Page:Contraception; 1st ed. (IA in.ernet.dli.2015.94163).pdf/425

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

from every national point of view ought not to produce the unhealthy and degenerate infants which they are now producing and who therefore should be sterilized. Whether future developments will associate a sterilizing Department with the ordinary Birth Control Clinic is, in my opinion, doubtful. The best procedure seems to me to hand on the sterilization cases to the ordinary Surgical Departments of the Hospitals prepared to receive them in their surgical wards. For this, of course, public opinion must also press, as the average surgeon is still afraid to be known to take on sterilization cases.

Meanwhile the foundation of pure contraception among the poor has been laid, and there has been for a year and a half a Birth Control Clinic in active work in England, which has given help not only to over fifteen hundred women personally, and to thousands by correspondence, but also to a large number of nurses, health visitors, welfare workers and medical doctors, who have spread and handed on knowledge gained there. This Clinic was founded to inform those who so badly needed its help, and to crystallize and advance public opinion, and is for that very reason debarred from experiment in new contraceptive

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