" AN ETHICAL BIRTH-RATE."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11685, 21 June 1901, Page 6

" AN ETHICAL BIRTH-RATE."

Under this curious title Frances Swiney puts forward in the Westminster Review a plea which moralisers on a dwindling birthrate would do well to bear in mind. The writer urges that before women are lectured on renouncing the functions of maternity certain facts should be considered: —

'* In 1897, 4250 deaths of women occurred from child-birth and puerperal fever, 143.589 children died within the first year, and it is calculated that nearly half of all children bom die in infancy, while the proportion in crowded cities rises to even three-fifths. Of 2983 deaths in infancy registered in 1889, 2968 were due to starvation and want of breast-milk, of which more than half were babies under three months old."

From these facts the writer derives her cogent inference: — "It appears, therefore, to be a question, not of more children being born, but of more children living. We do not want a higher birth-rate, but less mortality. And this desideratum cannot be achieved until an ethical birth-rate is established; until it is recognised that the true progress of a nation depends, not in the majority that are born, but upon the minority who survive as the fittest and most capable. An ethical birth-rate would ensure to every child a birthright of being born wellsound in mind and bodv."

She appeals to the law "strictly observed by the superior instincts of the animal creation," and proceeds: — "Reasoning by analogy, in the light of the same natural law of sex, no women, taking into consideration her supremacy as the most highly complex of living organisms, should bear more than six children during the prescribed period of child-bearing. Biological science would limit the number to four, with intervals of six years between each birth.

" No other female organism is so unmercifully exploited as the human, with the inevitable result of incurring a terrible deathtax, not only upon both mothers and infants, but upon the vital energies of the children who survive a few short years. They are born undeveloped, starved in body, mind, and spirit. Physically they are immature through disease, intellectually they are deficient in the higher faculties, spiritually they are not evolved beyond the brutes, because, not to one per thousand lias been secured the natural heritage of every other living species of being produced according to the immutable laws governing reproduction, maternity, nutrition, and environment. Not a higher birth-rate, but less mortality/' That is a cry to be considered.