FAMILIES IN FRANCE

Evening Star, Issue 18393, 29 September 1923, Page 4

FAMILIES IN FRANCE

FEWER CHILDLESS COUPLES,

Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright.

PARIS, September 28,

(Received September 29, at 9.50 a.m.)

“ Families are again becoming the fashion in social circles,” declared M. Auguste Isaac, a, Deputy for tho Rhone! Department, in presiding at tho National Congress on Natality at Marseilles. He added that young couples belonging to the middle classes are also becoming less opposed to idea of having children. Ho urged a heavier bachelor tax, pointing out that the surtax was applicable io only about 3 per cent, of the total. The surtax on childless couples, he contended, was also too small.—‘The Times.’ A DECLINING BIRTH RATE. Despite the strenuous efforts made in France recently to check the decline in tho Birth rate and to reduce tho rate of infant mortality, the depopulation of Franco continues at a rate which is giving rise to growing alarm among scientists and economists. A particularly bad feature of this depopulation is tho extent to which it is duo to tho wastage of infant life. Dr Wallich, professor of obstetrics in the Paris Faculty of Medicine, who bases his statement on recent statistics, has just declared that of newly-bom children put out (o nurse something like 50 per cent, arc doomed to death through the carelessness or ignorance, of their nurses. In the first ton days of last month 255 newly-born children in Paris were put out to nurse, and of these only one was to be naturally fed. Between the 21st and 51st of the same month 570 children were similarly handed over bv their parents to tiic care of others. “Fifty per cent, of those children are condemned to death,” said Dr Wallich. He pleaded for an extension through Franco of university creches similar to those already established in Paris, in which children are nursed under professional supervision. Until this was done there would continue, he said, to bo a wastage, which, quite apart from sentiment, France could not afford. It appears that over 40,000 French children die during their first year from lack of proper care. Yet the birth rate here is only seven per 10,000 inhabitants, while in Germany it is 141, in England 115, in Austria 114, and in Italy 115. Such a comparison seems sufficiently alarming, but M. Justin Godart, an es-Minister, has pointed out a fact which is still more likely to rouse Frenchmen to a realisation of the imminent danger which this rate of depopulation presents. Unless there is an immediate improvement, the population of France will actually ho diminishing in 1925 at the rate of 250,000 a year.