Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation | Page 6

No, the causes of ill-health and debility are
diverse, and to pretend to solve the question by conception control is a
mockery, for it salves the conscience of the community without really
dealing with the question of the disabilities of the working woman, or
the true cause of her excessive fertility.
Ill-health in working-class mothers often has its origin in inherited
weakness and lack of care in childhood. It is further accentuated by
overwork, with no labour-saving devices; lack of suitable food; too few,
if any, hours of recreation, and hence very little out-door exercise.
Badly ventilated homes deprive the mother of necessary supplies of
oxygen, and insufficient sleep is often the last straw which breaks down
the patient burden bearer. A true and haunting picture is given in a
recently published book called The Woman in the Little House (which
first appeared in a series of articles in the journal "Time and Tide"),
describing the anxiety of a working woman at night to keep her baby
quiet that the husband may sleep.
Now it is quite true that a small family instead of a large one will
diminish the work and anxieties of such a mother, but it will not give
her the remedies which she needs, nor will it diminish the excessive
sexual demands made upon her.
Everyone who knows these women intimately realises what an
exhausting feature is this habit of excess due to lack of knowledge or
self-restraint on the part of the husband.
I believe if facilities were provided whereby the woman could do her
laundry with modern appliances outside her own home, if family meals
were arranged in service rooms equivalent to the arrangements in
service flats, and if there were crêche rooms where children might be
left for an hour or two in safety while necessary work was done--we
should find a greatly increased standard of comfort even in existing
homes, and a great improvement in dietary for the whole family. Such
relief, added to teaching both to husband and wife as to the times of
conception, would revolutionise the life of women more than any
teaching of artificial birth control, and would lift it up to a higher level

instead of degrading it to the grossly physical.
We come to very different considerations in group 4, p. 18, where
choice rather than necessity impels the parents to limitation of the
family. The teaching now being advocated by certain books and
pamphlets advises deliberate delay in child-bearing for a period after
marriage, and the spacing of certain periods between the births of such
children as are allowed to come into the world, with limitation of the
number in each family.
Teaching on these lines, if followed, would involve an artificial mode
of sex life always--natural spontaneous union would find no place.
Already young wives are seeking advice for some relief from methods
of preparation which they say have destroyed in them all spontaneous
desire. The tragedy of it all is that even to attain the end in
view--moderation in the size of families--such methods are to a large
extent unnecessary. Not to every young married couple does a child
arrive at the end of a year. Some, using no artificial checks, wait two or
three years before the first baby comes. Even if it does come, however,
at the end of a year, there are many advantages to counterbalance the
small means and perhaps hard living of the young pair. For when
people are young they can put up with small means, because they are
strong enough to work hard and help each other; indeed, the demand
for little work and many luxuries in youth is not a healthy one, it is a
sign of decadence in the race.
Moreover, even though an early family involve real hardship for awhile,
it has the great advantage that parents and children later on are still
young together, and that means far more to the child in understanding
friendship and helpfulness during the most critical period of life than
extra comforts or pleasures would have meant to the parents, and if
young parents realised this, would they not put the child first?
The so-called advantages of a few years between one child and the next
so that the parents may give fuller care and attention to each, are far
outweighed from the child's point of view by the advantages of
playmates in the nursery of nearly its own age, who are a source of
education in the give and take of life such as no adult can supply. If

parents wish to have only three or four children, it is to the advantage
of the mother as well as of the children, to have the little family early in
life--they are then all in the nursery together, and