BIRTH CONTROL CONDEMNED

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22375, 12 April 1938, Page 12

BIRTH CONTROL CONDEMNED

ADDRESS BY VERY REV. OWEN DUDLEY COMMENT ON IMPORTATION OF OBSCENE LITERATURE (press association tkliqeam.) AUCKLAND, April 11. The attitude of New Zealand toward the practice of birth control and the importation of pornographic and obscene literature were subjects discussed by the Very Rev. Owen Dudley, of London, in an address at St. Patrick's Cathedral to-night.

"The world will not admit sin today," Father Dudley said. "Take, for instance, the amazing statement issued recently by the Wellington committee on birth control. The committee did not regard the practice of birth prevention as a moral question but as a matter of human expediency and judgment. Birth prevention or the, use of some artificial means of preventing conception is most emphatically a moral question. It is intimately bound up with the morality of sex relations and with marriage. Marriage was given by the Creator for the purpose of procreation, that is, for the purpose of bringing children into the world. To use artificial means of preventing conception is to frustrate the very purpose and end for which marriage was given. It is the perversion of the natural end and the frustration of the end of natural law. "Natural laws are God's laws," Father Dudley continued, "and therefore the use of contraceptives is-a defiance of God's law and of God Himself. That is why this practice is gravely sinful. "I am also very sorry to find in New Zealand," Father Dudley said, "such an immense number of shops selling pornographic literature, a great deal if it from America and a great deal of it camouflaged under.art and science. I No honest man, however, will be gulled ! by that. It is scarcely possible to walk down any street in- any New Zealand city without being confronted by obscene literature and pictures. This particular kind of filth must inevitably undermine the morality of New Zealand's youth and therefore the moral life of the nation.

"It will mean ultimately an immense increase in lasciviousness and licence, followed by crime, as is invariably the .case. I sincerely hope the civil authority in New Zealand will take steps to close down this traffic in obscene literature; otherwise it will be contributing to the degeneracy of the people, whose best interests the civil authority is supposed to guard," he added.