The Pathfinder
The question of birth control is again bobbing about in the limelight and attracting more attention than ever. Its enemies are many, but of late the movement has obtained some new converts in the ranks of educators, clergymen and scientists.
The other day, in addressing a session of state health officials, Dr. Clarence Little, president of the University of Michigan, pleased for a “slowing down in the production of children to a point where the child can be guaranteed proper care and education.”
“To produce to the point where we cannot adequately care for them is un-Christian,” he asserted. “I am suggesting a revolutionary thing. Limitation is now a fact in many families. The need of limitation of the population was admitted by the immigration limit. In our slums “the children are worse off than in so-called barbarous foreign countries.” Dr. Little favors sterilization of criminals and insane. “Not long ago, 1,000 physicians meeting at New York adopted a resolution asking that more attention be given to birth control. They see a relation between an uncontrollable birth rate and many national problems, including material mortality child labor, poverty, insanity and crime. President Coolidge was urged to form a Federal birth rate commission to investigate the subject. “Italy’s terrible infant mortality is directly traceable to too frequent child bearing and over-large families,” Prof. Edward East of Harvard told the Institute of Politics. “Why should man emulate the lobster in the matter of reproduction when God has given him brains?”
The Rev. Paul Dresser of Bath, Maine, ascribes social wrongs, crimes and a good share of poverty to indiscriminate procreation. “In the struggle for numbers,” he asserts, ”it has been overlooked that the worst evils civil and religious, are due to overproduction of the human kind.” He advocates scientific birth control. Though admitting likelihood of abuse of the practice, he insists that intelligent application of the majority would more than outweigh the other.
In the presence of Mrs. Coolidge at the dedication of a new home for unfortunate girls in Washington, Dr. J. Stanley Durkee, president of Howard University, urged that knowledge of birth control be communicated universally.
Rabbi Rudolph Coffee of Oakland, Cal., believes that “It is high time for human beings, by practicing birth control, to improve the type of children now being born into the world.” He thinks parents should limit their offspring to conform to the finances of the father and the physical condition of the mother.
“Every child has the right to be well born or not be born at all,” Owen Lovejoy of the National Child Labor committee said recently. “We catapult children into the world and erect legal stockades to prevent the truth from entering. Then we doom whole armies of them to disease and other perils.”
Judge Ben Lindsey of Denver juvenile court is “heartily in favor” of birth control.
On the other hand, because of religious doctrines or other reasons, a great mass of our best citizens are arrayed against birth control. The government sternly suppresses birth-control literature. The Catholic Church, always a foe to the movement, is opposing a birth control measure planned to be introduced in the new Congress.
“Birth control would turn marriage into an indescribable condition of free love,” Bishop Schrembs of Clevland, told The National Council of Catholic Women. “It is not desirable to eliminate the feeble-minded class,” remarked the Rev. Thomas Moore of Catholic University. “Without them, who would do the menial work?”
According to Dr. Louis Dubin, statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, birth control would hamper the American spirit of progress and adventure. Dr. Max Schrlapp, director of the New York children’s court clinic, sees peril in the growing number of unfit, but does not think that birth control can remedy the situation.
From page 7 of the Concord Daily Tribune, Saturday, Dec. 19, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1925-12-19/ed-1/seq-7/
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