BATTLING FOR THE BABY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 16561, 9 June 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

BATTLING FOR THE BABY.

THE PRICE OF ITS SAFETY.

BY TOHr/XGA. , Evert baby born into the world has to fight for its little life; eternal vigilance is the prico of its safety. Mother Nature, harsh though she often seems, loves her little ones, and does her best to make them healthy and strong, but our human organisation, savage, barbaric, and civilieod, constantly introduces artificial conditions, amid which we all have to walk warily, and the babies cannot walk, at all. The prevalent ignorance of what is good for them and what is harmful results too often in a depression of their vitality. This depression is always in- j jurious to their physical fitness, and often leads to their premature death. The battle for the lives of our babies is thus a fight against ignorance, usually a loving and unselfish ignorance, which eimply does not know. When we understand the matter better tho health-teaching association which we know in New Zealand as the Plunket Society will rank with tho Red Cross in tho estimation of' mankind. Ignorance is .No Excuse. Plunket Societies are necessary because ignorance is no excuse and motive no palliative in the Law of Things That Are. A martyr will burn as fast as a villain; a Belgian can stop a bullet no more safely than a German; a loving mother may kill with all kindness as easily as a babyfarmer can kill with design. Perhaps a better world might have been provided for us, but it wasn't. Tho rain falls upon the just and the unjust. Water drowns the good and the bad alike. Only the foolish waste their breath in denouncing the Law and bewailing its impartiality; the wise seek patiently and earnestly to discover how the Law works and try to conform their lives and the lives of those they love to its decrees and commandments. We strengthen and save the babies, who are helpless in our hands, when we govern their little lives with intelligence and understanding. We weaken and kill them when we undermine thoir health by mistaken management, however pure our motives, however loving our hearts.

In places where Germans do not drop bombs on residential areas the ordinary deaths of babies are rarely from direct violence, but are usually the result of a long-continued reduction of normal vitality. As a generalisation this is also true of grown-ups in peaceful times and callings. In fact it is no departure from the truth to say that death is very frequently due to the result of bad conditions which have operated from birth. The normal life of Man may be placed at from 80 to' 100 years. Some consider it much longer, but few of us regard a centenarian as liable to be cut off in his prime. Comparatively few live to be old and still fewer retain physical and mental fitness to the last. The vast majority drop out of the ranks of their generation while it is on the march and a pathetically large number fall i n infancy from the arms of heart-broken mothers. The Plunket Society aims at teaching mothers how to hold tight to their babies, who fall out, in most cases, because they were not properly nursed and handled. j

Slaughter of the Innocents. , The search-light. of truth is thrown upon the question of how to preserve in-fant-life by comparing the infantile deathrates in any slum area with similar rates in better quarters of the same civilised cities. Five times as many slum-babies die, in proportion to number, as do babies under ordinarily good suroundings. The pefcenta'ge of infantile deaths ' decreases with the social environment'. At the best, it is still far too heavy— we are only beginning to know a little of the great laws of living; at the worst, it is a veritable slaughter of the innocents. There should be no slums, of course, and the war will have failed in its lessons if civilisation does not set to work the moment peace is made to plough out the slums and sow salt in the'furrows; but even in the slums the lives of- many little ones can be saved by care and knowledge. It is sometimes argued by the' unthinking that society gains nothing by preserving stunted lives and by trying to coun'teiw.«t the poisonous atmosphere of slum areas. This is obviously unsound reasoning when we bethink us that death is only the final phase of a long depression of vitality, and that we cannot reduce infantile mortality without raising tho standard of infantile health. Thus, improvement in care of infants, whether in the slums or out of the slums, not only saves life, but also makes for strength arid health all along the line. -

Getting Used to It. A kindred fallacy to the erroneous ideathat it is a mistake to try to save the socalled " weaklings" ,is the widespread belief that -children "get used" to bad conditions of living, and bo do not, feel them as acutely as would those' suddenly plunged into this bad environment.. Men and women are said to become likewise hardened and not to feel the apparently intolerable.' It is true that exorcise does strengthen the muscles, harden the akin, and steady the nerves if it is not carried to excess. The average recruit returns home on leave after a few weeks' training as fit as a fiddlo 'and as hard as nails. The endurance of a trained athlete is common knowledge. The ease with which a professional axeman swings his axe all day is the envy of the soft-muscled townsman. But' why confuse the 'effect of oxercise which simply .makes a man "normal" with the results of excessive toil which bond the back; exhaust vitality, and make a man old and worn long before his time? A Scotsman could thrive on milk arid porridge because ho was strong and healthy and the food is good and wholesome, though simple. Are We to compare this with the "getting used to food that is inferior and unsatisfying by people who are underfed arid sickly? There is a limit to the intensity of suffering, to the acuteness of any irritation, to the feeling of any unhappinese, but the effect of any depreßfling'iiifluence is shown by symptoms which cannot be ignored. The children of the slums are stunted, wizened, preoocjous. They show in every lineament and in every limb the foulness of the air they breathe, the' wretchedness of their surroundings, the inhumanity of their lot. They have " got used to it" in so far that they do not immediately die, but in a generation or two they do die, tho vitality inherited from healthier generations completely exhausted. , "" ' ' • We do nothing but good, morally and physically, when we make conditions of living wholesome and health-giving. Thus, and thus alone, cart we save the babies not merely from death hut also from lives of relative suffering. Per health is happiness, as disease is pain." Not by bread alone, nor by milk alone, does a child live the normal, healthy" life/ but also by the mother-love that watches over it a* the angels watch and clothe its timid soul with noble thoughts as its little'body With pleasant' garnfents. Starred and hungry, all its life "is the baby over whom'no woman has ever • crooned a lullaby; yet. mother-love alone will not keep »'. baby healthy if the mother does not know how she should feed-it,' and'tend it, clothe it, nurse' and comfort it, which, ia wherYthja PltinkeJi'Sociejy/Oojaw'feli-' ' r ••'•'• i r !