Attack On Large Families

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31726, 9 July 1968, Page 13

Attack On Large Families

(NZPA. Staff Correspondent) LONDON, July 8. Mr Desmond Wilson, the Oamaru-born director of “Shelter,” a national campaign for the homeless in Britain, has resigned from his position as a trustee of the Govern-ment-sponsored Young Volunteer Foundation because he no longer feels able to serve alongside Mr Douglas Houghton, M.P., a senior trustee and chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Mr Houghton met a storm of abuse after a speech in which he said that large families were “a form of social irresponsibility which will soon be regarded as a form of social delinquency.” He called for “aggressive education" in family planning and said that family allowances encouraged “ignorant, careless, or feckless parenthood.”

Mr Houghton chose as his forum a ceremony marking the opening of the Sociological Research Foundation which is sponsored by the London Rubber Company. The company produces 95 per cent of Britain’s contraceptives, sales of which last year rose by 10 per cent to reach more than £lsm. At the “Shelter” office in the Strand today, Mr Wilson said Mr Houghton’s speech was “highly inflammable and discriminated against a section of the community struggling against insur mountable obstacles." Mr Wilson, who compared JJJr Houghton’s speech with

that, a few weeks ago, of Mr Enoch Powell on Britain’s racial problem, has written to Mr Houghton, saying: “I believe that in making no conciliatory remarks about the larger families in existence, which I assume include the Royal Family, you are condemning them to a secondclass citizen place in society.” Mr Wilson’s resignation, and his blunt, aggressive, but straight-to-the-point attitude, is typical of the Shelter organisation—one of the bestknown charities in Britain.

Mr Houghton’s widelyreported speech, in which he said that “the procreation of children is not purely a private matter, has caused a storm, but not all the thunderings in the press, and outside It, have been critical of Mr Houghton. Not all, but most

Six other Labour M.P.s have signed a House of Commons motion describing the speech as “an affront to family life." A “Daily Mail” writer, Pearson Phillips, commented: “So it has finally come to thisthe worm of State interference has finally wriggled into that last privacy—the act of making a child. What will they want us to do next—apply for a licence to conceive? . . . The State should be run for the benefit of the family, not vice versa. Some letters to editors echo Mr Phillips’s remarks. “So I’m to be called a social delinquent,” writes Mrs Eileen Wells. I’ve got eight children and I am proud of them and love all of them. Maybe Mr Houghton should do more (with the help of that rubber company) to prevent unwanted babies, but please leave us happily-mar-rieds with large families alone, and reserve the word ‘delinquent’ for those who deserve it”

But, in another letter, Dr Michael Watts says Mr Houghton is right “The production of large families is not the concern of the parents alone,” he writes. “It is the concern of society—which has to provide welfare services for them, subsidise them by means of income tax relief and family allowances, educate them and, frequently, house them.” Another M.P., Mr Robert Maxwell, the father of seven children, commented: “Large

families may be an expensive hobby for the families and the State, but they are one of the finest investments in human happiness and eventually, of considerable benefit to the community as a whole.” Mr Houghton, who is 70, and married but childless, said his speech had been meant to shock but not to offend. There was a definite need for research Into family allowances and other aspects of family life, he added.