BIRTH CONTROL

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19035, 12 June 1924, Page 5

BIRTH CONTROL

Almost every great extension ot man’s thought has been opposed as a Promethean presumption. we nave not to go back to Galileo or Vriordano Bruno. There are those living who remember the obloquy heaped on the Darwinians and we have only to cross the Atlantic to see that spirit in action in the person of Mr. Bryan and the Fundamentalists. With purely material inventions the opposition has not been so frequent, but when it comes to biological inventions —inventions which affect us personally and emotionally, as organisms—we find, as Mr. Haldane has pointed out in his amusing and stimulating little book that matters are very different. The invention of alcohol has brought the fanaticism of prohibition; vaccination has its conscientious objectors, and out of bacteriology has grown anti-vivisection. When the use of chloroform was introduced, there were religious moralists who disapproved of its employment in childbirth, as circumventing the Divine curse on women. There are even in the United States many denominational colleges where the professors may not smoke. And now we have birth control—one of the very few big biological inventions yet made. If people and Churches would only remember that the gifts of Nature and the works of man are only good or bad as we make good use or bal use of them! Luckily, however, there aie now signs of a really scientific temper being displayed to such questions by a considerable body of churchmen. A rational birth control wculd rig nt, the balance which the differential birthrate is upsetting, it would improve the physique of the children and give them a better chance in life; and it would slow down the rate of out multiplication so that wc might hope that our schemes for social improvement would begin to catch up with the problems with which population increase is always presenting us.—Julian Huxley, in the Spectator.