MOTHERHOOD

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17030, 15 August 1929, Page 11

MOTHERHOOD

DEMAND FOR CHILDREN MODERN WOMEN LESS FIT? LONDON, August ff. “Despite the improvements in medical and liygenie knowledge, modern clinics, liiotliercraft centres, and specialised ante-natal care, the truth is,” says Slieifa Kaye-Smith, the wellknown novelist, “that healthy, sunburnt, tenuis-playing young women are loss fit for motherhood than wore the pale-faced, languid women in Victorian stays. ’ ’ The novelist (who in 1924 married the Rev. Penrose Fry) makes this declaration in her contribution to the Daily News symposium on the birth control question. Miss Kaye-Smith contends that modern novels, picturing 'the Victorian mother as downtrodden, exhausted, and weary, if not actually dying, of child-bearing, are merely exploiting that theory, whereas the mothers of that age survive to-day, and arc still flourishing as grandmothers and greatgrandmothers. Mostly they are healthy, cheerful, and far Jess nervy or exhausted than many of the modern, childless women. If it is restored, slu’ says, that only the fittest have survived, the fact must be faced that, dospite the larger families in Victorian days maternal mortality was not greater than now. “FURTHER FROM NATURE” “A recent medical report, who adds, “suggests that the modern woman’s unfitness for child-bearing may be due to certain methods of birth control. On the contrary, it may merely be the result of the increasing influence of civilisation, which continually is taking our fitness for natural functions, of which childbirth is only one. “in any case, if ppople do not want children to-day, how is it that tho demand for ‘adopted children was never greater than now, vastly exceeding the supply? Consequently, I am driven to the conclusion that the limitation of families is not always voluntary, but is due to the race s decreasing fertility.”