DECLINE OF BIRTHS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 11 September 1937, Page 5

DECLINE OF BIRTHS

LOSSES IX AUSTRALIA NOT A QUESTION OF MONEY Speaking at the Australasian Medical Congress in I lie University of Adelaide recently. Professor Harvey Sutton, of New South Wales, said if the birth rate of 1921 had been maintained thorp would now have been 250,000 more people in Australia The calamity of losing G3.0C0 lives in (he Great War was well kuwn, he said, hut the ‘ loss’’ of the lives of 250,000 since the war because of the fall in the i birth rate was not recognised. The docline was not a question of money, as statistics showed that richer people had fewer children. Professor Sutton said that the two most important steps for social progress were the resuscitation of family life and the recouLruclion of the home on one hand, and the development of mental hygiene on the other. Since the war there had been a veritable landslide in births, and if the present trend persisted the population would cease to increase about 1945. Unless present conditions changed there would he insufficient mothers and children in the next generation, and lumbers must decrease. It was becoming hereditary not to have children, and the solution was to discover the family and the home.