Wise Parenthood (15th edition)/Chapter 1

"I think, dearest Uncle, you cannot really wish me to be the 'Mamma d'une nombreuse famille,' for I think you will see the great inconvenience a large family would be to us all, and particularly to the country, independent of the hardship and inconvenience to myself. Men never think, at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often."—Queen Victoria in a letter to the King of the Belgians, January 15, 1841.

A FAMILY of healthy happy children should be the joy of every pair of married lovers. To-day more than ever the course of duty and delight coincide for those who have health and love in their homes. For to-day as never before the world needs the products of sound and beautiful love, and though these range from the intangible aroma of peace and happiness which a rightly wedded pair radiate, through an infinite variety of spiritual and physical results, the most vital and the most potentially valuable to the community are the children.

Whatever theory of the transmission of characteristics scientists may ultimately adopt, there can be little doubt in the minds of ​rational people that heredity does tell, and that children who descend from a double line of healthy and intelligent parents are better equipped to face whatever difficulties in their environment may later arise than are children from unsound stock. As Sir James Barr said in the British Medical Journal, 1918: "There is no equality in nature among children nor among adults, and if there is to be a much-needed improvement in the race, we must breed from the physically, morally and intellectually fit."

Nevertheless, the happiness which children should be in a home depends less on a conscious sense of civic virtue (though that may be a factor), than on an acute and warm personal feeling of the parents towards each other. Every man who finds beauty and goodness in his wife must feel a keen desire to repeat that beauty and goodness throughout all time, and every woman who has picked her mate freely, and because she thought him a knight among men, must long to see his characteristics reproduced, so that the world should not lose the imprint of his splendour when the inevitable happens and he has to pass. Indeed, one may almost take it as an axiom when dealing with true love that the pair do feel thus towards each other, and consequently desire children, unless they are aware that either is stricken by some inherent ​weakness or disease which might reappear in the child. Then they must refrain from parenthood out of a sense of duty and pity towards the unborn.

Nature herself provided that men and women should delight in meeting. Given a loving married pair in normal health, and unsophisticated in any way, there is seldom any lack of children around them after they have been wedded for some years. This is what is still described as the "natural" condition of affairs, and in these days of sophistication in so-called "civilisation," some reformers urge a return to Nature and an unregulated birth-rate.

If, however, the course of "nature" is allowed to run unguided, babies come in general too quickly for the resources of most, and particularly of city-dwelling, families, and the parents as well as the children consequently suffer. Wise parents therefore guide nature, and control the conception of the desired children so as to space them in the way best adjusted to what health, wealth, and happiness they have to give. The object of this book is to tell prospective parents how best to do this, and to hand on to them in a concise form what help science can give on this vital subject.

This is not an attempt to present complete arguments to show the racial and national ​necessity for the Control of Conception: various aspects of this theme have been presented by others.

Recently valuable expositions of the supreme importance to humanity of a wise use of the control of conception have been made from many different points of view and by various distinguished people. Doubtless much more remains to be said, for there are many who are still ignorant, and consequently prejudiced against the greatest of the steps humanity can take next in its evolution; but this is not the place to deal with the wider aspects of the subject.

That a large proportion of intelligent and thoughtful married couples are practising at the present moment some method or other of the control of conception is beyond dispute. In Lord Dawson of Penn's speech before the Church Congress at Birmingham in 1921 he said: "I will put forward with confidence the view that birth control is here to stay. It is an established fact, and for good or evil has to be accepted. Although the extent of its application can be and is being modified, no denunciations will abolish it." The question before us, therefore, is not whether or no some knowledge of contraceptives should be allowed; it is already established. General dissatisfaction with most of the methods used is however prevalent; and this dissatisfaction is not being ​alleviated, because there is also a widespread ignorance of satisfactory methods, even on the part of medical practitioners. Numbers of people who are practising and have been practising the control of conception by various means for years, are in urgent need of a better method than any known to them. The following pages are written for them.

If this book gets into the hands of some who have not given the subject of the control of conception adequate thought they should read the books mentioned on pp. 83–84. This short list is only representative of a few of the more important aspects of the subject; but if a serious student is not yet convinced by them and will follow up and read all the other works referred to in them, he will then at any rate have a fair idea of the essentials of the subject and can form his own opinions.

What we are here concerned with is the fact that contraceptive methods of all sorts are now so widely used that it is high time serious attention should be devoted to the subject. People should not be employing anything less satisfactory than the best now obtainable; but, unless they are given the best, they will assuredly use some less desirable means.

I will give a quotation from one of our most ​ardent social reformers. The Rev. Sir J. Marchant, Secretary of the Birth Rate Commission and Director of the National Council of Public Morals, in his book, "Birth Rate and Empire," says as follows (pp. 144–146):

If, then, the volitional control of births within the married state has become a normal proceeding, if it is fast losing its apparent indelicacy, if it is spoken about without raising vicious passions, if it is becoming the "correct thing" to do . . . we must give up the futile attempt to keep young people in the dark and the assumption that they are ignorant of notorious facts. We cannot, if we would, stop the spread of sexual knowledge; and, if we could do so, we should only make matters infinitely worse. This is the second decade of the twentieth century, not the early Victorian period. . . . It is, then, no longer a question of knowing or not knowing. We have to disabuse our middle-aged minds of that fond delusion. Our young people know more than we did when we began our married lives, and sometimes as much as we know ourselves, even now. So that we need not continue to shake our few remaining hairs in simulating feelings of surprise and horror. It might have been better for us if we had been more enlightened. And if our discussion of this problem is to be of any real use, we must at the outset reconcile ourselves to the facts that the birth-rate is voluntarily controlled, that brides and bridegrooms know how it is done, and many will certainly do it. Certain persons who instruct us in these matters may hold up their pious hands and whiten their frightened faces as they cry out in the public squares against "this vice," but they only make themselves ridiculous. Their influence in stemming the tide is nearly nil.

The Rev. Sir J. Marchant says, "Brides and bridegrooms know how it is done." That is ​true. They know some, perhaps several, ways of securing voluntary instead of involuntary parenthood, but very few have precise and satisfactory knowledge of, or understand the reasons against, many of the methods which are recommended to them either by medical men or by friends who, as ignorant as they themselves, have been in the habit of using methods described as "harmless," simply because they do no gross and obvious injury.

Many things are reckoned "harmless" which are nevertheless far from satisfactory. Let me take an illustration from another aspect of our lives. Every medical man would consider doses of a half-teaspoonful of ammoniated quinine as not only harmless but beneficial to a patient suffering from influenza. Nevertheless, some even in normal health find that a few such doses upset the digestion for several weeks. It is true that in an influenza epidemic it may be more important to order quinine than to think about people's digestions, and in this sense quinine is not only "harmless" but beneficial. There are many parallels to this in the use of various kinds of preventives which are described as "harmless."

It is amazing that medical and physiological science should have so neglected research on this most vital subject, and that a more perfect procedure should not yet have been devised: it is perhaps more amazing that the ​reactions and results of the methods now widely used should not have been thoroughly studied and understood. The methods which I have to suggest are not yet the ideal, but they are much simpler, more healthful and less disillusioning than those most in vogue before this book was written. I am glad to think it has materially changed current practice.

After giving the details necessary for the comprehension and employment of the best methods which I can recommend, I shall mention one or two others of those in general use, with reasons why I think them inadvisable save in very special circumstances. The large number of other and still less satisfactory means employed will not be touched upon at all, as this is not a monographic dissertation, but an attempt to be helpful by presenting, if not the ideal, at any rate the good in place of the less good or actually bad.

A few fortunate people who really understand their own physiology, or by happy instinct have chanced upon the right use of their bodies and have been in the habit of practising satisfactory methods, may say or think that such simple and direct instruction as follows is not needed. I have, however, overwhelming evidence and experience that ignorance is rife even in the very places where knowledge might be expected to hold sway. For some time past, scarcely a day has gone by without my ​receiving letter after letter from people who have long been married, from people who have consulted physicians, from people who have tried many experiments, and who are yet ignorant of any really satisfactory means of achieving what they have been perforce achieving in unsatisfactory ways. I once asked a medical woman who had had a practice for fifteen years what method she would advise: she knew of no method whatever. A well-known doctor in London, who for twenty years had had a general and important family practice, asked me if I could tell him of any method other than the sheath, which was the only one he knew, as his patients were inquiring and he did not know what to tell them. Many married couples, who are even told by the doctor that for the wife to have another child would be fatal, are at the same time not told any rational method of prevention. With variations depending on the temperament of the writer, I get appeals one after the other saying: "We have asked our doctor, but he tells us nothing which is of any use. We have therefore to go on using this, that, or the other method, which we feel to be unsatisfactory, because we do not know what else to do." In the pages which follow they will find an account of the physiological reactions of various methods and will thus be able to use the means best suited to their own circumstances.

​Some churchmen recommend and some demand "absolute continence," save when a child is desired as a result of union. Where the mated pair are young, normal, and in love, such advice is not only impracticable, it is detrimental. Under such conditions a rigid and enforced abstinence, even where it is not directly injurious to health, may yet have as harmful effects as incontinence. The capacities and requirements of people vary greatly, and no universal rule can apply to all. Other clerics and ascetic-minded laymen sometimes disguise (perhaps even deceiving themselves) "absolute continence" under the more popular term of "self-control," which has a noble sound, and is liable, by credulous audiences, to be applauded. But "self-control" will not limit the numbers of the family unless it is so extensive that its correct description is "total abstinence extended over years," and this, as most medical men now agree, is not conducive to the physical well-being, or the mental harmony of a home composed of normal, strong and healthy young people, however suitable it may be for those ageing or of weak vitality. On the one side "absolute continence," and on the other an easy self-indulgence, are in married life equally to be condemned. In either of these two quagmires disasters lie in great variety. The narrow and safe path between them is a wise, reasoned and controlled ​use of the most intimate and sacred functions of the body.

Though for general guidance the suggestion which I have made, particularly in Chapter V of "Married Love," may be of service, yet each pair must find out for themselves the point where self-control becomes an object in itself and detrimental to health and vitality, and where on the other hand the expression of love begins to slide into a too facile indulgence.

My object is not to make sex-experience a danger-free indulgence, but to raise the sense of responsibility, the standard of self-control and knowledge which goes with maturity, and consequently the ultimate health and happiness of those who mate. It should be understood by the man, who is in general the more active partner, that he has to consider not only himself but his mate, and that the only right rule in marriage is that which gives the greatest sum total of health and happiness to the two concerned, for the benefit of the nation and the race. To achieve this, most men will have to exercise a fine self-control, truly ennobling and strengthening both to mind and body.

A knowledge of the means of prevention of conception may co-exist with low standards of living and personal hygiene, but even then such knowledge may save the next generation the misery of being hurled into wretched con​ditions, and may save the community the cost of maintaining anti-social lives.

Some, who would otherwise welcome the spread of knowledge on this important subject, fear an increase of promiscuous relations as a result. It appears, however, that the type of person who desires to lead an irregular life has long had access to sufficient information to satisfy such requirements, while the virtuous mother has been helpless in her ignorance of how to control her motherhood in the interests of her children. Daily experience at the Birth Control Clinic bears this out in a convincing manner. Hundreds of worn and wretchedly over-burdened mothers have applied for the help given by knowledge, but not a couple of flighty young people. The latter can get crude information from their companions.

Those who would debar the personally selfish from the knowledge of such methods of control, forget that it is just by those who do not trouble to prevent evils that the worst and most disastrous attempts are made to overtake the evils they themselves originated. I do not wish in this book to speak of the prevalence and horror of the poor and ignorant woman's attempts at early abortions: the story would be too heartrending, and is out of place in this little book, which is one of help and guidance.

Destructive of the health of both mother and ​child are the frantic efforts of women "caught," prematurely after a birth, or too frequently in their lives, by undesired motherhood. The desolating effects of abortion and attempted abortion can only be exterminated by a sound knowledge of the control of conception. In this my message coincides with that of all the Churches in condemning utterly the taking of even an embryonic life.

Alas that so many ignorant women do not realise the difference between the control of conception and abortion, and for want of knowledge of the former are ruining their health and pouring money into the pockets of unscrupulous firms which sell "pills."