The Falling Birth Rate.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 7, 12 February 1903, Page 1

The Falling Birth Rate.

Our vital statistics still continue to tell the melancholy, and we may add shameful tale of a declining birth-rate in this young and otherwise prosperous Colony. For the year 1901 the number of births registered in the Colony was 20,491, or 26*34 per thousand of the population. For the year 1902 the official figures show that the number registered was 20,653, or 25*88 in every 1000 persons living, a distinct decrease on the average rate for the previous year. The seriousness and real significance of this state of things will be more fully realised when it is noted that although the birth-rate has decreased the marriages solemnised in 1902 show a substantial increase on the number and rate for 1901, the total for 1902 being 6388, or 293 more than in the previous year. This brings the rate up to B*oi per thousand of the population, the highest recorded since 1878, the next highest being 783 for the year 1901. Moreover, putting the same facts tn a different way, the statistics show that the number of births per 1000 married women of child-bearing ages is steadily declining, and this although the number of such women is as steadily increasing. The figures for each census year are given in the following table, which appears in the Official Year Book for 1902. Birth Rates (Legitimate) per 1000 married women at child-bearing ages for each Census Year, 1878 to 1901.

It will thus be seen that although the number of married women at child-bearing ages is rapily increasing the birth-rate has fallen in 25 years from 337*2 to 243*8 per 1000 of such women. In the year 1881, says the Year Book, there were in New Zealand 5-72 births to every marriage in the previous year, and in 1901 the proportion had fallen to 3*50 births to each marriage. • Our Registrar-General, quoting an American statistician, has assigned as the causes forthe decline of the birth-rate observable here and in other countries: (1) The great diffusion of physiological information ; (2) lessening of restraint from religious and social opinion ; (3) the greater cost of family life, which leads to the desire to have fewer children in order that they may each be better provided for ; and with, this as their text certain of the press, and an occasional politician, have raised their voices in warning and in appeal for a better state of things. They have Seen assisted also from time to time by leading members of the medial profession, who have spoken in terms of unmeasured

condemnation of the baneful no-family policy of modern time>. Dr. William Brown, of Dunedin, for example, as a medjea} man and in his capacity as chairman of the Otago Ed^icatjon Board, brought the subject very prominently before! the public only a year or two ago; while Dr. Chappie, of Wellington, who has recently returned from a trip to New South Wales, hj^ just published the following vigorous piece of denunciation, which applies just as fully to a certain section of New Zealand) women as to the misguided Sydney matrons whom he so unmercifully pillories. • A sentiment against maternity,' he says, ' has flourished like a weed in Sydney society, and a lady of good birth an<| education, good physique and heredity, with a diamong ring on her finger that would keep a child for the first five years of its life, will tell you that "children are an expense." While she steeps her brain from dawn to dark in slushy novels, she declare that "children are a tie." In New South Wales in 1884 there were 30 births per hundred married women ; in 1888 the number fell to 28, and to 20 in 1898, or a decline of one. third in 15 years. Thus the best capable of producing the best stock, largely from selfishness, resulting in that old Roman craving for a wedded but childless life, have ceased to maintain the birth-rate, while the degenerates still breed on, and the defectives, born for society and the State to support, are an in. creasing ratio. Once get on a wrong track and everything conspires to hurl you to the devil. Lunacy increases, hospitals and prisons and reformatories must be increased and enlarged, and the added burden the fit have to bear strengthens their motive for enforced sterility.' But the preaching of the Press and the denunciation of the doctors have effected little result because they have not attacked the root-cause of the evil, which is primarily not economic and not social, but moral. As the N. Z. Tablet has more than once pointed out, of the three causes enumerated above the lessening of religious restraints is the great originating cause of the diminishing birth-rate, the others named being merely subsidiary. It has shown, too, that the chief forces which operate amongst us to weaken the beneficent influence of religion are our secular education system, the loose teachings of the non-Catholic denominations regarding the nature and obligations of the marriage tie, and the baneful divorce legislation of recent years. So far as the Catholic Church is concerned, she has clean hands in this matter; she has neither part nor lot in the responsibility for this foul blot on our social system. And if the- existing downward tendency is to be arrested, if a remedy is to be found at all for the present alarming state of affairs it will only be found in a return to the old Catholic principles and religious restraints which are inculcated in the Catholic school, developed by the Catholic faith, and observed in all their fulness in the Catholic home*

Year (Cenßus). Number of Married women between 15 and 45 years of age. Number of Legitimate Births (Confinements). Birth rate per 1000 Married women of from 15 to 45 years of age. 1878 1881 1886 1891 1896 1901 50,995 57,458 62,704 63,165 69,807 79,406 17,196 18,003 18,532 17,455 17,596 19,355 337-2 3133 2955 2763 2521 2438