Birth Control | Page 2

MARRIAGE
Section 3. ARTIFICIAL STERILITY WHOLLY CONDEMNED
Section 4. THE ONLY LAWFUL METHOD OF BIRTH CONTROL
Section 5. CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIRTH CONTROL


CHAPTER I
THE ESSENTIAL FALLACIES OF MALTHUSIAN TEACHING
Section 1. MALTHUS AND THE NEO-MALTHUSIANS
Birth control, in the sense of the prevention of pregnancy by chemical,
mechanical, or other artificial means, is being widely advocated as a
sure method of lessening poverty and of increasing the physical and
mental health of the nation. It is, therefore, advisable to examine these
claims and the grounds on which they are based. The following
investigation will prove that the propaganda throughout Western
Europe and America in favour of artificial birth control is based on a
mere assumption, bolstered up by economic and statistical fallacies;
that Malthusian teaching is contrary to reason and to fact; that
Neo-Malthusian practices are disastrous alike to nations and to
individuals; and that those practices are in themselves an offence
against the Law of Nature, whereby the Divine Will is expressed in

creation.
(a) Malthus The Rev. Thomas Malthus, M.A., in 1798 published his
Essay on the Principle of Population. His pamphlet was an answer to
Condorcet and Godwin, who held that vice and poverty were the result
of human institutions and could be remedied by an even distribution of
property. Malthus, on the other hand, believed that population
increased more rapidly than the means of subsistence, and consequently
that vice and poverty were always due to overpopulation and not to any
particular form of society or of government. He stated that owing to the
relatively slow rate at which the food supply of countries was increased,
a high birth-rate [1] inevitably led to all the evils of poverty, war, and
high death-rates. In an infamous passage he wrote that there was no
vacant place for the superfluous child at Nature's mighty feast; that
Nature told the child to be gone; and that she quickly executed her own
order. This passage was modified in the second, and deleted from the
third edition of the Essay. In later editions he maintained that vice and
misery had checked population, that the progress of society might have
diminished rather than increased the "evils resulting from the principle
of population," and that by "moral restraint" overpopulation could be
prevented. As Cannan has pointed out, [2] this last suggestion
destroyed the force of the argument against Godwin, who could have
replied that in order to make "moral restraint" universal a socialist State
was necessary. In order to avoid the evils of overpopulation, Malthus
advised people not to marry, or, if they did, to marry late in life and to
limit the number of their children by the exercise of self-restraint. He
reprobated all artificial and unnatural methods of birth control as
immoral, and as removing the necessary stimulus to industry; but he
failed to grasp the whole truth that an increase of population is
necessary as a stimulus not only to industry, but also as essential to
man's moral and intellectual progress.
(b) _The Neo-Malthusians_
The Malthusian League accept the theory of their revered teacher, but,
curiously enough, they reject his advice "as being impracticable and
productive of the greatest possible evils to health and morality." [3] On

the contrary, they advise universal early marriage, combined with
artificial birth control. Although their policy is thus in flat contradiction
to the policy of Malthus, there are two things common to both. Each is
based on the same fallacy, and the aim of both is wide of the mark.
Indeed, the Neo-Malthusian, like Malthus, has "a mist of speculation
over his facts, and a vapour of fact over his ideas." [4] Moreover, as
will be shown here, the path of the Malthusian League, although at first
glance an easy way out of many human difficulties, is in reality the
broad road along which a man or a nation travels to destruction; and as
guides the Neo-Malthusians are utterly unsafe, since they argue from (a)
false premises to (b) false deductions. We shall deal with the former in
this chapter.
Section 2. TEACHING BASED ON FALSE PREMISES
The theory of Malthus is based on three errors, namely (a) that the
population increases in geometrical progression, a progression of 1, 2,
4, 8, 16, and so on upwards; (b) that the food supply increases in
arithmetical progression, a progression of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on
upwards; and (c) that overpopulation is the cause of poverty and
disease. If we show that de facto there is no overpopulation it obviously
cannot be a cause of anything, nor be itself caused by the joint
operation of the first two causes. However, each of the errors can be
severally refuted.
(a) In the first place, it is true that a population might increase in
geometrical