BIG FAMILIES.

Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette, 19 February 1936, Page 3

BIG FAMILIES.

STATE MAY STEP IN

If.the State wants people to have large families it may soon have to offer some inducement. Lady Maureen Stanley made .that forecast at a birth control conference in Manchester.

Previously large families were a kind of old-age insurance. The more children the parents had, the more secure they would be in their old age. Now the State had stepped in with old-age pensions and other forms of insurance, and it would soon have to step in and take the matter of large families into consideration as well. . .

"Birth control," she said, "is going to make early marriages possible in innumerable cases. Young people who could not otherwise afford to be married because they are hot in a position to have children will now be able to do so.

- "I also hope the time is not far distant," she said, "when we shall all look on having an annual medical inspection as an essential part of our lives. lam sure that such examinations would have a general uplifting effect on the health and happiness of the race."

Dr. Robert Sutherland, medical officer for Brighouse (Yorks), speaking on "The Future of the Race," said that at the present time the race had fallen to an alarming extent from its highly hereditary state. We bore the stigma of a race which had interfered with the elimination of the unfit. . .',;■ If present tendencies, were unchecked there could not fail to be a progressive deterioration.