Wise Parenthood (1st 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. If, however, the course of "nature" is allowed to run unguided babies come in general too quickly for the parents' resources, and the parents as well as the children consequently suffer. Wise parents therefore guide nature, and control the birth 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 what little help science can give humanity on this vital subject.

This is not an attempt to present complete arguments to show the racial and national necessity for Birth Control: that has been done by others.

Recently valuable expositions of the supreme importance to humanity of a wise use of Birth Control 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 aspect of the subject.

That almost every intelligent and thoughtful ​married pair is practising at the present moment some method or other of Birth Control is beyond dispute.

The question before us, therefore, is not whether or no birth control should be allowed. It is in daily use by the great majority of the more intelligent married people.

General dissatisfaction with most of the methods used is prevalent; and it 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 birth control 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 birth control adequate thought they should read the books mentioned on the fly-leaf at the end of this volume. 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 birth control 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. James Marchant, the Secretary of the Birth Rate Commission and Secretary of the National Council of Public Morals, in his recent 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.

Mr. 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 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 is 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 method which I have to suggest is not yet the ideal, but it is much simpler, more healthful and less disillusioning than those most in vogue.

After giving the details necessary for the comprehension and employment of this one method which I can sincerely recommend, I shall mention one or two other 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 dissertation on birth control methods in general, 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. To them the answer is that the personally fortunate are ever the most callous and unaware of the needs of others. I have 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."

Churchmen recommend (though I wonder if they practise) "absolute continence." Where the mated pair are young, normal, and in love, such advice is not only impracticable, it is detrimental. A rigid and enforced abstinence can be as destructive of health as incontinence.

Destructive of the health both of 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 attempted abortion can only be exterminated by a sound knowledge of the control of conception.