. This supposition is strengthened by the fact
that the word sometimes actually was written "condon." Thus, in
lines quoted by Bachaumont, in his Diary (Dec. 15, 1773), and
supposed to be addressed to a former ballet dancer who had become
a prostitute, I find:—
"Du condon cependant, vous connaissez l'usage,
"Le condon, c'est la loi, ma fille, et les prophètes!"
The difficulty remains, however, of discovering any Englishman of
the name of Condon, who can plausibly be associated with the
condom; doubtless he took no care to put the matter on record,
never suspecting the fame that would accrue to his invention, or
the immortality that awaited his name. I find no mention of any
Condon in the records of the College of Physicians, and at the
College of Surgeons, also, where, indeed, the old lists are very
imperfect, Mr. Victor Plarr, the librarian, after kindly making a
search, has assured me that there is no record of the name. Other
varying explanations of the name have been offered, with more or
less assurance, though usually without any proofs. Thus, Hyrtl
(Handbuch der Topographischen Anatomic, 7th ed., vol. ii, p.
212) states that the condom was originally called gondom, from
the name of the English discoverer, a Cavalier of Charles II's
Court, who first prepared it from the amnion of the sheep; Gondom
is, however, no more an English name than Condom. There happens
to be a French town, in Gascony, called Condom, and Bloch
suggests, without any evidence, that this furnished the name; if
so, however, it is improbable that it would have been unknown in
France. Finally, Hans Ferdy considers that it is derived from
"condus"—that which preserves—and, in accordance with his
theory, he terms the condom a condus.
The early history of the condom is briefly discussed by various
writers, as by Proksch, Die Vorbauung der Venerischen
Krankheiten, p. 48; Bloch, Sexual Life of Our Time, Chs. XV
and XXVIII; Cabanès, Indiscretions de l'Histoire, p. 121, etc.
The control of procreation by the prevention of conception has, we have
seen, become a part of the morality of civilized peoples. There is another
method, not indeed for preventing conception, but for limiting offspring,
which is of much more ancient appearance in the world, though it has at
different times been very differently viewed and still arouses widely
opposing opinions. This is the method of abortion.
While the practice of abortion has by no means, like the practice of
preventing conception, become accepted in civilization, it scarcely
appears to excite profound repulsion in a large proportion of the
population of civilized countries. The majority of women, not excluding
educated and highly moral women, who become pregnant against their wish
contemplate the possibility of procuring abortion without the slightest
twinge of conscience, and often are not even aware of the usual
professional attitude of the Church, the law, and medicine regarding
abortion. Probably all doctors have encountered this fact, and even so
distinguished and correct a medico-legist as Brouardel stated[437] that he
had been not infrequently solicited to procure abortion, for themselves or
their wet-nurses, by ladies who looked on it as a perfectly natural thing,
and had not the least suspicion that the law regarded the deed as a crime.
It is not, therefore, surprising that abortion is exceedingly common in
all civilized and progressive countries. It cannot, indeed, unfortunately,
be said that abortion has been conducted in accordance with eugenic
considerations, nor has it often been so much as advocated from the
eugenic standpoint. But in numerous classes of cases of undesired
pregnancy, occurring in women of character and energy, not accustomed to
submit tamely to conditions they may not have sought, and in any case
consider undesirable, abortion is frequently resorted to. It is usual to
regard the United States as a land in which the practice especially
flourishes, and certainly a land in which the ideal of chastity for
unmarried women, of freedom for married women, of independence for all, is
actively followed cannot fail to be favorable to the practice of abortion.
But the way in which the prevalence of abortion is proclaimed in the
United States is probably in large part due to the honesty of the
Americans in setting forth, and endeavoring to correct, what, rightly or
wrongly, they regard as social defects, and may not indicate any real
pre-eminence in the practice. Comparative statistics are difficult, and it
is certainly true that abortion is extremely common in England, in France,
and in Germany. It is probable that any national differences may be
accounted for by differences in general social habits and ideals. Thus in
Germany, where considerable sexual freedom is permitted to unmarried women
and married women are very domesticated, abortion may be less frequent
than in France where purity is stringently demanded from the young girl,
while the married woman demands freedom for work and for pleasure. But
such national differences, if they exist, are tending to be levelled down,
and charges of criminal abortion are constantly becoming more common in
Germany; though this increase, again, may be merely due to greater zeal in
pursuing the offence.
Brouardel (op. cit., p. 39) quotes the opinion that, in New
York, only one in every thousand abortions is discovered. Dr.
J. F. Scott (The Sexual Instinct, Ch. VIII), who is himself
strongly opposed to the practice, considers that in America, the
custom of procuring abortion has to-day reached "such vast
proportions as to be almost beyond belief," while "countless
thousands" of cases are never reported. "It has increased so
rapidly in our day and generation," Scott states, "that it has
created surprise and alarm in the minds of all conscientious
persons who are informed of the extent to which it is carried."
(The assumption that those who approve of abortion are
necessarily not "conscientious persons" is, as we shall see,
mistaken.) The change has taken place since 1840. The Michigan
Special Committee on Criminal Abortion reported in 1881 that,
from correspondence with nearly one hundred physicians, it
appeared that there came to the knowledge of the profession
seventeen abortions to every one hundred pregnancies; to these,
the committee believe, may be added as many more that never came
to the physician's knowledge. The committee further quoted,
though without endorsement, the opinion of a physician who
believed that a change is now coming over public feeling in
regard to the abortionist, who is beginning to be regarded in
America as a useful member of society, and even a benefactor.
In England, also, there appears to have been a marked increase of
abortion during recent years, perhaps specially marked among the
poor and hard-working classes. A writer in the British Medical
Journal (April 9, 1904, p. 865) finds that abortion is
"wholesale and systematic," and gives four cases occurring in his
practice during four months, in which women either attempted to
produce abortion, or requested him to do so; they were married
women, usually with large families, and in delicate health, and
were willing to endure any suffering, if they might be saved from
further child-bearing. Abortion is frequently effected, or
attempted, by taking "Female Pills," which contain small portions
of lead, and are thus liable to produce very serious symptoms,
whether or not they induce abortion. Professor Arthur Hall, of
Sheffield, who has especially studied this use of lead ("The
Increasing Use of Lead as an Abortifacient," British Medical
Journal, March 18, 1905), finds that the practice has lately
become very common in the English Midlands, and is gradually, it
appears, widening its circle. It occurs chiefly among married
women with families, belonging to the working class, and it tends
to become specially prevalent during periods of trade depression
(cf. G. Newman, Infant Mortality, p. 81). Women of better
social class resort to professional abortionists, and sometimes
go over to Paris.
In France, also, and especially in Paris, there has been a great
increase during recent years in the practice of abortion. (See
e.g., a discussion at the Paris Société de Médecine Légale,
Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, May, 1907.) Doléris has
shown (Bulletin de la Société d'Obstétrique, Feb., 1905) that
in the Paris Maternités the percentage of abortions in
pregnancies doubled between 1898 and 1904, and Doléris estimates
that about half of these abortions were artificially induced. In
France, abortion is mainly carried on by professional
abortionists. One of these, Mme. Thomas, who was condemned to
penal servitude, in 1891, acknowledged performing 10,000
abortions during eight years; her charge for the operation was
two francs and upwards. She was a peasant's daughter, brought up
in the home of her uncle, a doctor, whose medical and obstetrical
books she had devoured (A. Hamon, La France en 1891, pp.
629-631). French public opinion is lenient to abortion,
especially to women who perform the operation on themselves; not
many cases are brought into court, and of these, forty per cent.
are acquitted (Eugène Bausset, L'Avortement Criminel, Thèse de
Paris, 1907). The professional abortionist is, however, usually
sent to prison.
In Germany, also, abortion appears to have greatly increased
during recent years, and the yearly number of cases of criminal
abortion brought into the courts was, in 1903, more than double
as many as in 1885. (See, also, Elisabeth Zanzinger, Geschlecht
und Gesellschaft, Bd. II, Heft 5; and Sexual-Probleme, Jan.,
1908, p. 23.)
In view of these facts it is not surprising that the induction of abortion
has been permitted and even encouraged in many civilizations. Its
unqualified condemnation is only found in Christendom, and is due to
theoretical notions. In Turkey, under ordinary circumstances, there is no
punishment for abortion. In the classic civilization of Greece and Rome,
likewise, abortion was permitted though with certain qualifications and
conditions. Plato admitted the mother's right to decide on abortion but
said that the question should be settled as early as possible in
pregnancy. Aristotle, who approved of abortion, was of the same opinion.
Zeno and the Stoics regarded the fœtus as the fruit of the womb,
the soul being acquired at birth; this was in accordance with Roman law
which decreed that the fœtus only became a human being at
birth.[438] Among the Romans abortion became very common, but, in
accordance with the patriarchal basis of early Roman institutions, it was
the father, not the mother, who had the right to exercise it. Christianity
introduced a new circle of ideas based on the importance of the soul, on
its immortality, and the necessity of baptism as a method of salvation
from the results of inherited sin. We already see this new attitude in St.
Augustine who, discussing whether embryos that died in the womb will rise
at the resurrection, says "I make bold neither to affirm nor to deny,
although I fail to see why, if they are not excluded from the number of
the dead, they should not attain to the resurrection of the dead."[439]
The criminality of abortion was, however, speedily established, and the
early Christian Emperors, in agreement with the Church, edicted many
fantastic and extreme penalties against abortion. This tendency continued
under ecclesiastical influence, unrestrained, until the humanitarian
movement of the eighteenth century, when Beccaria, Voltaire, Rousseau and
other great reformers succeeded in turning the tide of public opinion
against the barbarity of the laws, and the penalty of death for abortion
was finally abolished.[440]
Medical science and practice at the present day—although it can scarcely
be said that it speaks with an absolutely unanimous voice—on the whole
occupies a position midway between that of the classic lawyers and that of
the later Christian ecclesiastics. It is, on the whole, in favor of
sacrificing the fœtus whenever the interests of the mother demand
such a sacrifice. General medical opinion is not, however, prepared at
present to go further, and is distinctly disinclined to aid the parents in
exerting an unqualified control over the fœtus in the womb, nor
is it yet disposed to practice abortion on eugenic grounds. It is obvious,
indeed, that medicine cannot in this matter take the initiative, for it is
the primary duty of medicine to save life. Society itself must assume the
responsibility of protecting the race.
Dr. S. Macvie ("Mother versus Child," Transactions Edinburgh
Obstetrical Society, vol. xxiv, 1899) elaborately discusses the
respective values of the fœtus and the adult on the
basis of life-expectancy, and concludes that the fœtus
is merely "a parasite performing no function whatever," and that
"unless the life-expectancy of the child covers the years in
which its potentiality is converted into actuality, the relative
values of the maternal and fœtal life will be that of
actual as against potential." This statement seems fairly sound.
Ballantyne (Manual of Antenatal Pathology: The Fœtus,
p. 459) endeavors to make the statement more precise by saying
that "the mother's life has a value, because she is what she is,
while the fœtus only has a possible value, on account of
what it may become."
Durlacher, among others, has discussed, in careful and cautious
detail, the various conditions in which the physician should, or
should not, induce abortion in the interests of the mother ("Der
Künstliche Abort," Wiener Klinik, Aug. and Sept., 1906); so
also, Eugen Wilhelm ("Die Abtreibung und das Recht des Arztes zur
Vernichtung der Leibesfrucht," Sexual-Probleme, May and June,
1909). Wilhelm further discusses whether it is desirable to alter
the laws in order to give the physician greater freedom in
deciding on abortion. He concludes that this is not necessary,
and might even act injuriously, by unduly hampering medical
freedom. Any change in the law should merely be, he considers, in
the direction of asserting that the destruction of the fœtus
is not abortion in the legal sense, provided it is
indicated by the rules of medical science. With reference to the
timidity of some medical men in inducing abortion, Wilhelm
remarks that, even in the present state of the law, the physician
who conscientiously effects abortion, in accordance with his best
knowledge, even if mistakenly, may consider himself safe from all
legal penalties, and that he is much more likely to come in
conflict with the law if it can be proved that death followed as
a result of his neglect to induce abortion.
Pinard, who has discussed the right to control the fœtal
life (Annales de Gynécologie, vols. lii and liii, 1899 and
1900), inspired by his enthusiastic propaganda for the salvation
of infant life, is led to the unwarranted conclusion that no one
has the rights of life and death over the fœtus; "the
infant's right to his life is an imprescriptible and sacred
right, which no power can take from him." There is a mistake
here, unless Pinard deliberately desires to place himself, like
Tolstoy, in opposition to current civilized morality. So far from
the infant having any "imprescriptible right to life," even the
adult has, in human societies, no such inalienable right, and
very much less the fœtus, which is not strictly a human
being at all. We assume the right of terminating the lives of
those individuals whose anti-social conduct makes them dangerous,
and, in war, we deliberately terminate, amid general applause and
enthusiasm, the lives of men who have been specially selected for
this purpose on account of their physical and general efficiency.
It would be absurdly inconsistent to say that we have no rights
over the lives of creatures that have, as yet, no part in human
society at all, and are not so much as born. We are here in
presence of a vestige of ancient theological dogma, and there can
be little doubt that, on the theoretical side at all events, the
"imprescriptible right" of the embryo will go the same way as the
"imprescriptible right" of the spermatozöon. Both rights are
indeed "imprescriptible."
Of recent years a new, and, it must be admitted, somewhat unexpected,
aspect of this question of abortion has been revealed. Hitherto it has
been a question entirely in the hands of men, first, following the Roman
traditions, in the hands of Christian ecclesiastics, and later, in those
of the professional castes. Yet the question is in reality very largely,
and indeed mainly, a woman's question, and now, more especially in
Germany, it has been actively taken up by women. The Gräfin Gisela
Streitberg occupies the pioneering place in this movement with her book
Das Recht zur Beiseitigung Keimenden Lebens, and was speedily followed,
from 1897 onwards, by a number of distinguished women who occupy a
prominent place in the German woman's movement, among others Helene
Stöcker, Oda Olberg, Elisabeth Zanzinger, Camilla Jellinek. All these
writers insist that the fœtus is not yet an independent human
being, and that every woman, by virtue of the right over her own body, is
entitled to decide whether it shall become an independent human being. At
the Woman's Congress held in the autumn of 1905, a resolution was passed
demanding that abortion should only be punishable when effected by another
person against the wish of the pregnant women herself.[441] The acceptance
of this resolution by a representative assembly is interesting proof of
the interest now taken by women in the question, and of the strenuous
attitude they are tending to assume.
Elisabeth Zanzinger ("Verbrechen gegen die Leibesfrucht,"
Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. II, Heft 5, 1907) ably and
energetically condemns the law which makes abortion a crime. "A
woman herself is the only legitimate possessor of her own body
and her own health.... Just as it is a woman's private right, and
most intimate concern, to present her virginity as her best gift
to the chosen of her heart, so it is certainly a pregnant woman's
own private concern if, for reasons which seem good to her, she
decides to destroy the results of her action." A woman who
destroys the embryo which might become a burden to the community,
or is likely to be an inferior member of society, this writer
urges, is doing a service to the community, which ought to reward
her, perhaps by granting her special privileges as regards the
upbringing of her other children. Oda Olberg, in a thoughtful
paper ("Ueber den Juristischen Schutz des Keimenden Lebens," Die
Neue Generation, June, 1908), endeavors to make clear all that
is involved in the effort to protect the developing embryo
against the organism that carries it, to protect a creature, that
is, against itself and its own instincts. She considers that most
of the women who terminate their pregnancies artificially would
only have produced undesirables, for the normal, healthy, robust
woman has no desire to effect abortion. "There are women who are
psychically sterile, without being physically so, and who possess
nothing of motherhood but the ability to bring forth. These, when
they abort, are simply correcting a failure of Nature." Some of
them, she remarks, by going on to term, become guilty of the far
worse offence of infanticide. As for the women who desire
abortion merely from motives of vanity, or convenience, Oda
Olberg points out that the circles in which these motives rule
are quite able to limit their children without having to resort
to abortion. She concludes that society must protect the young
life in every way, by social hygiene, by laws for the protection
of the workers, by spreading a new morality on the basis of the
laws of heredity. But we need no law to protect the young
creature against its own mother, for a thousand natural forces
are urging the mother to protect her own child, and we may be
sure that she will not disobey these forces without very good
reasons. Camilla Jellinek, again (Die Strafrechtsreform, etc.,
Heidelberg, 1909), in a powerful and well-informed address before
the Associated German Frauenvereine, at Breslau, argues in the
same sense.
The lawyers very speedily came to the assistance of the women in
this matter, the more readily, no doubt, since the traditions of
the greatest and most influential body of law already pointed, on
one side at all events, in the same direction. It may, indeed, be
claimed that it was from the side of law—and in Italy, the
classic land of legal reform—that this new movement first begun.
In 1888, Balestrini published, at Turin, his Aborto,
Infanticidio ed Esposizione d'Infante, in which he argued that
the penalty should be removed from abortion. It was a very able
and learned book, inspired by large ideas and a humanitarian
spirit, but though its importance is now recognized, it cannot be
said that it attracted much attention on publication.
It is especially in Germany that, during recent years, lawyers
have followed women reformers, by advocating, more or less
completely, the abolition of the punishment for abortion. So
distinguished an authority as Von Liszt, in a private letter to
Camilla Jellinek (op. cit.), states that he regards the
punishment of abortion as "very doubtful," though he considers
its complete abolition impracticable; he thinks abortion might be
permitted during the early months of pregnancy, thus bringing
about a return of the old view. Hans Gross states his opinion
(Archiv für Kriminal-Anthropologie, Bd. XII, p. 345) that the
time is not far distant when abortion will no longer be punished.
Radbruch and Von Lilienthal speak in the same sense. Weinberg has
advocated a change in the law (Mutterschutz, 1905, Heft 8),
and Kurt Hiller (Die Neue Generation, April, 1909), also from
the legal side, argues that abortion should only be punishable
when effected by a married woman, without the knowledge and
consent of her husband.
The medical profession, which took the first step in modern times in the
authorization of abortion, has not at present taken any further step. It
has been content to lay down the principle that when the interests of the
mother are opposed to those of the fœtus, it is the latter which
must be sacrificed. It has hesitated to take the further step of placing
abortion on the eugenic basis, and of claiming the right to insist on
abortion whenever the medical and hygienic interests of society demand
such a step. This attitude is perfectly intelligible. Medicine has in the
past been chiefly identified with the saving of lives, even of worthless
and worse than worthless lives; "Keep everything alive! Keep everything
alive!" nervously cried Sir James Paget. Medicine has confined itself to
the humble task of attempting to cure evils, and is only to-day beginning
to undertake the larger and nobler task of preventing them.
"The step from killing the child in the womb to murdering a
person when out of the womb, is a dangerously narrow one," sagely
remarks a recent medical author, probably speaking for many
others, who somehow succeed in blinding themselves to the fact
that this "dangerously narrow step" has been taken by mankind,
only too freely, for thousands of years past, long before
abortion was known in the world.
Here and there, however, medical authors of repute have advocated
the further extension of abortion, with precautions, and under
proper supervision, as an aid to eugenic progress. Thus,
Professor Max Flesch (Die Neue Generation, April, 1909) is in
favor of a change in the law permitting abortion (provided it is
carried out by the physician) in special cases, as when the
mother's pregnancy has been due to force, when she has been
abandoned, or when, in the interests of the community, it is
desirable to prevent the propagation of insane, criminal,
alcoholic, or tuberculous persons.
In France, a medical man, Dr. Jean Darricarrère, has written a
remarkable novel, Le Droit d'Avortement (1906), which advocates
the thesis that a woman always possesses a complete right to
abortion, and is the supreme judge as to whether she will or not
undergo the pain and risks of childbirth. The question is, here,
however, obviously placed not on medical, but on humanitarian and
feminist grounds.
We have seen that, alike on the side of practice and of theory, a great
change has taken place during recent years in the attitude towards
abortion. It must, however, clearly be recognized that, unlike the control
of procreation by methods for preventing conception, facultative abortion
has not yet been embodied in our current social morality. If it is
permissible to interpolate a personal opinion, I may say that to me it
seems that our morality is here fairly reasonable.[442] I am decidedly of
opinion that an unrestricted permission for women to practice abortion in
their own interests, or even for communities to practice it in the
interests of the race, would be to reach beyond the stage of civilization
we have at present attained. As Ellen Key very forcibly argues, a
civilization which permits, without protest, the barbarous slaughter of
its carefully selected adults in war has not yet won the right to destroy
deliberately even its most inferior vital products in the womb. A
civilization guilty of so reckless a waste of life cannot safely be
entrusted with this judicial function. The blind and aimless anxiety to
cherish the most hopeless and degraded forms of life, even of unborn life,
may well be a weakness, and since it often leads to incalculable
suffering, even a crime. But as yet there is an impenetrable barrier
against progress in this direction. Before we are entitled to take life
deliberately for the sake of purifying life, we must learn how to preserve
it by abolishing such destructive influences—war, disease, bad industrial
conditions—as are easily within our social power as civilized
nations.[443]
There is, further, another consideration which seems to me to carry
weight. The progress of civilization is in the direction of greater
foresight, of greater prevention, of a diminished need for struggling with
the reckless lack of prevision. The necessity for abortion is precisely
one of those results of reckless action which civilization tends to
diminish. While we may admit that in a sounder state of civilization a few
cases might still occur when the induction of abortion would be desirable,
it seems probable that the number of such cases will decrease rather than
increase. In order to do away with the need for abortion, and to
counteract the propaganda in its favor, our main reliance must be placed,
on the one hand, on increased foresight in the determination of conception
and increased knowledge of the means for preventing conception,[444] and
on the other hand, on a better provision by the State for the care of
pregnant women, married and unmarried alike, and a practical recognition
of the qualified mother's claim on society.[445] There can be little doubt
that, in many a charge of criminal abortion, the real offence lies at the
door of those who have failed to exercise their social and professional
duty of making known the more natural and harmless methods for preventing
conception, or else by their social attitude have made the pregnant
woman's position intolerable. By active social reform in these two
directions, the new movement in favor of abortion may be kept in check,
and it may even be found that by stimulating such reform that movement has
been beneficial.
We have seen that the deliberate restraint of conception has become a part
of our civilized morality, and that the practice and theory of facultative
abortion has gained a footing among us. There remains a third and yet more
radical method of controlling procreation, the method of preventing the
possibility of procreation altogether by the performance of castration or
other slighter operation having a like inhibitory effect on reproduction.
The other two methods only effect a single act of union or its results,
but castration affects all subsequent acts of sexual union and usually
destroys the procreative power permanently.
Castration for various social and other purposes is an ancient and
widespread practice, carried out on men and on animals. There has,
however, been on the whole a certain prejudice against it when applied to
men. Many peoples have attached a very sacred value to the integrity of
the sexual organs. Among some primitive peoples the removal of these
organs has been regarded as a peculiarly ferocious insult, only to be
carried out in moments of great excitement, as after a battle. Medicine
has been opposed to any interference with the sexual organs. The oath
taken by the Greek physicians appears to prohibit castration: "I will not
cut."[446] In modern times a great change has taken place, the castration
of both men and women is commonly performed in diseased conditions; the
same operation is sometimes advocated and occasionally performed in the
hope that it may remove strong and abnormal sexual impulses. And during
recent years castration has been invoked in the cause of negative
eugenics, to a greater extent, indeed, on account of its more radical
character, than either the prevention of conception or abortion.
The movement in favor of castration appears to have begun in the United
States, where various experiments have been made in embodying it in law.
It was first advocated merely as a punishment for criminals, and
especially sexual offenders, by Hammond, Everts, Lydston and others. From
this point of view, however, it seems to be unsatisfactory and perhaps
illegitimate. In many cases castration is no punishment at all, and indeed
a positive benefit. In other cases, when inflicted against the subject's
will, it may produce very disturbing mental effects, leading in already
degenerate or unbalanced persons to insanity, criminality, and anti-social
tendencies generally, much more dangerous than the original state.
Eugenic considerations, which were later brought forward, constitute a
much sounder argument for castration; in this case the castration is
carried out, by no means in order to inflict a barbarous and degrading
punishment, but, with the subject's consent, in order to protect the
community from the risk of useless or mischievous members.
The fact that castration can no longer be properly considered a
punishment, is shown by the possibility of deliberately seeking
the operation simply for the sake of convenience, as a preferable
and most effective substitute for the adoption of preventive
methods in sexual intercourse. I am only at present acquainted
with one case in which this course has been adopted. This subject
is a medical man (of Puritan New England ancestry) with whose
sexual history, which is quite normal, I have been acquainted for
a long time past. His present age is thirty-nine. A few years
since, having a sufficiently large family, he adopted preventive
methods of intercourse. The subsequent events I narrate in his
own words: "The trouble, forethought, etc., rendered necessary by
preventive measures, grew more and more irksome to me as the
years passed by, and finally, I laid the matter before another
physician, and on his assurances, and after mature deliberation
with my wife, was operated on some time since, and rendered
sterile by having the vas deferens on each side exposed through a
slit in the scrotum, then tied in two places with silk and
severed between the ligatures. This was done under cocaine
infiltrative anæsthesia, and was not so extremely painful, though
what pain there was (dragging the cord out through the slit,
etc.) seemed very hard to endure. I was not out of my office a
single day, nor seriously disturbed in any way. In six days all
stitches in the scrotum were removed, and in three weeks I
abandoned the suspensory bandage that had been rendered necessary
by the extreme sensitiveness of the testicles and cord.
"The operation has proved a most complete success in every way.
Sexual functions are absolutely unaffected in any way
whatsoever. There is no sense of discomfort or uneasiness in the
sexual tract, and what seems strangest of all to me, is the fact
that the semen, so far as one can judge by ordinary means of
observation, is undiminished in quantity and unchanged in
character. (Of course, the microscope would reveal its fatal
lack.)
"My wife is delighted at having fear banished from our love, and,
taken all in all, it certainly seems as if life would mean more
to us both. Incidentally, the health of both of us seems better
than usual, particularly so in my wife's case, and this she
attributes to a soothing influence that is attained by allowing
the seminal fluid to be deposited in a perfectly normal manner,
and remain in contact with the vaginal secretions until it
naturally passes off.
"This operation being comparatively new, and, as yet, not often
done on others than the insane, criminal, etc., I thought it
might be of interest to you. If I shed even the faintest ray of
light on this greatest of all human problems ... I shall be glad
indeed."
Such a case, with its so far satisfactory issue, certainly
deserves to be placed on record, though it may well be that at
present it will not be widely imitated.
The earliest advocacy of castration, which I have met with as a part of
negative eugenics, for the specific "purpose of prophylaxis as applied to
race improvement and the protection of society," is by Dr. F. E. Daniel, of
Texas, and dates from 1893.[447] Daniel mixed up, however, somewhat
inextricably, castration as a method of purifying the race, a method which
can be carried out with the concurrence of the individual operated on,
with castration as a punishment, to be inflicted for rape, sodomy,
bestiality, pederasty and even habitual masturbation, the method of its
performance, moreover, to be the extremely barbarous and primitive method
of total ablation of the sexual organs. In more recent years somewhat more
equitable, practical, and scientific methods of castration have been
advocated, not involving the removal of the sexual glands or organs, and
not as a punishment, but simply for the sake of protecting the community
and the race from the burden of probably unproductive and possibly
dangerous members. Näcke has, from 1899 onwards, repeatedly urged the
social advantages of this measure.[448] The propagation of the inferior
elements of society, Näcke insists, brings unhappiness into the family and
is a source of great expense to the State. He regards castration as the
only effective method of prevention, and concludes that it is, therefore,
our duty to adopt it, just as we have adopted vaccination, taking care to
secure the consent of the subject himself or his guardian, of the civil
authorities, and, if necessary, of a committee of experts. Professor
Angelo Zuccarelli of Naples has also, from 1899 onwards, emphasized the
importance of castration in the sterilization of the epileptic, the insane
of various classes, the alcoholic, the tuberculous, and instinctive
criminals, the choice of cases for operation to be made by a commission of
experts who would examine school-children, candidates for public
employments, or persons about to marry.[449] This movement rapidly gained
ground, and in 1905 at the annual meeting of Swiss alienists it was
unanimously agreed that the sterilization of the insane is desirable, and
that it is necessary that the question should be legally regulated. It is
in Switzerland, indeed, that the first steps have been taken in Europe to
carry out castration as a measure of social prophylaxis. The sixteenth
yearly report (1907) of the Cantonal asylum at Wil describes four cases of
castration, two in men and two in women, performed—with the permission of
the patients and the civil authorities—for social reasons; both women had
previously had illegitimate children who were a burden on the community,
and all four patients were sexually abnormal; the operation enabled the
patients to be liberated and to work, and the results were considered in
every respect satisfactory to all concerned.[450]
The introduction of castration as a method of negative eugenics
has been facilitated by the use of new methods of performing it
without risk, and without actual removal of the testes or
ovaries. For men, there is the simple method of vasectomy, as
recommended by Näcke and many others. For women, there is the
corresponding, and almost equally simple and harmless method of
Kehrer, by section and ligation of the Fallopian tubes through
the vagina, as recommended by Kisch, or Rose's very similar
procedure, easily carried out in a few minutes by an experienced
hand, as recommended by Zuccarelli.
It has been found that repeated exposure to the X-rays produces
sterility in both sexes, alike in animals and men, and X-ray
workers have to adopt various precautions to avoid suffering from
this effect. It has been suggested that the application of the
X-rays would be a good substitute for castration; it appears that
the effects of the application are only likely to last a few
years, which, in some doubtful cases, might be an advantage. (See
British Medical Journal, Aug. 13, 1904; ib., March 11, 1905;
ib., July 6, 1907.)
It is scarcely possible, it seems to me, to view castration as a method of
negative eugenics with great enthusiasm. The recklessness, moreover, with
which it is sometimes proposed to apply it by law—owing no doubt to the
fact that it is not so obviously repulsive as the less radical procedure
of abortion—ought to render us very cautious. We must, too, dismiss the
idea of castration as a punishment; as such it is not merely barbarous but
degrading and is unlikely to have a beneficial effect. As a method of
negative eugenics it should never be carried out except with the subject's
consent. The fact that in some cases it might be necessary to enforce
seclusion in the absence of castration would doubtless be a fact exerting
influence in favor of such consent; but the consent is essential if the
subject of the operation is to be safeguarded from degradation. A man who
has been degraded and embittered by an enforced castration might not be
dangerous to posterity, but might very easily become a dangerous member of
the society in which he actually lived. With due precautions and
safeguards, castration may doubtless play a certain part in the elevation
and improvement of the race.[451]
The methods we have been considering, in so far as they limit the
procreative powers of the less healthy and efficient stocks in a
community, are methods of eugenics. It must not, however, be supposed that
they are the whole of eugenics, or indeed that they are in any way
essential to a eugenic scheme. Eugenics is concerned with the whole of the
agencies which elevate and improve the human breed; abortion and
castration are methods which may be used to this end, but they are not
methods of which everyone approves, nor is it always clear that the ends
they effect would not better be attained by other methods; in any case
they are methods of negative eugenics. There remains the field of positive
eugenics, which is concerned, not with the elimination of the inferior
stocks but with ascertaining which are the superior stocks and with
furthering their procreative power.
While the necessity of refraining from procreation is no longer a bar to
marriage, the question of whether two persons ought to marry each other
still remains in the majority of cases a serious question from the
standpoint of positive as well as of negative eugenics, for the normal
marriage cannot fail to involve children, as, indeed, its chief and most
desirable end. We have to consider not merely what are the stocks or the
individuals that are unfit to breed, but also what are these stocks or
individuals that are most fit to breed, and under what conditions
procreation may best be effected. The present imperfection of our
knowledge on these questions emphasizes the need for care and caution in
approaching their consideration.
It may be fitting, at this point, to refer to the experiment of
the Oneida Community in establishing a system of scientific
propagation, under the guidance of a man whose ability and
distinction as a pioneer are only to-day beginning to be
adequately recognized. John Humphrey Noyes was too far ahead of
his own day to be recognized at his true worth; at the most, he
was regarded as the sagacious and successful founder of a sect,
and his attempts to apply eugenics to life only aroused ridicule
and persecution, so that he was, unfortunately, compelled by
outside pressure to bring a most instructive experiment to a
premature end. His aim and principle are set forth in an Essay
on Scientific Propagation, printed some forty years ago, which
discusses problems that are only now beginning to attract the
attention of the practical man, as within the range of social
politics. When Noyes turned his vigorous and practical mind to
the question of eugenics, that question was exclusively in the
hands of scientific men, who felt all the natural timidity of the
scientific man towards the realization of his proposals, and who
were not prepared to depart a hair's breadth from the
conventional customs of their time. The experiment of Noyes, at
Oneida, marked a new stage in the history of eugenics; whatever
might be the value of the experiment—and a first experiment
cannot well be final—with Noyes the questions of eugenics passed
beyond the purely academic stage in which, from the time of
Plato, they had peacefully reposed. "It is becoming clear," Noyes
states at the outset, "that the foundations of scientific society
are to be laid in the scientific propagation of human beings." In
doing this, we must attend to two things: blood (or heredity) and
training; and he puts blood first. In that, he was at one with
the most recent biometrical eugenists of to-day ("the nation has
for years been putting its money on 'Environment,' when
'Heredity' wins in a canter," as Karl Pearson prefers to put it),
and at the same time revealed the breadth of his vision in
comparison with the ordinary social reformer, who, in that day,
was usually a fanatical believer in the influence of training and
surroundings. Noyes sets forth the position of Darwin on the
principles of breeding, and the step beyond Darwin, which had
been taken by Galton. He then remarks that, when Galton comes to
the point where it is necessary to advance from theory to the
duties the theory suggests, he "subsides into the meekest
conservatism." (It must be remembered that this was written at an
early stage in Galton's work.) This conclusion was entirely
opposed to Noyes' practical and religious temperament. "Duty is
plain; we say we ought to do it—we want to do it; but we cannot.
The law of God urges us on; but the law of society holds us back.
The boldest course is the safest. Let us take an honest and
steady look at the law. It is only in the timidity of ignorance
that the duty seems impracticable." Noyes anticipated Galton in
regarding eugenics as a matter of religion.
Noyes proposed to term the work of modern science in propagation
"Stirpiculture," in which he has sometimes been followed by
others. He considered that it is the business of the
stirpiculturist to keep in view both quantity and quality of
stocks, and he held that, without diminishing quantity, it was
possible to raise the quality by exercising a very stringent
discrimination in selecting males. At this point, Noyes has been
supported in recent years by Karl Pearson and others, who have
shown that only a relatively small portion of a population is
needed to produce the next generation, and that, in fact, twelve
per cent. of one generation in man produces fifty per cent. of
the next generation. What we need to ensure is that this small
reproducing section of the population shall be the best adapted
for the purpose. "The quantity of production will be in direct
proportion to the number of fertile females," as Noyes saw the
question, "and the value produced, so far as it depends on
selection, will be nearly in inverse proportion to the number of
fertilizing males." In this matter, Noyes anticipated Ehrenfels.
The two principles to be held in mind were, "Breed from the
best," and "Breed in-and-in," with a cautious and occasional
introduction of new strains. (It may be noted that Reibmayr, in
his recent Entwicklungsgeschichte des Genics und Talentes,
argues that the superior races, and superior individuals, in the
human species, have been produced by an unconscious adherence to
exactly these principles.) "By segregating superior families, and
by breeding these in-and-in, superior varieties of human beings
might be produced, which would be comparable to the thoroughbreds
in all the domestic races." He illustrates this by the early
history of the Jews.
Noyes finally criticises the present method, or lack of method,
in matters of propagation. Our marriage system, he states,
"leaves mating to be determined by a general scramble." By
ignoring, also, the great difference between the sexes in
reproductive power, it "restricts each man, whatever may be his
potency and his value, to the amount of production of which one
woman, chosen blindly, may be capable." Moreover, he continues,
"practically it discriminates against the best, and in favor of
the worst; for, while the good man will be limited by his
conscience to what the law allows, the bad man, free from moral
check, will distribute his seed beyond the legal limits, as
widely as he dares." "We are safe every way in saying that there
is no possibility of carrying the two precepts of scientific
propagation into an institution which pretends to no
discrimination, allows no suppression, gives no more liberty to
the best than to the worst, and which, in fact, must inevitably
discriminate the wrong way, so long as the inferior classes are
most prolific and least amenable to the admonitions of science
and morality." In modifying our sexual institutions, Noyes
insists there are two essential points to remember: the
preservation of liberty, and the preservation of the home. There
must be no compulsion about human scientific propagation; it must
be autonomous, directed by self-government, "by the free choice
of those who love science well enough to 'make themselves eunuchs
for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake.'" The home, also, must be
preserved, since "marriage is the best thing for man as he is;"
but it is necessary to enlarge the home, for, "if all could learn
to love other children than their own, there would be nothing to
hinder scientific propagation in the midst of homes far better
than any that now exist."
This memorable pamphlet contains no exposition of the precise
measures adopted by the Oneida Community to carry out these
principles. The two essential points were, as we know, "male
continence" (see ante p. 553), and the enlarged family, in
which all the men were the actual or potential mates of all the
women, but no union for propagation took place, except as the
result of reason and deliberate resolve. "The community," says
H. J. Seymour, one of the original members (The Oneida
Community, 1894, p. 5), "was a family, as distinctly separated
from surrounding society as ordinary households. The tie that
bound it together was as permanent, and at least as sacred, as
that of marriage. Every man's care, and the whole of the common
property, was pledged for the maintenance and protection of the
women, and the support and education of the children." It is not
probable that the Oneida Community presented in detail the model
to which human society generally will conform. But even at the
lowest estimate, its success showed, as Lord Morely has pointed
out (Diderot, vol. ii, p. 19), "how modifiable are some of
these facts of existing human character which are vulgarly deemed
to be ultimate and ineradicable," and that "the discipline of the
appetites and affections of sex," on which the future of
civilization largely rests, is very far from an impossibility.
In many respects, the Oneida Community was ahead of its
time,—and even of ours,—but it is interesting to note that, in
the matter of the control of conception, our marriage system has
come into line with the theory and practice of Oneida; it cannot,
indeed, be said that we always control conception in accordance
with eugenic principles, but the fact that such control has now
become a generally accepted habit of civilization, to some extent
deprives Noyes' criticism of our marriage system of the force it
possessed half a century ago. Another change in our customs—the
advocacy, and even the practice, of abortion and
castration—would not have met with his approval; he was strongly
opposed to both, and with the high moral level that ruled his
community, neither was necessary to the maintenance of the
stirpiculture that prevailed.
The Oneida Community endured for the space of one generation, and
came to an end in 1879, by no means through a recognition of
failure, but by a wise deference to external pressure. Its
members, many of them highly educated, continued to cherish the
memory of the practices and ideals of the Community. Noyes Miller
(the author of The Strike of a Sex, and Zugassant's
Discovery) to the last, looked with quiet confidence to the time
when, as he anticipated, the great discovery of Noyes would be
accepted and adopted by the world at large. Another member of the
Community (Henry J. Seymour) wrote of the Community long
afterwards that "It was an anticipation and imperfect miniature
of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth."
Perhaps the commonest type of proposal or attempt to improve the
biological level of the race is by the exclusion of certain classes of
degenerates from marriage, or by the encouragement of better classes of
the community to marry. This seems to be, at present, the most popular
form of eugenics, and in so far as it is not effected by compulsion but is
the outcome of a voluntary resolve to treat the question of the creation
of the race with the jealous care and guardianship which so tremendously
serious, so godlike, a task involves, it has much to be said in its favor
and nothing against it.
But it is quite another matter when the attempt is made to regulate such
an institution as marriage by law. In the first place we do not yet know
enough about the principles of heredity and the transmissibility of
pathological states to enable us to formulate sound legislative proposals
on this basis. Even so comparatively simple a matter as the relationship
of tuberculosis to heredity can scarcely be said to be a matter of common
agreement, even if it can yet be claimed that we possess adequate material
on which to attain a common agreement. Supposing, moreover, that our
knowledge on all these questions were far more advanced than it is, we
still should not have attained a position in which we could lay down
general propositions regarding the desirability or the undesirability of
certain classes of persons procreating. The question is necessarily an
individual question, and it can only be decided when all the circumstances
of the individual case have been fairly passed in review.
The objection to any legislative and compulsory regulation of the right to
marry is, however, much more fundamental than the consideration that our
knowledge is at present inadequate. It lies in the extraordinary
confusion, in the minds of those who advocate such legislation, between
legal marriage and procreation. The persons who fall into such confusion
have not yet learnt the alphabet of the subject they presume to dictate
about, and are no more competent to legislate than a child who cannot tell
A from B is competent to read.
Marriage, in so far as it is the partnership for mutual help and
consolation of two people who in such partnership are free, if they
please, to exercise sexual union, is an elementary right of every person
who is able to reason, who is guilty of no fraud or concealment, and who
is not likely to injure the partner selected, for in that case society is
entitled to interfere by virtue of its duty to protect its members. But
the right to marry, thus understood, in no way involves the right to
procreate. For while marriage per se only affects the two individuals
concerned, and in no way affects the State, procreation, on the other
hand, primarily affects the community which is ultimately made up of
procreated persons, and only secondarily affects the two individuals who
are the instruments of procreation. So that just as the individual couple
has the first right in the question of marriage, the State has the first
right in the question of procreation. The State is just as incompetent to
lay down the law about marriage as the individual is to lay down the law
about procreation.
That, however, is only one-half of the folly committed by those who would
select the candidates for matrimony by statute. Let us suppose—as is not
indeed easy to suppose—that a community will meekly accept the abstract
prohibitions of the statute book and quietly go home again when the
registrar of marriages informs them that they are shut out from legal
matrimony by the new table of prohibited degrees. An explicit prohibition
to procreate within marriage is an implicit permission to procreate
outside marriage. Thus the undesirable procreation, instead of being
carried out under the least dangerous conditions, is carried out under the
most dangerous conditions, and the net result to the community is not a
gain but a loss.
What seems usually to happen, in the presence of a formal legislative
prohibition against the marriage of a particular class, is a combination
of various evils. In part the law becomes a dead letter, in part it is
evaded by skill and fraud, in part it is obeyed to give rise to worse
evils. This happened, for instance, in the Terek district of the Caucasus
where, on the demand of a medical committee, priests were prohibited from
marrying persons among whose relatives or ancestry any cases of leprosy
had occurred. So much and such various mischief was caused by this order
that it was speedily withdrawn.[452]
If we remember that the Catholic Church was occupied for more than a
thousand years in the attempt to impose the prohibition of marriage on its
priesthood,—an educated and trained body of men, who had every spiritual
and worldly motive to accept the prohibition, and were, moreover, brought
up to regard asceticism as the best ideal in life,[453]—we may realize
how absurd it is to attempt to gain the same end by mere casual
prohibitions issued to untrained people with no motives to obey such
prohibitions, and no ideals of celibacy.
The hopelessness and even absurdity of effecting the eugenic improvement
of the race by merely placing on the statute book prohibitions to certain
classes of people to enter the legal bonds of matrimony as at present
constituted, reveals the weakness of those who undervalue the eugenic
importance of environment. Those who affirm that heredity is everything
and environment nothing seem strangely to forget that it is precisely the
lower classes—those who are most subjected to the influence of bad
environment—who procreate most copiously, most recklessly, and most
disastrously. The restraint of procreation, and a concomitant regard for
heredity, increase pari passu with improvement of the environment and
rise in social well-being. If even already it can be said that probably
fifty per cent. of sexual intercourse—perhaps the most procreatively
productive moiety—takes place outside legal marriage, it becomes obvious
that statutory prohibition to the unfit classes to refrain from legal
marriage merely involves their joining the procreating classes outside
legal matrimony. It is also clear that if we are to neglect the factor of
environment, and leave the lower social classes to the ignorance and
recklessness which are the result of such environment, the only practical
method of eugenics left open is that by castration and abortion. But this
method—if applied on a wholesale scale as it would need to be[454] and
without reference to the consent of the individual—is entirely opposed
to modern democratic feeling. Thus those short-sighted eugenists who
overlook the importance of environment are overlooking the only practical
channel through which their aims can be realized. Attention to procreation
and attention to environment are not, as some have supposed, antagonistic,
but they play harmoniously into each other's hands. The care for
environment leads to a restraint on reckless procreation, and the
restraint of procreation leads to improved environment.
Legislation on marriage, to be effectual, must be enacted in the home, in
the school, in the doctor's consulting room. Force is helpless here; it is
education that is needed, not merely instruction, but the education of the
conscience and will, and the training of the emotions.
Legal action may come in to further this process of education, though it
cannot replace it. Thus it is very desirable that when there has been a
concealment of serious disease by a party to a marriage such concealment
should be a ground for divorce. Epilepsy may be taken as typical of the
diseases which should be a bar to procreation, and their concealment
equivalent to an annulment of marriage.[455] In the United States the
Supreme Court of Errors of Connecticut laid it down in 1906 that the
Superior Court has the power to pass a decree of divorce when one of the
parties has concealed the existence of epilepsy. This weighty deliverence,
it has been well said,[456] marks a forward step in human progress. There
are many other seriously pathological conditions in which divorce should
be pronounced, or indeed, occur automatically, except when procreation has
been renounced, for in that case the State is no longer concerned in the
relationship, except to punish any fraud committed by concealment.
The demand that a medical certificate of health should be
compulsory on marriage, has been especially made in France. In
1858, Diday, of Lyons, proposed, indeed, that all persons,
without exception, should be compelled to possess a certificate
of health and disease, a kind of sanitary passport. In 1872,
Bertillon (Art. "Demographic," Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des
Sciences Médicales) advocated the registration, at marriage, of
the chief anthropological and pathological traits of the
contracting parties (height, weight, color of hair and eyes,
muscular force, size of head, condition of vision, hearing, etc.,
deformities and defects, etc.), not so much, however, for the end
of preventing undesirable marriages, as to facilitate the study
and comparison of human groups at particular periods. Subsequent
demands, of a more limited and partial character, for legal
medical certificates as a condition of marriage, have been made
by Fournier (Syphilis et Mariage, 1890), Cazalis (Le Science
et le Mariage, 1890), and Jullien (Blenorrhagie et Mariage,
1898). In Austria, Haskovec, of Prague ("Contrat Matrimonial et
L'Hygiène Publique," Comptes-rendus Congrès International de
Médecine, Lisbon, 1906, Section VII, p. 600), argues that, on
marriage, a medical certificate should be presented, showing that
the subject is exempt from tuberculosis, alcoholism, syphilis,
gonorrhœa, severe mental, or nervous, or other
degenerative state, likely to be injurious to the other partner,
or to the offspring. In America, Rosenberg and Aronstam argue
that every candidate for marriage, male or female, should undergo
a strict examination by a competent board of medical examiners,
concerning (1) Family and Past History (syphilis, consumption,
alcoholism, nervous, and mental diseases), and (2) Status Presens
(thorough examination of all the organs); if satisfactory, a
certificate of matrimonial eligibility would then be granted. It
is pointed out that a measure of this kind would render
unnecessary the acts passed by some States for the punishment by
fine, or imprisonment, of the concealment of disease. Ellen Key
also considers (Liebe und Ehe, p. 436) that each party at
marriage should produce a certificate of health. "It seems to me
just as necessary," she remarks, elsewhere (Century of the
Child, Ch. I), "to demand medical testimony concerning capacity
for marriage, as concerning capacity for military service. In the
one case, it is a matter of giving life; in the other, of taking
it, although certainly the latter occasion has hitherto been
considered as much the more serious."
The certificate, as usually advocated, would be a private but
necessary legitimation of the marriage in the eyes of the civil
and religious authorities. Such a step, being required for the
protection alike of the conjugal partner and of posterity, would
involve a new legal organization of the matrimonial contract.
That such demands are so frequently made, is a significant sign
of the growth of moral consciousness in the community, and it is
good that the public should be made acquainted with the urgent
need for them. But it is highly undesirable that they should, at
present, or, perhaps, ever, be embodied in legal codes. What is
needed is the cultivation of the feeling of individual
responsibility, and the development of social antagonism towards
those individuals who fail to recognize their responsibility. It
is the reality of marriage, and not its mere legal forms, that it
is necessary to act upon.
The voluntary method is the only sound way of approach in this matter.
Duclaux considered that the candidate for marriage should possess a
certificate of health in much the same way as the candidate for life
assurance, the question of professional secrecy, as well as that of
compulsion, no more coming into one question than into the other. There is
no reason why such certificates, of an entirely voluntary character,
should not become customary among those persons who are sufficiently
enlightened to realize all the grave personal, family, and social issues
involved in marriage. The system of eugenic certification, as originated
and developed by Galton, will constitute a valuable instrument for raising
the moral consciousness in this matter. Galton's eugenic certificates
would deal mainly with the natural virtues of superior hereditary
breed—"the public recognition of a natural nobility"—but they would
include the question of personal health and personal aptitude.[457]
To demand compulsory certificates of health at marriage is indeed to begin
at the wrong end. It would not only lead to evasions and antagonisms but
would probably call forth a reaction. It is first necessary to create an
enthusiasm for health, a moral conscience in matters of procreation,
together with, on the scientific side, a general habit of registering the
anthropological, psychological, and pathological data concerning the
individual, from birth onwards, altogether apart from marriage. The
earlier demands of Diday and Bertillon were thus not only on a sounder but
also a more practicable basis. If such records were kept from birth for
every child, there would be no need for special examination at marriage,
and many incidental ends would be gained. There is difficulty at present
in obtaining such records from the moment of birth, and, so far as I am
aware, no attempts have yet been made to establish their systematic
registration. But it is quite possible to begin at the beginning of school
life, and this is now done at many schools and colleges in England,
America, and elsewhere, more especially as regards anthropological,
physiological, and psychological data, each child being submitted to a
thorough and searching anthropometric examination, and thus furnished with
a systematic statement of his physical condition.[458] This examination
needs to be standardized and generalized, and repeated at fixed intervals.
"Every individual child," as is truly stated by Dr. Dukes, the Physician
to Rugby School, "on his entrance to a public school should be as
carefully and as thoroughly examined as if it were for life insurance." If
this procedure were general from an early age, there would be no hardship
in the production of the record at marriage, and no opportunity for fraud.
The dossier of each person might well be registered by the State, as
wills already are, and, as in the case of wills, become freely open to
students when a century had elapsed. Until this has been done during
several centuries our knowledge of eugenics will remain rudimentary.
There can be little doubt that the eugenic attitude towards
marriage, and the responsibility of the individual for the future
of the race, is becoming more recognized. It is constantly
happening that persons, about to marry, approach the physician in
a state of serious anxiety on this point. Urquhart, indeed
(Journal of Mental Science, April, 1907, p. 277), believes that
marriages are seldom broken off on this ground; this seems,
however, too pessimistic a view, and even when the marriage is
not broken off the resolve is often made to avoid procreation.
Clouston, who emphasizes (Hygiene of the Mind, p. 74) the
importance of "inquiries by each of the parties to the
life-contract, by their parents and their doctors, as to
heredity, temperament, and health," is more hopeful of the
results than Urquhart. "I have been very much impressed, of late
years," he writes (Journal of Mental Science, Oct., 1907, p.
710), "with the way in which this subject is taking possession of
intelligent people, by the number of times one is consulted by
young men and young women, proposing to marry, or by their
fathers or mothers. I used to have the feeling in the back of my
mind, when I was consulted, that it did not matter what I said,
it would not make any difference. But it is making a difference;
and I, and others, could tell of scores of marriages which were
put off in consequence of psychiatric medical advice."
Ellen Key, also, refers to the growing tendency among both men
and women, to be influenced by eugenic consideration in forming
partnerships for life (Century of the Child, Ch. I). The
recognition of the eugenic attitude towards marriage, the
quickening of the social and individual conscience in matters of
heredity, as also the systematic introduction of certification
and registration, will be furthered by the growing tendency to
the socialization of medicine, and, indeed, in its absence would
be impossible. (See e.g., Havelock Ellis, The Nationalization
of Health.) The growth of the State Medical Organization of
Health is steady and continuous, and is constantly covering a
larger field. The day of the private practitioner of
medicine—who was treated, as Duclaux (L'Hygiène Sociale, p.
263) put it, "like a grocer, whose shop the customer may enter
and leave as he pleases, and when he pleases"—will, doubtless,
soon be over. It is now beginning to be felt that health is far
too serious a matter, not only from the individual but also from
the social point of view, to be left to private caprice. There
is, indeed, a tendency, in some quarters, to fear that some day
society may rush to the opposite extreme, and bow before medicine
with the same unreasoning deference that it once bowed before
theology. That danger is still very remote, nor is it likely,
indeed, that medicine will ever claim any authority of this kind.
The spirit of medicine has, notoriously, been rather towards the
assertion of scepticism than of dogma, and the fanatics in this
field will always be in a hopelessly small minority.
The general introduction of authentic personal records covering all
essential data—hereditary, anthropometric and pathological—cannot fail
to be a force on the side of positive as well as of negative eugenics, for
it would tend to promote the procreation of the fit as well as restrict
that of the unfit, without any legislative compulsion. With the growth of
education a regard for such records as a preliminary to marriage would
become as much a matter of course as once was the regard to the
restrictions imposed by Canon law, and as still is a regard to money or to
caste. A woman can usually refrain from marrying a man with no money and
no prospects; a man may be passionately in love with a woman of lower
class than himself but he seldom marries her. It needs but a clear general
perception of all that is involved in heredity and health to make eugenic
considerations equally influential.
A discriminating regard to the quality of offspring will act beneficially
on the side of positive eugenics by substituting the pernicious tendency
to put a premium on excess of childbirth by the more rational method of
putting a premium on the quality of the child. It has been one of the most
unfortunate results of the mania for protesting against that decline of
the birthrate which is always and everywhere the result of civilization,
that there has been a tendency to offer special social or pecuniary
advantages to the parents of large families. Since large families tend to
be degenerate, and to become a tax on the community, since rapid
pregnancies in succession are not only a serious drain on the strength of
the mother but are now known to depreciate seriously the quality of the
offspring, and since, moreover, it is in large families that disease and
mortality chiefly prevail, all the interests of the community are against
the placing of any premium on large families, even in the case of parents
of good stock. The interests of the State are bound up not with the
quantity but with the quality of its citizens, and the premium should be
placed not on the families that reach a certain size but on the individual
children that reach a certain standard; the attainment of this standard
could well be based on observations made from birth to the fifth year. A
premium on this basis would be as beneficial to a State as that on the
merely numerical basis is pernicious.
This consideration applies with still greater force to the proposals for
the "systematic endowment of motherhood" of which we hear more and more.
So moderate and judicious a social reformer as Mr. Sidney Webb writes: "We
shall have to face the problem of the systematic endowment of motherhood,
and place this most indispensable of all professions upon an honorable
economic basis. At present it is ignored as an occupation, unremunerated,
and in no way honored by the State."[459] True as this statement is, it
must always be remembered that an indispensable preliminary to any
proposal for the endowment of motherhood by the State is a clear
conception of the kind of motherhood which the State requires. To endow
the reckless and indiscriminate motherhood which we see around us, to
encourage, that is, by State aid, the production of citizens a large
proportion of whom the State, if it dared, would like to destroy as unfit,
is too ridiculous a proposal to deserve discussion.[460] The only sound
reason, indeed, for the endowment of motherhood is that it would enable
the State, in its own interests, to further the natural selection of the
fit.
As to the positive qualities which the State is entitled to endow in its
encouragement of motherhood, it is still too early to speak with complete
assurance. Negative eugenics tends to be ahead of positive eugenics; it is
easier to detect bad stocks than to be quite sure of good stocks. Both on
the scientific side and on the social side, however, we are beginning to
attain a clearer realization of the end to be attained and a more precise
knowledge of the methods of attaining it.[461]
Even when we have gained a fairly clear conception of the stocks and the
individuals which we are justified in encouraging to undertake the task of
producing fit citizens for the State, the problems of procreation are by
no means at an end. Before we can so much as inquire what are the
conditions under which selected individuals may best procreate, there is
still the initial question to be decided whether those individuals are
both fertile and potent, for this is not guaranteed by the fact that they
belong to good stocks, nor is even the fact that a man and a woman are
fertile with other persons any positive proof that they will be fertile
with each other. Among the large masses of the population who do not seek
to make their unions legal until those unions have proved fertile, this
difficulty is settled in a simple and practical manner. The question is,
however, a serious and hazardous one, in the present state of the marriage
law in most countries, for those classes which are accustomed to bind
themselves in legal marriage without any knowledge of their potency and
fertility with each other. The matter is mostly left to chance, and as
legal marriage cannot usually be dissolved on the ground that there are no
offspring, even although procreation is commonly declared to be the chief
end of marriage, the question assumes much gravity. The ordinary range of
sterility is from seven to fifteen per cent. of all marriages, and in a
very large proportion of these it is a source of great concern. This could
be avoided, in some measure, by examination before marriage, and almost
altogether by ordaining that, as it is only through offspring that a
marriage has any concern for the State, a legal marriage could be
dissolved, after a certain period, at the will of either of the parties,
in the absence of such offspring.
It was formerly supposed that when a union proved infertile, it
was the wife who was at fault. That belief is long since
exploded, but, even yet, a man is generally far more concerned
about his potency, that is, his ability to perform the mechanical
act of coitus, than about his fertility, that is, his ability to
produce living spermatozoa, though the latter condition is a much
more common source of sterility. "Any man," says Arthur Cooper
(British Medical Journal, May 11, 1907), "who has any sexual
defect or malformation, or who has suffered from any disease or
injury of the genito-urinary organs, even though comparatively
trivial or one-sided, and although his copulative power may be
unimpaired, should be looked upon as possibly sterile, until some
sort of evidence to the contrary has been obtained." In case of a
sterile marriage, the possible cause should first be investigated
in the husband, for it is comparatively easy to examine the
semen, and to ascertain if it contains active spermatozoa.
Prinzing, in a comprehensive study of sterile marriages ("Die
Sterilen Ehen," Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft, 1904, Heft
1 and 2), states that in two-fifths of sterile marriages the man
is at fault; one-third of such marriages are the result of
venereal diseases in the husband himself, or transmitted to the
wife. Gonorrhœa is not now considered so important a
cause of sterility as it was a few years ago; Schenk makes it
responsible for only about thirteen per cent. sterile marriages
(cf. Kisch, The Sexual Life of Woman). Pinkus (Archiv für
Gynäkologie, 1907) found that of nearly five hundred cases in
which he examined both partners, in 24.4 per cent. cases, the
sterility was directly due to the husband, and in 15.8 per cent.
cases, indirectly due, because caused by gonorrhœa with
which he had infected his wife.
When sterility is due to a defect in the husband's spermatozoa,
and is not discovered, as it usually might be, before marriage,
the question of impregnating the wife by other methods has
occasionally arisen. Divorce on the ground of sterility is not
possible, and, even if it were, the couple, although they wish to
have a child, have not usually any wish to separate. Under these
circumstances, in order to secure the desired end, without
departing from widely accepted rules of morality, the attempt is
occasionally made to effect artificial fecundation by injecting
the semen from a healthy male. Attempts have been made to effect
artificial fecundation by various distinguished men, from John
Hunter to Schwalbe, but it is nearly always very difficult to
effect, and often impossible. This is easy to account for, if we
recall what has already been pointed out (ante p. 577)
concerning the influence of erotic excitement in the woman in
securing conception; it is obviously a serious task for even the
most susceptible woman to evoke erotic enthusiasm à propos of a
medical syringe. Schwalbe, for instance, records a case
(Deutsche Medizinisches Wochenschrift, Aug., 1908, p. 510) in
which,—in consequence of the husband's sterility and the wife's
anxiety, with her husband's consent, to be impregnated by the
semen of another man,—he made repeated careful attempts to
effect artificial fecundation; these attempts were, however,
fruitless, and the three parties concerned finally resigned
themselves to the natural method of intercourse, which was
successful. In another case, recorded by Schwalbe, in which the
husband was impotent but not sterile, six attempts were made to
effect artificial fecundation, and further efforts abandoned on
account of the disgust of all concerned.
Opinion, on the whole, has been opposed to the practice of
artificial fecundation, even apart from the question of the
probabilities of success. Thus, in France, where there is a
considerable literature on the subject, the Paris Medical
Faculty, in 1885, after some hesitation, refused Gérard's thesis
on the history of artificial fecundation, afterwards published
independently. In 1883, the Bordeaux legal tribunal declared that
artificial fecundation was illegitimate, and a social danger. In
1897, the Holy See also pronounced that the practice is unlawful
("Artificial Fecundation before the Inquisition," British
Medical Journal, March 5, 1898). Apart, altogether, from this
attitude of medicine, law, and Church, it would certainly seem
that those who desire offspring would do well, as a rule, to
adopt the natural method, which is also the best, or else to
abandon to others the task of procreation, for which they are not
adequately equipped.
When we have ascertained that two individuals both belong to sound and
healthy stocks, and, further, that they are themselves both apt for
procreation, it still remains to consider the conditions under which they
may best effect procreation.[462] There arises, for instance, the
question, often asked, What is the best age for procreation?
The considerations which weigh in answering this question are of two
different orders, physiological, and social or moral. That is to say, that
it is necessary, on the one hand, that physical maturity should have been
fully attained, and the sexual cells completely developed; while, on the
other hand, it is necessary that the man shall have become able to support
a family, and that both partners shall have received a training in life
adequate to undertake the responsibilities and anxieties involved in the
rearing of children. While there have been variations at different times,
it scarcely appears that, on the whole, the general opinion as to the best
age for procreation has greatly varied in Europe during many centuries.
Hesiod indeed said that a woman should marry about fifteen and a man about
thirty,[463] but obstetricians have usually concluded that, in the
interests alike of the parents and their offspring, the procreative life
should not begin in women before twenty and in men before
twenty-five.[464] After thirty in women and after thirty-five or forty in
men it seems probable that the best conditions for procreation begin to
decline.[465] At the present time, in England and several other civilized
countries, the tendency has been for the age of marriage to fall at an
increasingly late age, on the average some years later than that usually
fixed as the most favorable age for the commencement of the procreative
life. But, on the whole, the average seldom departs widely from the
accepted standard, and there seems no good reason why we should desire to
modify this general tendency.
At the same time, it by no means follows that wide variations,
under special circumstances, may not only be permissible, but
desirable. The male is capable of procreating, in some cases,
from about the age of thirteen until far beyond eighty, and at
this advanced age, the offspring, even if not notable for great
physical robustness, may possess high intellectual qualities.
(See e.g., Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, pp. 120
et seq.) The range of the procreative age in women begins
earlier (sometimes at eight), though it usually ceases by fifty,
or earlier, in only rare cases continuing to sixty or beyond.
Cases have been reported of pregnancy, or childbirth, at the age
of fifty-nine (e.g., Lancet, Aug. 5, 1905, p. 419). Lepage
(Comptes-rendus Société d'Obstétrique de Paris, Oct., 1903)
reports a case of a primipara of fifty-seven; the child was
stillborn. Kisch (Sexual Life of Woman, Part II) refers to
cases of pregnancy in elderly women, and various references are
given in British Medical Journal, Aug. 8, 1903, p. 325.
Of more importance is the question of early pregnancy. Several
investigators have devoted their attention to this question.
Thus, Spitta (in a Marburg Inaugural Dissertation, 1895) reviewed
the clinical history of 260 labors in primiparæ of 18 and under,
as observed at the Marburg Maternity. He found that the general
health during pregnancy was not below the average of pregnant
women, while the mortality of the child at birth and during the
following weeks was not high, and the mortality of the mother was
by no means high. Picard (in a Paris thesis, 1903) has studied
childbirth in thirty-eight mothers below the age of sixteen. He
found that, although the pelvis is certainly not yet fully
developed in very young girls, the joints and bones are much more
yielding than in the adult, so that parturition, far from being
more difficult, is usually rapid and easy. The process of labor
itself, is essentially normal in these cases, and, even when
abnormalities occur (low insertion of the placenta is a common
anomaly) it is remarkable that the patients do not suffer from
them in the way common among older women. The average weight of
the child was three kilogrammes, or about 6 pounds, 9 ounces; it
sometimes required special care during the first few days after
birth, perhaps because labor in these cases is sometimes slow.
The recovery of the mother was, in every case, absolutely normal,
and the fact that these young mothers become pregnant again more
readily than primiparæ of a more mature age, further contributes
to show that childbirth below the age of sixteen is in no way
injurious to the mother. Gache (Annales de Gynécologie et
d'Obstétrique, Dec., 1904) has attended ninety-one labors of
mothers under seventeen, in the Rawson Hospital, Buenos Ayres;
they were of so-called Latin race, mostly Spanish or Italian.
Gache found that these young mothers were by no means more
exposed than others to abortion or to other complications of
pregnancy. Except in four cases of slightly contracted pelvis,
delivery was normal, though rather longer than in older
primiparæ. Damage to the soft parts was, however, rare, and, when
it occurred, in every case rapidly healed. The average weight of
the child was 3,039 grammes, or nearly 6¾ pounds. It may be noted
that most observers find that very early pregnancies occur in
women who begin to menstruate at an unusually early age, that is,
some years before the early pregnancy occurs.
It is clear, however, that young mothers do remarkably well,
while there is no doubt whatever that they bear unusually fine
infants. Kleinwächter, indeed, found that the younger the mother,
the bigger the child. It is not only physically that the children
of young mothers are superior. Marro has found (Pubertà, p.
257) that the children of mothers under 21 are superior to those
of older mothers both in conduct and intelligence, provided the
fathers are not too old or too young. The detailed records of
individual cases confirm these results, both as regards mother
and child. Thus, Milner (Lancet, June 7, 1902) records a case
of pregnancy in a girl of fourteen; the labor pains were very
mild, and delivery was easy. E. B. Wales, of New Jersey, has
recorded the history (reproduced in Medical Reprints, Sept. 15,
1890) of a colored girl who became pregnant at the age of eleven.
She was of medium size, rather tall and slender, but well
developed, and began to menstruate at the age of ten. She was in
good health and spirits during pregnancy, and able to work.
Delivery was easy and natural, not notably prolonged, and
apparently not unduly painful, for there were no moans or
agitation. The child was a fine, healthy boy, weighing not less
than eleven pounds. Mother and child both did well, and there was
a great flow of milk. Whiteside Robertson (British Medical
Journal, Jan. 18, 1902) has recorded a case of pregnancy at the
age of thirteen, in a Colonial girl of British origin in Cape
Colony, which is notable from other points of view. During
pregnancy, she was anæmic, and appeared to be of poor development
and doubtfully normal pelvic conformation. Yet delivery took
place naturally, at full term, without difficulty or injury, and
the lying-in period was in every way satisfactory. The baby was
well-proportioned, and weighed 7½ pounds. "I have rarely seen a
primipara enjoy easier labor," concluded Robertson, "and I have
never seen one look forward to the happy realization of
motherhood with greater satisfaction."
The facts brought forward by obstetricians concerning the good
results of early pregnancy, as regards both mother and child,
have not yet received the attention they deserve. They are,
however, confirmed by many general tendencies which are now
fairly well recognized. The significant fact is known, for
instance, that in mothers over thirty, the proportion of
abortions and miscarriages is twice as great as in mothers
between the ages of fifteen and twenty, who also are superior in
this respect to mothers between the ages of twenty and thirty
(Statistischer Jahrbuch, Budapest, 1905). It was, again, proved
by Matthews Duncan, in his Goulstonian lecture, that the chances
of sterility in a woman increase with increase of age. It has,
further, been shown (Kisch, Sexual Life of Woman, Part II) that
the older a woman at marriage, the greater the average interval
before the first delivery, a tendency which seems to indicate
that it is the very young woman who is in the condition most apt
for procreation; Kisch is not, indeed, inclined to think that
this applies to women below twenty, but the fact, observed by
other obstetricians, that mothers under eighteen tend to become
pregnant again at an unusually short interval, goes far to
neutralize the exception made by Kisch. It may also be pointed
out that, among children of very young mothers, the sexes are
more nearly equal in number than is the case with older mothers.
This would seem to indicate that we are here in presence of a
normal equilibrium which will decrease as the age of the mother
is progressively disturbed in an abnormal direction.
The facility of parturition at an early age, it may be noted,
corresponds to an equal facility in physical sexual intercourse,
a fact that is often overlooked. In Russia, where marriage still
takes place early, it was formerly common when the woman was only
twelve or thirteen, and Guttceit (Dreissig Jahre Praxis, vol.
i, p. 324) says that he was assured by women who married at this
age that the first coitus presented no especial difficulties.
There is undoubtedly, at the present time, a considerable amount
of prejudice against early motherhood. In part, this is due to a
failure to realize that women are sexually much more precocious
than men, physically as well as psychically (see ante p. 35).
The difference is about five years. This difference has been
virtually recognized for thousands of years, in the ancient
belief that the age of election for procreation is about twenty,
or less, for women, but about twenty-five for men; and it has
more lately been affirmed by the discovery that, while the male
is never capable of generation before thirteen, the female may,
in occasional instances, become pregnant at eight. (Some of the
recorded examples are quoted by Kisch.) In part, also, there is
an objection to the assumption of responsibilities so serious as
those of motherhood by a young girl, and there is the very
reasonable feeling that the obligations of a permanent marriage
tie ought not to be undertaken at an early age. On the other
hand, apart from the physical advantages, as regards both mother
and infant, on the side of early pregnancies, it is an advantage
for the child to have a young mother, who can devote herself
sympathetically and unreservedly to its interests, instead of
presenting the pathetic spectacle we so often witness in the
middle-aged woman who turns to motherhood when her youth and
mental flexibility are gone, and her habits and tastes have
settled into other grooves; it has sometimes been a great
blessing even to the very greatest men, like Goethe, to have had
a youthful mother. It would also, in many cases, be a great
advantage for the woman herself if she could bring her
procreative life to an end well before the age of twenty-five, so
that she could then, unhampered by child-bearing and mature in
experience, be free to enter on such wider activities in the
world as she might be fitted for.
Such an arrangement of the procreative life of women would,
obviously, only be a variation, and would probably be unsuited
for the majority. Every case must be judged on its own merits.
The best age for procreation will probably continue to be
regarded as being, for most women, around the age of twenty. But
at a time like the present, when there is an unfortunate
tendency for motherhood to be unduly delayed, it becomes
necessary to insist on the advantages, in many cases, of early
motherhood.
There are other conditions favorable or unfavorable to procreation which
it is now unnecessary to discuss in detail, since they have already been
incidentally dealt with in previous volumes of these Studies. There is,
for instance, the question of the time of year and the time of the
menstrual cycle which may most properly be selected for procreation.[466]
The best period is probably that when sexual desire is strongest, which is
the period when conception would appear, as a matter of fact, most often
to occur. This would be in spring or early summer,[467] and immediately
after (or shortly before) the menstrual period. The Chinese have observed
that the last day of menstruation and the two following
days—corresponding to the period of œstrus—constitute the most
favorable time for fecundation, and Bossi, of Genoa, has found that the
great majority of successes in both natural and artificial fecundation
occur at this period.[468] Soranus, as well as the Talmud, assigned the
period about menstruation as the best for impregnation, and Susruta, the
Indian physician, said that at this time pregnancy most readily occurs
because then the mouth of the womb is open, like the flower of the
water-lily to the sunshine.
We have now at last reached the point from which we started, the moment of
conception, and the child again lies in its mother's womb. There remains
no more to be said. The divine cycle of life is completed.
[421]
Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia,
p. 330.
[422]
Academy of Medicine of Paris, March 31, 1908.
[423]
The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, vol. ii,
p. 405.
[424]
Population and Progress, p. 41.
[425]
Cf. Reibmayr, Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und
Genics, Bd. II, p. 31.
[426]
"The debt that we owe to those who have gone before us,"
says Haycraft (Darwinism and Race Progress, p. 160), "we can only repay
to those who come after us."
[427]
Mardrus, Les Mille Nuits, vol. xvi, p. 158.
[428]
Sidney Webb, Popular Science Monthly, 1906, p. 526
(previously published in the London Times, Oct. 11, 16, 1906). In Ch. IX
of the present volume it has already been necessary to discuss the meaning
of the term, "morality."
[429]
Thus, in Paris, in 1906, in the rich quarters, the
birthrate per 1,000 inhabitants was 19.09; in well-to-do quarters, 22.51;
and in poor quarters, 29.70. Here we see that, while the birthrate falls
and rises with social class, even among the poor and least restrained
class the birthrate is still but little above the general average for
England, where prevention is widespread, and very considerably lower than
the average (now rapidly falling) in Germany. It is evident that even
among the poor class there is a process of leveling up to the higher
classes in this matter.
[430]
I have developed these points more in detail in two
articles in the Independent Review, November, 1903, and April, 1904. See
also, Bushee, "The Declining Birthrate and Its Causes," Popular Science
Monthly, Aug., 1903.
[431]
Francis Place, Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle
of Population, 1822, p. 165.
[432]
See, e.g., a weighty chapter in the Sexualleben und
Nervenleiden of Löwenfeld, one of the most judicious authorities on
sexual pathology. Twenty-five years ago, as many will remember, the
medical student was usually taught that preventive methods of intercourse
led to all sorts of serious results. At that time, however, reckless and
undesirable methods of prevention seem to have been more prevalent than
now.
[433]
Michael Ryan, Philosophy of Marriage, p. 9. To enable
"the conservative power of the Creator" to exert itself on the myriads of
germinal human beings secreted during his life-time by even one man, would
require a world full of women, while the corresponding problem as regards
a woman is altogether too difficult to cope with. The process by which
life has been built up, far from being a process of universal
conservation, has been a process of stringent selection and vast
destruction; the progress effected by civilization merely lies in making
this blind process intelligent.
[434]
Thus, in Belgium, in 1908 (Sexual-Probleme, Feb., 1909,
p. 136), a physician (Dr. Mascaux) who had been prominent in promoting a
knowledge of preventive methods of conception, was condemned to three
months imprisonment for "offense against morality!" In such a case, Dr.
Helene Stöcker comments (Die Neue Generation, Jan., 1909, p. 7),
"morality" is another name for ignorance, timidity, hypocrisy, prudery,
coarseness, and lack of conscience. It must be remembered, however, in
explanation of this iniquitous judgment, that for some years past the
clerical party has been politically predominant in Belgium.
[435]
It has been objected that the condom cannot be used by the
very poorest, on account of its cost, but Hans Ferdy, in a detailed paper
(Sexual-Probleme, Dec., 1908), shows that the use of the condom can be
brought within the means of the very poorest, if care is taken to preserve
it under water when not in use. Nyström (Sexual Probleme, Nov., 1908, p.
736) has issued a leaflet for the benefit of his patients and others,
recommending the condom, and explaining its use.
[436]
Thus, Kisch, in his Sexual Life of Woman, after
discussing fully the various methods of prevention, decides in favor of
the condom. Fürbringer similarly (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease
in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, pp. 232 et seq.) concludes that the
condom is "relatively the most perfect anti-conceptual remedy." Forel
(Die Sexuelle Frage, pp. 457 et seq.) also discusses the question at
length; any æsthetic objection to the condom, Forel adds (p. 544), is due
to the fact that we are not accustomed to it; "eye-glasses are not
specially æsthetic, but the poetry of life does not suffer excessively
from their use, which, in many cases, cannot be dispensed with."
[437]
[438]
There are some disputed points in Roman law and practice
concerning abortion; they are discussed in Balestrini's valuable book,
Aborto, pp. 30 et seq.
[439]
Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Bk. XXII, Ch. XIII.
[440]
The development of opinion and law concerning abortion has
been traced by Eugène Bausset, L'Avortement Criminel, Thèse de Paris,
1907. For a summary of the practices of different peoples regarding
abortion, see W. G. Sumner, Folkways, Ch. VIII.
[441]
Die Neue Generation, May, 1908, p. 192. It may be added
that in England the attachment of any penalty at all to abortion,
practiced in the early months of pregnancy (before "quickening" has taken
place), is merely a modern innovation.
[442]
Even Balestrini, who is opposed to the punishment of
abortion, is no advocate of it. "Whenever abortion becomes a social
custom," he remarks (op. cit., p. 191), "it is the external
manifestation of a people's decadence, and far too deeply rooted to be
cured by the mere attempt to suppress the external manifestation."
[443]
Cf. Ellen Key, Century of the Child, Ch. I. Hirth
(Wege zur Heimat, p. 526) is likewise opposed to the encouragement of
abortion, though he would not actually punish the pregnant woman who
induces abortion. I would especially call attention to an able and cogent
article by Anna Pappritz ("Die Vernichtung des Keimenden Lebens,"
Sexual-Probleme, July, 1909) who argues that the woman is not the sole
guardian of the embryo she bears, and that it is not in the interests of
society, nor even in her own interests, that she should be free to destroy
it at will. Anna Pappritz admits that the present barbarous laws in regard
to abortion must be modified, but maintains that they should not be
abolished. She proposes (1) a greatly reduced punishment for abortion; (2)
this punishment to be extended to the father, whether married or unmarried
(a provision already carried out in Norway, both for abortion and
infanticide); (3) permission to the physician to effect abortion when
there is good reason to suspect hereditary degeneration, as well as when
the woman has been impregnated by force.
[444]
Cf. Dr. Max Hirsch, Sexual-Probleme, Jan., 1908, p.
23.
[445]
Bausset (op. cit.) sets forth various social measures for
the care of pregnant and child-bearing women, which would tend to lessen
criminal abortion.
[446]
Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, vol. i, p. 564.
[447]
F. E. Daniel, President of the State Medical Association of
Texas, "Should Insane Criminals or Sexual Perverts be Allowed to
Procreate?" Medico-legal Journal, Dec., 1893; id., "The Cause and
Prevention of Rape," Texas Medical Journal, May, 1904.
[448]
P. Näcke, "Die Kastration bei gewissen Klassen von
Degenerirten als ein Wirksamer Socialer Schutz," Archiv für
Kriminal-Anthropologie, Bd. III, 1899, p. 58; id. "Kastration in
Gewissen Fällen von Geisteskrankheit," Psychiatrisch-Neurologische
Wochenschrift, 1905, No. 29.
[449]
Angelo Zuccarelli, "Asessualizzazione o sterilizzazione dei
Degenerati," L'Anomalo, 1898-99, No. 6; id., "Sur la nécessité et sur
les Moyens d'empêcher la Réproduction des Hommes les plus Dégénérés,"
International Congress Criminal Anthropology, Amsterdam, 1901.
[450]
Näcke, Neurologisches Centralblatt, March 1, 1909. The
original account of these operations is reproduced in the
Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift, No. 2, 1909, with an
approving comment by the editor, Dr. Bresler. As regards castration in
America, see Flood, "Castration of Idiot Children," American Journal
Psychology, Jan., 1899; also, Alienist and Neurologist, Aug., 1909, p.
348.
[451]
It is probable that castration may prove especially
advantageous in the case of the feeble-minded. "In Somersetshire," says
Tredgold ("The Feeble-Mind as a Social Danger," Eugenics Review, July,
1909), "I found that out of a total number of 167 feeble-minded women,
nearly two-fifths (61) had given birth to children, for the most part
illegitimate. Moreover, it is not uncommon, but, rather the rule, for
these poor girls to be admitted into the workhouse maternity wards again
and again, and the average number of offspring to each one of them is
probably three or four, although even six is not uncommon." In his work on
Mental Deficiency (pp. 288-292) the same author shows that propagation
by the mentally deficient is, in England, "both a terrible and extensive
evil."
[452]
This example is brought forward by Ledermann, "Skin
Diseases and Marriage," in Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in
Relation to Marriage.
[453]
I may here again refer to Lea's instructive History of
Sacerdotal Celibacy.
[454]
In England, 35,000 applicants for admission to the navy are
annually rejected, and although the physical requirements for enlistment
in the army are nowadays extremely moderate, it is estimated by General
Maurice that at least sixty per cent. of recruits and would-be recruits
are dismissed as unfit. (See e.g., William Coates, "The Duty of the
Medical Profession in the Prevention of National Deterioration," British
Medical Journal, May 1, 1909.) It can scarcely be claimed that men who
are not good enough for the army are good enough for the great task of
creating the future race.
[455]
The recognition of epilepsy as a bar to procreation is not
recent. There is said to be a record in the archives of the town of Luçon
in which epilepsy was adjudged to be a valid reason for the cancellation
of a betrothal (British Medical Journal, Feb. 14, 1903, p. 383).
[456]
British Medical Journal, April 14, 1906. In California
and some other States, it appears that deceit regarding health is a ground
for the annulment of marriage.
[457]
Sir F. Galton, Inquiries Into Human Faculty, Everyman's
Library edition, pp. 211 et seq.; cf. Galton's collected Essays in
Eugenics, recently published by the Eugenics Education Society.
[458]
For some account of the methods and results of the work in
schools, see Bertram C. A. Windle, "Anthropometric Work in Schools,"
Medical Magazine, Feb., 1894.
[459]
The most notable steps in this direction have been taken in
Germany. For an account of the experiment at Karlsruhe, see Die Neue
Generation, Dec., 1908.
[460]
Wiethknudsen (as quoted in Sexual-Probleme, Dec., 1908,
p. 837) speaks strongly, but not too strongly, concerning the folly of any
indiscriminate endowment of procreation.
[461]
On the scientific side, in addition to the fruitful methods
of statistical biometrics, which have already been mentioned, much promise
attaches to work along the lines initiated by Mendel; see W. Bateson,
Mendel's Principles of Heredity, 1909; also, W. H. Lock, Recent Progress
in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, and R. C. Punnett,
Mendelism, 1907 (American edition, with interesting preface by Gaylord
Wilshire, from the Socialistic point of view, 1909).
[462]
The study of the right conditions for procreation is very
ancient. In modern times we find that even the very first French medical
book in the vulgar tongue, the Régime du Corps, written by Alebrand of
Florence (who was physician to the King of France), in 1256, is largely
devoted to this matter, concerning which it gives much sound advice. See
J. B. Soalhat, Les Idées de Maistre Alebrand de Florence sur la
Puériculture, Thèse de Paris, 1908.
[463]
Hesiod, Works and Days, II, 690-700.
[464]
This has long been the accepted opinion of medical
authorities, as may be judged by the statements brought together two
centuries ago by Schurig, Parthenologia, pp. 22-25.
[465]
The statement that, on the average, the best age for
procreation in men is before, rather than after, forty, by no means
assumes the existence of any "critical" age in men analogous to the
menopause in women. This is sometimes asserted, but there is no agreement
in regard to it. Restif de la Bretonne (Monsieur Nicolas, vol. x, p.
176) said that at the age of forty delicacy of sentiment begins to go.
Fürbringer believes (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation
to Marriage, vol. i, p. 222) that there is a decisive turn in a man's
life in the sixth decade, or the middle of the fifth, when desire and
potency diminish. J. F. Sutherland also states (Comptes-rendus Congrès
International de Médecine, 1900, Section de Psychiatrie, p. 471) that
there is, in men, about the fifty-fifth year, a change analogous to the
menopause in women, but only in a certain proportion of men. It would
appear that in most men the decline of sexual feeling and potency is very
gradual, and at first manifests itself in increased power of control.
[466]
See, in vol. i, the study of "The Phenomena of Sexual
Periodicity."
[467]
Among animals, also, spring litters are often said to be
the best.
[468]
Bossi's results are summarized in Archives d'Anthropologie
Criminelle, Sept., 1891. Alebrand of Florence, the French King's
physician in the thirteenth century, also advised intercourse a day after
the end of menstruation. |
