BISHOP ON RACE SUICIDE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18458, 23 July 1923, Page 5

BISHOP ON RACE SUICIDE.

CAUSE OF GRAVE ANXIETY. ATTACK UPON DOCTOE& Birth-control was vigorously. denounced by Bishop Phelan, of Sale, Victoria, in the Cathedral Hall, Melbourne, last week. He (also attacked certain members of the medical . profession. He characterised those who employ contraceptives as baby-killers, and drew a gloomy picture of Australia's future, with its scanty population, confronted by the teeming millions of the Eait. ; ; . The Bishop said that the ' twin evils of divorce and race suicide, which corrupted the great nations of antiquity, had made their presence' felt in modern tiroes. The saddest feature of. the war against the cradle was .that nature's own guardians took sides with the enemy. The murderer of infants was ,no longer a Pharaoh or a Herod, but a father or a mother. 'People might stifle a blunted conscience into the belief that birth-con-trol was not murder, but to kill the unborn in the early moments of being was none the less a crime, against the laws of God, a f crime against the race, and a crime against the nation. * That form of preventing life, or inflicting death, was murder just as punishable as the act of an unnatural mother who flung her newborn babe from Prince's Bridge into the muddy water of the Yaira. v , :..• i ; • Bishop Phelan declared tliat criminal malpractice was rampant and was a cancer eating away the heart of the nation. "A horde of disreputable practitioners, who are a disgrace to the noble medical profession," he said, " are engaged in this human slaughterhouse, denying the unborn the right to live." He contrasted the slow increase in Australia's population with the immense advances made in Oriental countries and said that, looted at from a national point of view, the slaughter of innocents must be a cause of grave . anxiety to those who rallied to the battle cry of a White Australia. While immigrants 'were welcome, there was ■no . immigrant that had the " same claim on the country as the Australianborn: Child. /'.' , : - : \"-''i