The Fertility of the Unfit | Page 3

poverty a cause of high birth-rates.--High birth-rates a cause of
poverty.--Fecundity depends on capacity of the female to bear children.

CHAPTER VI.

--ETHICS OF PREVENTION p. 31
Fertility the law of life.--Man interprets and controls this
law.--Marriage law necessary to fix paternal responsibility.--Malthus's
high ideal.--If prudence the motive, continence and celibacy violate no
law.--Post-nuptial intermittent restraint.--Ethics of prevention judged
by consequences.--When procreation is a good and when an
evil.--Oligantrophy.--Artificial checks are physiological sins.

CHAPTER VII.
--WHO PREVENT p. 64
Desire for family limitation result of our social system.--Desire and
practice not uniform through all classes.--The best limit, the worst do
not.--Early marriages and large families.--N.Z. marriage rates.--Those
who delay, and those who abstain from marriage.--Good motives
mostly actuate.--All limitation implies restraint.--Birth-rates vary
inversely with prudence and self-control.--The limited family usually
born in early married life when progeny is less likely to be well
developed.--Our worst citizens most prolific. Effect of poverty on
fecundity.--Effect of alcoholic intemperance.--Effect of mental and
physical defects.--Defectives propagate their kind.--The intermittent
inhabitants of Asylums and Gaols constitute the greatest danger to
society.--Character the resultant of two forces--motor impulse and
inhibition.--Chief criminal characteristic is defective inhibition.--This
defect is strongly hereditary.--It expresses itself in unrestrained fertility.

CHAPTER VIII.
--THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE FIT IN RELATION TO STATE
p. 77
The State's ideal in relation to the fertility of its subjects.--Keen

competition means great effort and great waste of life.--If in the minds
of the citizens space and food are ample multiplication works
automatically.--To New Zealanders food now includes the luxuries as
well as the necessities of life.--Men are driven to the alternative of
supporting a family of their own or a degenerate family of
defectives.--The State enforces the one but cannot enforce the
other.--New Zealand taxation.--The burden of the bread-winner.--As
the State lightens this burden it encourages fertility.--The survival of
the unfit makes the burden of the fit.

CHAPTER IX.
--THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE UNFIT IN RELATION TO THE
STATE p. 85
Ancient methods of preventing the fertility of the unfit.--Christian
sentiment suppressed inhuman practices.--Christian care brings many
defectives to the child-bearing period of life.--The association of
mental and physical defects.--Who are the unfit?--The tendency of
relatives to cast their degenerate kinsfolk on the State.--Our social
conditions manufacture defectives and foster their fertility.--The only
moral force that limits families is inhibition with prudence.--Defective
self-control transmitted hereditarily.--Dr. MacGregor's cases.--The
transmission of insanity.--Celibacy of the insane is the prophylaxis of
insanity in the race.--The environment of the unfit.--Defectives
snatched from Nature's clutches.--At the age of maturity they are left to
propogate their kind.

CHAPTER X.
--WHAT ANÆSETICS AND ANTISEPTICS HAVE MADE
POSSIBLE p. 99
Education of defectives in prudence and self-restraint of little

avail.--Surgical suggestions discussed.

CHAPTER XI.
--TUBO-LIGATURE p. 110
The fertility of the criminal a greater danger to society than his
depredations.--Artificial sterility of women.--The menopause
artificially induced. Untoward results.--The physiology of the Fallopian
tubes.--Their ligature procures permanent sterility.--No other results
immediate or remote.--Some instances due to disease.--Defective
women and the wives of defective men would welcome protection from
unhealthy offspring.

CHAPTER XII.
--SUGGESTIONS AS TO APPLICATION p. 118
The State's humanitarian zeal protects the lives and fosters the fertility
of the degenerate.--A confirmed or hereditary criminal defined.--Law
on the subject of sterilization could at first be permissive.--It should
apply, to begin with, to criminals and the insane.--Marriage certificates
of health should be required.--Women's readiness to submit to surgical
treatment for minor as well as major pelvic diseases.--Surgically
induced sterility of healthy women a greater crime than abortion.--This
danger not remote.
CONCLUSION p. 124

THE FERTILITY OF THE UNFIT.
* * * * *

INTRODUCTION.
Biology is the Science of Life. It seeks to explain the phenomena of all
life, whether animal or vegetable. Its methods are observation and
experiment. It observes the tiny cell on the surface of an egg yolk, and
watches it divide and multiply until it becomes a great mass of cells,
which group off or differentiate, and rearrange and alter their shapes. It
observes how little organs unfold themselves, or evolve out of these
little cell groups--how gradual, but how unvarying the change; how one
group becomes a bone, another a brain, another a muscle, to constitute
in three short weeks the body of a matured chick. Those little tendons
like silken threads, that run down those slender pink legs to each and
every toe, and move its little joints so swiftly that we hardly see
them--that little brain, no bigger than a tiny seed, in which is planted a
mysterious force that impels it to set all those brand-new muscles in
motion, and to dart after a fly with the swiftness of an arrow--all this
wondrous mechanism, all this beauteous structure, all this perfection of
function, all this adaptation to environment, have evolved from a few
microscopic cells