BIRTH CONTROL 
By 
JOHN m COOPER, PH. D. 
oAssociate Professor of Sociology, Catholic University of cAtrerica 
NATIONAL CATHOLIC WELFARE COUNCIL 
1312 MASSACHUSETTS AVE., N. W. 
WASHINGTON, D. C. BIRTH CONTROL 
By 
JOHN M. COOPER, PH. D. 
Associate Professor of Sociology, Catholic University of oAmerica 
September, 1923 
NATIONAL CATHOLIC WELFARE COUNCIL 
1312 MASSACHUSETTS AVE., N. W. 
WASHINGTON, D. C. mtbil ©bstat: 
John A. Ryan, D.D., 
Censor Deputatus. 
Imprtmatut: 
Michael J. Curley, D.D., 
Archbishop of Baltimore. 
Copyright, 1923, by 
National Catholic Welfare Council INTRODUCTION 
IN recent years, press, platform, and mouth-to-mouth propa- 
ganda have dragged the subject of family limitation or birth 
control out of the cupboards of decent reserve into the glaring 
light of day. No apology, therefore, is necessary for presenting 
a frank discussion of the topic from the Catholic standpoint. 
Indeed, an apology would be needed for not doing so. Nor does 
a Catholic discussion of birth control call for any labored intro- 
duction. The subject has already been amply and, many of us 
think, too amply introduced. 
We may, therefore, proceed without further words to our 
question. We shall, in the opening chapter, outline briefly the 
Catholic standpoint on the subject, and shall then, in the suc- 
ceeding chapters, review some of the chief grounds that underlie 
this standpoint. 
We desire meanwhile to take this opportunity to express our 
grateful acknowledgment for the many valuable suggestions 
given generously in the preparation of this study by the Rev. 
Aloysius P. Brosnan, S.J., the Very Rev. Dr. John A. Ryan, 
the Rev. Dr. James H. Ryan, Dr. John F. Moran, and Dr. 
Jerome F. Crowley. We are in a very special manner indebted 
to the Rev. Dr. William J. Kerby, of the Catholic University of 
America, and to Dr. Frederick W. Rice, of New York City. CONTENTS 
page 
Introduction 3 
CHAPTER I 
Catholic Principles and Teaching 5 
CHAPTER II 
The Voice of Conscience 9 
CHAPTER III 
The Marital Relationship 13 
CHAPTER IV 
The Home Circle 24 
CHAPTER V 
Overpopulation 
CHAPTER VI 
Underpopulation 
CHAPTER VII 
War, Poverty, and Infant Mortality 55 
CHAPTER VIII 
Economic and Health Motives ....... 65 
CHAPTER IX 
Conclusion . 77 
Bibliography g5 
Notes and References BIRTH CONTROL 
CHAPTER I 
Catholic Principles and Teaching 
Marriage has a threefold purpose. First and primarily, its 
purpose is the begetting and rearing of children. Secondly, it 
fosters conjugal love and mutual helpful- 
ness between man and wife. Thirdly, it 
allays the dangers of incontinence. 
Promiscuous or free love relations 
might conceivably maintain the existence or being of the race, 
but its wellbeing would, under such a regime, suffer beyond 
description. Marriage makes for the maximum wellbeing of 
the race by providing maximum and permanent care by both 
parents in the upbringing of children; it ensures the maximum 
protection of the mother by the father; it pins down responsi- 
bility on the father by determining clearly who the true father is. 
Marriage and parenthood are sacred. Parents are in no 
figurative sense but literally the agents and representatives of 
God in rearing children to be worthwhile citizens of the com- 
monwealth of man and the commonwealth of God. Their task 
is to train up souls for this life and for the next. Their mission 
is a trusteeship than which none is more exalted and sublime. 
The vocation of a father and of a mother is a sacrosanct and holy 
one, so sacred that Christ saw fit to re-consecrate marriage by 
raising it to the dignity of a sacrament. The Catholic Church 
extols virginity as holy, for those who can take it. She like- 
wise honors parenthood as holy and sacred. And she holds aloft 
both ideals in her reverence for and devotion to Mary, Virgin 
and Mother, 
Purpose of 
Marriage 6 
BIRTH CONTROL 
Time and again, in the history of Christianity, heretical 
groups have maintained that marriage is unlawful, and that the 
exercise of marital relations and the begetting of children 
thereby is sinful. The Church has consistently condemned in 
the strongest terms this suicidal position. Sexual intercourse 
within the marriage union is the means divinely established for 
the propagation of the race. But such intercourse outside the 
marriage union strikes a deadly blow at all three values that 
marriage protects and that promiscuous mating would utterly 
blast. For extra-marital intercourse tends to bring children into 
the world without proper provision for permanent and maximum 
care of offspring, without proper protection of motherhood, and 
without definite determination of paternity and paternal respon- 
sibility.1 * 
Within, however, the marital union, intercourse is not only 
lawful. It is divinely planned and sanctioned. The vague feel- 
ing sometimes met with that even within the marriage union such 
relations are indecent, or little short of sinful, or only reluctantly 
tolerated by morality, is an outgrowth of various causes. This 
feeling is in no sense an outgrowth of Catholic teaching, and it 
can find no shadow of support therein. 
Not only is the marital relation within the marriage union 
lawful, but it is of the nature of a strict right. In the marriage 
contract, by which man and woman take 
each other for wedded mates until death 
do them part, they mutually confer on 
each other the right to marital relations. 
The two parties enter into the agreement 
freely and the mutual right is conferred on an absolutely equal 
plane. The contract is between equals and binds each and both 
with democratic equality. 
Such being the marriage agreement, the refusal on the part 
of either party to grant the marital right constitutes a breach of 
Marital Rights 
and 
Obligations 
♦Numbers denote references and notes listed in order after bibliography 
on last pages of pamphlet. CATHOLIC PRINCIPLES AND TEACHINGS 
7 
contract, an injustice, provided, of course, there be no serious 
or grave reason for the refusal. Such a grave reason would be, 
for instance, uncondoned adultery on the part of the requesting 
husband or wife, the state of insanity or intoxication, grave 
danger to life or health of mate or of offspring from contagion, 
serious illness, or extraordinary suffering and peril in childbirth. 
And there may be other grave exempting grounds. 
Husband and wife may, however, by mutual consent, forego 
the exercise of their marital rights, whether for a time or even 
permanently, if moral and other danger is absent. They are 
not strictly obliged to exercise the right at any particular time, 
and, if they both elect to abstain during certain days of the 
month, as, for example, the mid-menstrual period,2 they are free 
to do so. Such abstention on the one hand places no unnatural 
obstacle in the way of procreation, and in the main is not open 
to the gravely harmful consequences that follow the use of direct 
contraceptive measures, and on the other hand may be fairly 
looked upon as a corollary of the general liberty to abstain by 
mutual consent when the parties so choose. 
The Catholic position on the limitation of offspring is fre- 
quently misinterpreted by non-Catholics and sometimes mis- 
understood by Catholics themselves. It 
does not hold that married couples are 
under obligation to bring into the world 
the maximum number of children, to exer- 
cise no foresight or prudence, to bear offspring up to the limit of 
physiological fertility, to labor for the maximum increase of the 
population, to bring on “an avalanche of babies”—all regardless 
alike of circumstances and consequences. It holds no brief for 
imprudence or intemperance. It does emphatically stand for 
marital chastity against artificial prevention of conception. 
The question is not primarily, Is it ethical to limit the num- 
ber of offspring? but rather, What method is ethically justified 
in the accomplishment of this end, the method of abstinence and 
continence, or the method of artificial prevention? The two 
Limitation of 
Offspring 8 
BIRTH CONTROL 
questions open up profoundly different ethical issues. If a mar- 
ried couple elect to practise continence and thus limit the num- 
ber of offspring, they will not be infringing on Catholic prin- 
ciples. Such limitation by continence may at times be distinctly 
to be advised, as, for instance, when the mother’s health or life 
would be seriously jeopardized by further childbearing, or when 
real destitution may result from further additions to the family. 
But limitation of offspring by artificial prevention of concep- 
tion is of its very nature immoral, and immoral means are not 
justified by ends however good. Having marital relations while 
at the same time using physiological, mechanical, or other means 
to prevent conception is, in accordance with Catholic ethics, ever 
and always immoral, sinful, and grievously sinful. 
This attitude on the part of the Catholic Church is not a 
mere matter of ecclesiastical legislation, as are, for instance, such 
laws as those of fasting during Lent or of abstaining from meat 
on Fridays. She has no power to dispense in the premises. 
Her standard is not merely a matter of Church law. It is a 
matter of divine law over which the Church has no authority 
except the authority of promulgating it and of standing by it, 
come what may. Artificial prevention of conception is ever and 
always gravely sinful, just as adultery is.3 
Such is the historic stand of the Catholic conscience. What 
are the ethical grounds therefor? It is to the consideration of 
the more important of these grounds that we may now address 
ourselves. CHAPTER II 
The Voice of Conscience 
There is a widespread if not universal shrinking from and 
repulsion towards artificial tampering with the functions of pro- 
creation. Unsophisticated mankind more generally looks upon 
contraceptive methods as unnatural, unclean, immoral. Most 
simple peoples on the lower cultural levels 
are little addicted to such practices, even 
peoples who do not scruple much at abor- 
tion and infanticide. Among peoples on 
the higher civilized levels of material cul- 
ture, individuals or groups may reason themselves into an ethical 
defence of such methods and may acquire a certain relative cal- 
lousness in practising them, but even they do not always succeed 
in entirely quenching the disgust and repugnance that the per- 
sonal use of contraceptive measures commonly arouses in refined 
and high-principled natures. 
The dictates of unsophisticated conscience in the field of sex 
are not, it is true, necessarily the last word in morality. They 
are not necessarily infallible. But, on the other hand, to brush 
them aside lightly as superstitious inheritances from a dark and 
ignorant past is perilously foolhardy. “To disregard instinc- 
tive [ ?] repugnances in matters of sex-morality is exceedingly 
dangerous, and would lead logically to the toleration of acts 
which all decent persons condemn.” 4 What of the disgust at 
and condemnation of unnatural and solitary vice? And what of 
the seemingly universal human sense of shame, modesty, ret- 
icence, and reserve in sex matters? We may be pardoned for 
not instancing more lurid examples. 
Validity of 
Ethical 
Intuitions 10 
BIRTH CONTROL 
The real reasons underlying the moral intuitions of sex are 
not always obvious to the casual observer. How often do we 
find otherwise intelligent folks overlook- 
ing the profound protective value of, for 
instance, reasonable sex conventions and 
reasonable sex reticences ? Or take a 
more striking example, the prohibition of 
near kin marriage. The deep horror at 
and the draconian prohibition of inces- 
tuous sex relations or of incestuous marriage, particularly be- 
tween parent and offspring and between brother and sister, is 
practically universal among both uncivilized and civilized peo- 
ples. Yet how few individuals, even among educated and highly 
intelligent Christians, are at all aware of the real reasons that 
are back of their own social, moral, and religious condemnation 
of such relations and marriages. 
Such condemnation is commonly supposed to rest on an as- 
sumed danger of giving birth to degenerate offspring. It does 
not rest, however, and historically has not rested on such a 
ground. Recent biological discoveries in heredity, while seem- 
ingly discounting to a considerable extent the theories prevalent 
in the last century regarding direct degeneration of the offspring 
of near kin unions, nevertheless on account of the hazards of 
transmission of undesirable latent recessive traits, are very far 
from lending approval to indiscriminate human inbreeding.6 
But even were such hazards altogether absent, the Catholic 
position would be quite unaffected. This position rests on other 
grounds and has historically so rested. The two more important 
of these have been: first, the social value of checking family 
clannishness and exclusiveness and of multiplying social bonds 
in the community; secondly, and above all, the profound neces- 
sity of preserving from taint the sanctuary of the home wherein 
the members must live day and night under promiscuous condi- 
tions that might readily give rise to grave immoralities, were not 
the severest taboo on sex rigidly enforced within the family 
Grounds for 
Ethical 
Intuitions 
Often not 
Obvious THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE 
11 
circle. Some of the data from the Freudian psychology have 
seemingly thrown new light on this second consideration. St. 
Thomas, by the way, who clearly and explicitly sets forth the 
foregoing grounds, makes no mention whatever of the danger of 
degenerate offspring.6 
We have given space to this apparent digression from our 
subject to illustrate a vital point, namely, that sex reaches down 
into unfathomed depths of human nature, that its moral in- 
tuitions are fraught with far-reaching, albeit subtle and silent, 
consequences, and that the moral grounds for the tenets of sex 
codes are very often far from being so obvious that he who runs 
may read. 
Such is emphatically the case in regard to birth control. 
The Catholic position thereon certainly does not rest primarily 
on the widespread attitude of disgust at contraceptive methods 
as unclean and immoral, yet it would be worse than folly to 
waive aside such an emotional and ethical reaction as of no mo- 
ment. The bare fact of the existence of such a social or moral 
intuition is at its lowest valuation significant, a “stop, look, 
listen,” sign. Is this intuition then morally wholesome and so- 
cially sound ? 
In endeavoring to evaluate this intuition at its moral worth, 
we shall first give attention to the bearing of artificial birth con- 
trol upon human welfare or, to use the Catholic ethical term, 
upon human perfection, leaving to the concluding chapter the 
consideration of its relation to the eternal and natural law. We 
shall consider artificial birth control, not from the standpoint of 
its physical results, nor purely from the standpoint of ”unnat- 
uralness” or unnatural use of function, but rather from the 
standpoint of its consequences for the individual, the family, and 
the race. So far as the effect of contraceptive measures on the 
health of those using them is concerned, there is ample evidence 
regarding frequent possibilities of harm to serve as a pointed 
warning,7 but we shall be content to await further data on the 
question. So far as the “unnaturalness” of contraception is 12 
BIRTH CONTROL 
concerned, we shall deal not so much with this unnaturalness in 
itself as with the profoundly blasting consequences that result 
from such “unnatural” use. 
The evidence regarding these consequences may for con- 
venience be grouped under three general headings, accordingly 
as they bear upon (1) the conjugal relationship, (2) the 
home and its functions, and (3) the race. We shall then dis- 
cuss briefly some of the chief motives that appear to be respon- 
sible for the spread of birth control practices in our modern 
civilization. CHAPTER III 
The Marital Relationship 
The broad domestic relation of man and wife is woven of 
three intertwining strands, passion, love, and parenthood. We 
are not speaking exclusively of the mar- 
ital relation in its strictly physiological 
sense. We are referring to the whole 
marital or conjugal relationship within the 
home. 
Of passion or the purely physical factor in the marital rela- 
tion not much need be said. Physical sex pleasure and gratifica- 
tion is not an end in itself. It is biologically a means to an end. 
It is a sense gratification which nature and 
nature’s Author has attached to procrea- 
tion to induce mankind to carry on the 
task of bringing new human beings into the world and thereby 
to provide for the propagation and continuance of the race. 
Were it not for this physical appeal, many would shirk the task 
from selfish considerations. This appeal is primarily to the 
selfish or self-regarding in human beings in order to induce 
them to take up the burden and task and responsibility of carry- 
ing out an unselfish or other-regarding office. It is shared in 
common by man and his humbler brethren of earth, and air, and 
sea. 
The second element is of a distinctly higher and more spir- 
itual order, the element of love. Passion and love are often con- 
fused. They are, however, two distinct 
things, and in actuality may often be 
found one apart from the other, although 
they usually tend to exist side by side. Love is characterized by 
Three Elements 
in Marital 
Relationship 
a. Passion 
b. Love 14 
BIRTH CONTROL 
mutual attraction and sympathy, the desire for companionship, 
and tenderness of affection, but there stand out in the higher 
forms of love two factors that are still more significant socially, 
the factor of constancy and the factor of self-devotion and self- 
sacrifice. Love, in the sense of mutual attraction at least, has its 
early beginnings far down in the scale of sub-human living things. 
Love in the sense of constancy and self-devotion begins to ap- 
pear in a rudimentary form, only rather high up in the biolog- 
ical scale, particularly among the birds and some of the 
higher mammals. Love in its full blossoming of tenderness, 
constancy, and self-devotion is more truly a strictly human 
characteristic. 
In contrast to physical passion, higher human love is pri- 
marily unselfish, devoted to another, and self-sacrificing. It 
centers its affection, its well-wishing, and its well-doing not upon 
self so much as upon the object of love, the loved one. If pas- 
sion is above all egoistic and self-regarding, love is above all 
altruistic and other-self-regarding. 
The third element, the parental, covers or connotes several 
factors, such as the desire for and love, care, and protection of 
offspring, the acceptance of the respon- 
sibilities and sacrifices of child-bearing 
and child-rearing, and the cooperation in 
the divine creative act and educative dispensation. Each of the 
chief factors just noted has profound influence upon the char- 
acter development of the parents and the atmosphere of the home 
relation. These factors saturate the marital relation and do- 
mestic life with the self-devoted, the sacrificial, the sacred. A 
word about each of these three factors in the parental element 
will make the point clear. 
The mutual love of husband and wife finds its completion 
and fulfillment and final consecration in their common love of 
offspring, and is sustained, fed, and further purified by their 
common sacrificial and unselfish devotion to and protection and 
care of their children. 
c. Parenthood THE MARITAL RELATIONSHIP 
15 
The office of parenthood is full-laden with the highest spirit 
and requirements of lofty altruism in consequence of its long 
years of responsibilities and sacrifices for offspring, and the 
marital sex relation itself carried out normally and honestly is 
by its open-eyed acceptance of prospective parenthood lifted up 
out of the purely physical plane into the higher moral and spir- 
itual plane, and self-centered sex gratification becomes sur- 
charged with higher energies of a moral and deeply altruistic 
order. 
And still another element is present in parenthood, the ele- 
ment of the sacred. The divine work of creation was carried 
out in all its details without man’s intervention or cooperation. 
But the bringing of human souls into existence is, under the 
order of Providence, left by God subject to the will and co- 
operation of man himself. Without such cooperation, God Him- 
self creates no human soul. Parents, therefore, have a divinely 
entrusted and essential responsibility and partnership in the sub- 
limest work of creation, in the bringing into existence of human 
beings, immortal souls, children of the Father of mankind. 
More than this, they are entrusted with an equally sacred 
responsibility of taking God’s own place in the rearing of their 
children and in molding and shaping their lives that they may 
be fit for man’s society here and for the society of God here- 
after. Even those who have abandoned belief in a higher Power 
feel something of the inner sacredness of honorable human pro- 
creation and of parental tasks, and bow in reverence before 
worthy fatherhood and motherhood. 
Passion, love, parenthood—all three go to the making of the 
domestic and marital relation. But the three are not of equal 
worth judged by any wholesome human standard. Passion is 
primarily self-seeking, self-centered, self-regarding, egoistic. 
It may foster love no doubt; but it may also corrode or crowd 
out love. Love and parenthood are primarily other-seeking, 
other-centered, other-regarding, altruistic, and carry with them 
a subtle atmosphere of the sacred and reverential. 16 
BIRTH CONTROL 
Moreover, the interplay of these three great factors is part 
of a wondrous strategy by which the selfish sex hungers of hu- 
manity are exploited and utilized, not only, 
as is obvious, for the good of the offspring 
and for the welfare of the human race, 
but also for the character-training, the 
higher development, the higher discipline, 
and the higher freedom of human mates. 
Human sex hunger is lured by the bait of sex gratification into 
providing for the continuance and propagation of the race. But 
sex pleasure and gratification serve another scarcely less impor- 
tant end, and are capitalized by nature and moral codes through 
a less obvious strategy. By tying up sex to the sacrifices and 
responsibilities and reverences of child-bearing and child-rearing 
in the marriage bond, self-regarding egoistic sex pleasure is built 
upon and made use of for the drawing out and cultivating and 
expanding of the unselfish and altruistic tendencies in our human 
inheritance. 
Conversely, the cultivation of and indulgence in sex gratifi- 
cation in itself and isolated from its natural correctives, unselfish 
love and devoted and sacred parenthood, stamp in and harden 
and aggravate man’s inborn selfishness and egoism, first of all 
in the great field of sex itself, and by irradiation in much of the 
rest of human life and human activities. And few realize how 
deep-lying and far-reaching sex and parental impulses are. 
Fatherhood, motherhood, marital and parental love, protec- 
tion of the weak, filial affection, brotherly love, and, prob- 
ably, by extension, neighborly love, all arise out of this 
one cycle.8 Delete these things from human life, and how 
little worth while remains. Poison the stream at its source 
with the poison of selfishness—will these higher things escape 
the taint ? 
Finer human nature intuitively condemns solitary vice, un- 
natural vice, and incontinence between the unmarried. Is not 
one, perhaps more or less subconscious, source of the intuition 
Child-rearing 
Altruism 
and Home 
Sanctities THE MARITAL RELATIONSHIP 
17 
the fact that these moral aberrations isolate passion from love 
and parenthood? They tend of their nature to deflect the 
streams of human character and conduct from purer unselfish 
channels into starkly selfish channels. They strip sex passion 
of the normal controls and correctives and 
counterchecks placed upon it by nature 
and the God of nature and leave it shorn 
and naked in all its degrading and de- 
graded grossness and unloveliness. 
Artificial birth control tends likewise 
to isolate sex passion from its natural con- 
trols and correctives, love and parenthood. 
It reaps the pleasures of sex while at the 
same time evading the normally consequent sacrifices and respon- 
sibilities of sex. 
Contraceptive practices eliminate from the marital relation 
prospective acceptance of parenthood, and only too commonly 
eliminate parenthood itself from the home or reduce it to near 
the zero point. The element of the sacred 
that ordinarily hallows marital intercourse 
disappears where there is no question of 
cooperation in the divine creative act nor 
of acceptance of the sacrosanct office of 
parenthood. The evasion moreover of parenthood means as 
well the evasion of the character-building and character-sustain- 
ing sacrifices and responsibilities that parenthood entails. Con- 
traceptive practices in eliminating the parental element from the 
marital relation, tend, in so far as they go, to eliminate from the 
marital relation the sacredness that elevates sheer sex passion in 
marriage and at the same time to eliminate from the lives of 
those who practice them the stimuli to unselfish altruism that offset 
the stimulus to selfish egoism given by physical sex gratification. 
There still remains or may remain love. Will it suffice in 
the long run and among the great masses of men and women to 
sustain the higher and finer currents in the marriage institution ? 
Contraception, 
Like 
Extra-marital 
Incontinence, 
Fosters Egoism 
and Desecrates 
Home Sanctities 
I. By Eliminating 
the Parental 
Element 18 
BIRTH CONTROL 
Is love in its higher and finer sense at all universal? And how 
often do we find it, even in the home, scarcely more than tinge- 
ing grosser and more calculating elements! 
And how often does it descend to a level 
hardly if at all superior to the level of 
naked passion! But even were its higher 
type more nearly universal, would this 
higher type itself stand intact in the long run ? 
Love has not “just happened.” Love is a growth. It has 
grown and been bred into life in response to a vital biological 
need. The biological function of love is not merely to attract 
the sexes to each other. Love in its higher human sense would 
have had no great biological purpose unless there had been off- 
spring that needed long-enduring bi-parental care. 
Love in its rudimentary form of mere sex attraction as found 
among lower sub-human sentient forms of life does indeed fulfill 
only the purpose of attracting the sexes to each other until sex 
mating takes place. In my study some time ago I had a large 
Luna moth. She laid her eggs upon my window screen and 
days before they hatched, she died. The male parent had died 
even earlier. When the eggs hatched, forth came the tiny green 
caterpillars, armed for the battle of life, with bodies equipped 
all over with stiff bristles that would discourage hungry winged 
enemies and with massive mandibles that would enable their 
owners to begin at once eating their way through life. Placed 
on proper living foliage, such as walnut or hickory or sweetgum, 
where the mother under natural conditions would have deposited 
her eggs, these newly born Luna infants would have been well 
able to fend for themselves. They would have eaten and eaten 
until they attained their full three inches of length. 
The mating of the Luna moth demanded only sex attraction. 
It demanded no higher love, for the offspring required no care. 
Such rudimentary love as exists in the lower animal scale is 
mere sex attraction. No self-devotion or constancy is needed, 
for no prolonged care of offspring is needed. 
II. And by 
Undermining 
Love THE MARITAL RELATIONSHIP 
19 
Higher up in the scale of living things, love with its char- 
acters of constancy and self-devotion puts in an appearance. It 
puts in its appearance in response to the need of care of off- 
spring by both parents for a more or less prolonged period. 
Such is the case among birds and some mammals, for instance. 
You may watch such love at work from your window in the mat- 
ing and nesting and offspring-raising of the familiar robin or 
English sparrow. 
In mankind, the care of offspring necessarily extends over 
many years, and calls for the closest union and cooperation of 
parents and the highest spirit of mutual devotion to each other 
in their common sacrificial task of rearing children. So in the 
human species, love in its loftiest sense first appears. 
Love in the human race meets a profound biological need, 
the need of bi-parental, self-devoted, and prolonged care of off- 
spring. By what psychic or social forces or process it has been 
bred in or sustained we are not in a position to determine. But 
of this we are certain, that love in all its higher manifestations 
which distinguish it from bare sex attraction is an outgrowth of 
the parental element, a phenomenon that has been bred into hu- 
man life and sustained at high tension therein—though none too 
high at that—by the needs of human infancy and child-rearing. 
Eliminate the child from family life or tend so to eliminate 
him by contraceptive measures widely practised among great 
masses of humanity, and you thereby impoverish the soil where 
love grows and dry up the very seed and roots of love itself. 
No doubt but that the deadly effects will not always make them- 
selves apparent at once in every individual life. They will not 
come suddenly and dramatically like a bolt from the blue. 
Love-force will maintain itself, in some measure at least, as a 
psychic or social inheritance from countless generations of child- 
bearing and child-rearing ancestors. The process of love- 
growth in the race was slow. The process of death will like- 
wise be leisurely perhaps. The mills of life, like the mills of 
the gods, grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small. 20 
BIRTH CONTROL 
It is well, moreover, to remember that love is a comparatively 
late growth in the biological scale, unlike sex attraction and the 
mating instinct which date from the lowest and earliest levels of 
that scale. Love having been bred into life in a much later pe- 
riod and against powerful egoistic forces, all biological and 
sociological analogy suggests that it can the more easily be bred 
out of life in large part or in its entirety, if the factor that bred 
it and sustains it in intensity, namely, child-rearing, is cut down 
or approaches the vanishing point in large masses of humanity. 
Higher love is found among many if not most of the lower 
nomadic hunting tribes. We have no good ground for inferring 
that it is a later development in human history. But, on the 
other hand, we have no guarantee that love is something as 
stable or universal in humanity as is reason, or language, or the 
parental impulses. In fact, among not a few primitive peoples 
and among large groups in the more civilized peoples of ancient 
and modern times, we seem to see very significant and sinister 
instances where love has actually been eliminated from and bred 
out of the home relationship. 
We are not, of course, reducing ethics to a mere sublimated 
biology. We are simply dealing with a biological fact, and ethics 
takes into account data from every field that affects human wel- 
fare. Again, we are not assuming the inheritance of acquired 
characters, nor are we committing ourselves to this or that theory 
of biological or social development. We know that love has been 
bred into life where before it did not exist. By what process or 
genetic mechanism we do not know or pretend to know. But 
we have every ground for concluding that love can be largely 
bred out of the life of the race, if the factor that bred it in and 
sustains it, the factor of child-bearing, weakens or verges on 
decay. We are concerned not with the process by which the 
factors responsible bred love into the race, but we are concerned 
solely with the fact itself. 
We may, for clearness’ sake, sum up the foregoing discus- 
sion as follows: Three distinct elements go to make up the THE MARITAL RELATIONSHIP 
21 
marital relationship—passion, love, and parenthood. It is the 
latter two that lift up and ennoble that relationship, that foster 
the altruistic impulses, and that consecrate the conjugal union. 
Contraceptive practices tend to eliminate immediately and in the 
lives of those who use them, the sacred and sacrificial and self- 
devoted elements that are part of the parental phase of home life 
and of marital relations. In addition they tend, if not always 
and immediately in the individual case, at least in the long run 
and racially, to eliminate the altruistic elements that are asso- 
ciated with the love phase of home life and 
marital relations. Eliminate these two 
sets of correctives and controls and hal- 
lowers of home life and marital relations, 
and you have little left but gross sensual- 
ity, naked sex passion, and sex gratifica- 
tion, stripped of all its loftier associations 
and concomitants. 
Contraceptive practices have this in 
common with solitary and unnatural vice 
and with incontinence between the unmarried, that they all iso- 
late or tend to isolate sex passion from love and parenthood; 
that they concentrate or tend to concentrate attention and desire 
upon selfish sex gratification alone; that they dethrone love and 
parenthood and enshrine physical self-regarding pleasures in the 
central and dominating place of personality. May we not then 
justifiably put them all on the same moral plane, or rather brand 
them all as of the same order in the moral abyss ? Is Bernard 
Shaw’s characterization of contraceptive practices as reciprocal 
masturbation too brutal? Was St. Augustine using language 
too strong when he referred to contraception as making a pros- 
titute out of the wife and an adulterer out of the husband ? Yet 
only recently one of America’s ablest gynecologists, Dr. Howard 
Kelly, whose theology no doubt differs considerably from that of 
St. Augustine, used almost the same words: “All meddling 
with the sexual relation to secure facultative sterility degrades 
III. And Thus 
Reducing the 
Conjugal 
Relationship 
to the Level 
of Sheer 
Self-regarding 
Passion 22 
BIRTH CONTROL 
the wife to the level of a prostitute.” 9 Such language is un- 
questionably vigorous, to say the least; but, apart from the re- 
flection it implies upon those who may, in good faith and with- 
out awareness of the similarities between birth control and other 
sex aberrations, practice contraceptive measures, can we, in view 
of the considerations advanced in the foregoing paragraphs, look 
upon it as mere metaphor? 
One further point before we pass on. Let the spring poet 
continue to pen his lyrics to romantic 
idyllic love. Thank God, there is much of 
it in human life. But, on the other hand, 
we need no deep delving into the psychology of sex and no vast 
experience of the baser realities of life to know that sex passion 
in the man only too often masquerades in the domino of love. 
Women, particularly the unmarried, being as a more general 
rule less drawn by the grosser physical side of sex than by its 
higher psychic and emotional phases, often do not realize the ab- 
sorbing and overpowering physical drive that sex so commonly 
exerts in the masculine life. They do not 
realize how large physical gratification 
bulks in the man’s sex psyche and how 
easily the physical side of sex may eclipse 
and overshadow love. They do not realize 
that man is apt to be so much more polyg- 
amous and inconstant in his impulses. 
Neither do they realize by what an easy decline love can descend 
to a purely physical plane and reverence be no more—unless the 
man see in the woman the mother or prospective mother of his 
children. 
Remove motherhood or prospective motherhood from the 
home, or tamp it down; do away with the maternal element in 
the marital relation, and the way is all too often made straight 
and smooth for the man to look upon his wife as primarily a 
thing instead of a person, as primarily a mere instrument for 
satisfying his animal passion, instead of looking upon her as the 
A Corollary 
Contraception 
By Hindering 
Motherhood 
Dethrones 
Womanhood THE MARITAL RELATIONSHIP 
23 
honored, revered, and cherished mother of his children. The 
descent is not from the human to the animal plane. The descent 
is from the human to the sub-animal plane. 
The Catholic Church in taking her stand for normal rela- 
tions within the marital bond is standing not for some minor 
ecclesiastical regulation. She takes her stand for the preserva- 
tion of the inner sanctities of the home life and for the main- 
tenance of all those higher and loftier and nobler sentiments and 
affections and relationships which distinguish the home from the 
barnyard or the house of prostitution, and which set a broad 
barrier between human marriage and the mating of a dog and a 
slut. CHAPTER IV 
The Home Circle 
“Experience in summering and wintering with fathers and 
mothers makes it evident that adult life, relieved of the fullest 
care of children, would become so poor and mean as to imperil 
civilization itself.” 10 If we except from this generalization the 
minority of adults who are by nature and grace exceptionally 
high-principled and unselfish and strong-willed, would not the 
sane judgment of most intelligent people agree with this view as 
expressed by two American workers than whom few have been 
for longer periods nearer to the lives of the great masses of the 
people ? 
The home is the school of childhood. But it is just as much 
and just as truly the school of adulthood. 
It is a school of living experience in which 
two adult mates, man and woman, are 
educated—educated out of instinctive ego- 
ism and unselfishness, out of the native 
self-centeredness which is diametrically 
opposed to the disinterested love that lies 
at the base of Christian morality, and for that matter at the base 
of the moral codes of humanity. 
Selfishness is proverbially attached to bachelorhood, and has 
become so attached in the average human mind as a result of 
observation of the everyday facts of life. As in all things hu- 
man, exceptions occur. But the trend and the rule remain true. 
Nor is this due altogether to the probability that marriage may 
selectively attract the more unselfish. There is another great 
reason. 
Home-making and child-rearing are, to borrow a term from 
a. Home-making 
and Child-rearing 
as a Project in 
Adults’ Moral 
Education THE HOME CIRCLE 
25 
the educator, a great “project” for the education of adult mates. 
Sex attraction and love and often desire for children serve as 
the stimuli or interests that impel adults into wedded life and 
parenthood. Once they have entered upon that life, its very 
circumstances and necessities are of a nature to draw out and 
drive into action the finer self-sacrificing, courageous, and 
hardier strains of character. These native strains of character 
more often remain latent and asleep in the unmarried, if indeed 
they do not pass, as adulthood merges into age, from sleep into 
coma, and from coma into death. It is the appealing note of an 
infant’s voice and the trusting look in an infant’s eyes that 
awaken them and cause them to leap forth into expression. 
Like a muscle that long remains unused, they tend to wither and 
shrink. It is the magic touch of an infant’s hand that sets them 
in action and gives them the exercise without which they tend to 
vanish out of the average life, and leave that life empty, im- 
poverished, self-centered, and of little moral worth. 
The rearing of a good-sized family of children entails two 
or three decades of unselfish care and active responsibility, of 
curtailment of liberty and renunciation of pleasure, of ready 
sacrifices and self-denials of the most altruistic kind. It means 
hardships courageously faced and borne, moral effort consist- 
ently and persistently put forth, responsibilities unflinchingly 
shouldered, sacrifices unselfishly made. Fathers and mothers 
are trained not by the feeble words of human exhortation, but 
by the living experiences of their very parenthood. 
Human beings do not normally grow and develop in soul 
entirely from within. Our moral discipline and development is 
usually dependent on some situation in which we are placed or 
in which we place ourselves voluntarily. Only by reason of this 
stimulus from without do we ordinarily do anything worth while 
or give of the best that is in us. Lacking this stimulus, we drift, 
we dawdle, we atrophy. It is in rising to an occasion, in meet- 
ing a crisis, in responding under some form of instinctive in- 
terest or moral impulsion to a situation and a responsibility in 26 
BIRTH CONTROL 
which we are placed or in which we place ourselves that we grow 
and develop morally. And for the great masses of humanity, 
it is the rearing of a normally large family of children that 
morally disciplines and morally develops adult character. 
Conversely, birth control practices, by eliminating or notably 
reducing child birth and child care, knock from under character 
the blocks and stays that sustain and sup- 
port it in the great masses of humanity 
during the decades of ripe adulthood. Such 
practices encourage and strengthen the 
spirit of ignoble ease, of physical indul- 
gence, or gross material enjoyment. They second humanity’s 
inborn bent towards the shirking of responsibility and the 
shrinking from hardship. They help to stamp in flabbiness of 
will and languor of spirit. They tend to enfeeble the powers of 
sustained effort and of hardy endurance, to sap the foundations 
of morale, of moral stamina and robustness, to train adults in 
moral mollycoddleism. 
No doubt but there are among those who practise artificial 
birth control some or many who escape, at least for a while and 
to a greater or lesser degree, the natural consequences of their 
practices. This or that man or woman of exceptionally robust 
moral inheritance may be relatively immune to moral contagion 
and resistant to moral breakdown, in whatever environment or 
under whatever influences he or she be placed. But most of us 
are fashioned from a clay of coarser texture. And an ethics 
that is concerned with human welfare must mold its principles 
and obligations not so much on the exceptional individual as on 
the average humanity which it is commissioned to serve. 
Birth control practices engender selfishness and softness in 
man and wife and in the home which these twain make. We 
have no reason to believe that such selfishness and softness will 
be taken off like a smoking jacket or a kimono as man or wife 
passes out of the precincts of the home into the community. A 
habit developed in one field of life or enthroned in one corner of 
Contraception 
Undercuts This 
Project THE HOME CIRCLE 
27 
personality may not automatically transfer or spread over into 
other fields and reign over other provinces of character. The 
man who is scrupulously honest in his golf score may cheat his 
business competitor to the queen’s taste. We need, however, to 
remember, not only that the sex and parental fields of life cover 
an enormous area in themselves, but also that much of the altru- 
ism that is at the base of charity and neighborly love and justice 
is deeply rooted in and sustained by the sex and parental drives 
in our human make-up. 
Instinct, or an inborn force that usually passes for instinct, 
impels a parent to care for, love, and protect his own children, 
to resent an injustice to them, and to sympathize with them if 
they suffer or are in pain. It is no doubt the same parental in- 
stinct that impels us to protect and help children in need who 
are not our own, and it is in all probability the same inborn 
strain, generally speaking, that naturally inclines us to succor 
the needy, helpless, or suffering aged person or adult, and that 
rouses within us moral indignation at injustice or cruelty to the 
defenceless, be they young or old. The parental impulses are 
probably the greatest natural source of brotherly love and neigh- 
borly justice.11 
Establish selfishness in the field of sex and parental im- 
pulses, as birth control tends to do, and can we doubt that selfish- 
ness will in greater or lesser degree contaminate the wider neigh- 
borly relations of charity and justice? For the stream is being 
poisoned at its source. Establish selfishness and softness and 
calculating shirking at the very heart of the home, and can we 
question that the same ignoble spirit will carry over to greater or 
lesser extent into business and friendship and community 
relations ? 
Nor will the force of this influence be felt only outside the 
home circle. It will all the more be felt within the very walls 
of the home. The one or two children that characterize so 
commonly the birth control family will be the first to feel this 
disintegrating and degrading influence in their plastic years, to 28 
BIRTH CONTROL 
say nothing- of the reasonable certainty that they will later prac- 
tise, when they marry, what they have learned from parental 
example. Children are molded in character less by what they 
are told at home than by what they with their uncanny keenness 
feel or see or intuitively sense. The selfishness and softness of 
parents are by contact and infection inoculated into the very life 
blood of the child, and selfishness and softness are willed to him 
to be his portion and inheritance for life. 
Furthermore, the one-child regime, so common among those 
who are given to contraceptive measures, only too often makes 
for the spoiling of the child. It does not do so always, it is true, 
for human things do not work out by rule of thumb, but it does 
so in so many cases, that the lone child has become the proverbial 
exemplar of selfishness and spoiled possibilities, “unhappy and 
the cause of much unhappiness to others throughout his or her 
life.” 12 
On the other hand, a normally large family is, like child- 
rearing for the parents, a great project in the education of char- 
acter in the children. Quite apart from 
parental example and training, an ines- 
timable amount of education, not in book- 
learning, but in the ways of life and liv- 
ing, is gotten by the children from their 
democratic group life within the home 
circle. In a normal family, say, of five to 
seven children, almost every fundamental type of personality and 
character will more likely be found that may be found in the 
larger society of the world. In such a family we have a sort of 
world in miniature, a micro-society wherein the child learns to 
live with and adjust himself to his fellow human beings of 
diverse types and temperaments, and learns it naturally, simply, 
and efficaciously, and from the cradle up. In this small demo- 
cratic world of brothers and sisters, he learns self-reliance; he 
learns generosity and the habit of sharing; he learns the give- 
and-take of life; he learns self-discipline and self-mastery; he 
b. Growing up in 
a Good-sized 
Family a Project 
in Children’s 
Moral Education THE HOME CIRCLE 
29 
learns fair play, for he is taught it in brushing shoulders with 
his peers who, although bound to him by the bond of blood af- 
fection, have abundant resources, albeit sometimes rough-and- 
ready ones, for obliging the recalcitrant to knuckle down to the 
demands of an elemental and stern justice. Self-reliance, self- 
control, charity, justice, teamwork—all these primary human 
qualities are, in a family of fair numbers, bred into the child’s life 
by a vital method that makes our own reasoned-out and tested 
technic of child training seem almost like a sorry makeshift, and 
that goes far to compensate for the common educational grop- 
ing and stumbling and erring of even the more intelligent and 
conscientious parents in that most complex and difficult of all 
human tasks, the moral training of children. 
The preceding paragraphs may be summed as follows : The 
rearing of a normal family is an incomparable moral education 
for the parents ;13 growing up in a normal family is an incom- 
parable moral education for the child; in both cases there is usu- 
ally no adequate substitute for such moral education; birth con- 
trol undermines the value and function of the home as an edu- 
cative project for adults and children. And it undermines this 
function from within. But it also tends to undermine the home 
institution from without, and it is to this aspect of the question 
that we now turn. 
Children are binding ties between fathers and mothers. 
More divorces occur between the childless than between those 
who have children. The more childless marriages we have, the 
more divorces, other things being equal, 
may be expected. There are many factors 
that enter into this situation. It would 
carry us too far afield to deal with them in 
detail. But the fact seems well attested 
even by the statistical and ethnological evidence.14 Now among 
couples who practice artificial birth control the number of child- 
less marriages is disproportionately high. In so far then as it 
goes, the practice and preaching of birth control, not as it might 
c. Children 
Stabilize the 
Marriage Union 30 
BIRTH CONTROL 
be on some other planet, but as it actually is on this planet of 
ours, leads towards instability in the marriage relation and 
towards a weakening of the home bonds. We do not insist on the 
point nor do we insist on a somewhat kindred point, namely, 
that in the one-child or two-child familyrthe death of offspring 
may leave the parents inconsolable in their latter years and 
often, too, may leave in its wake a profound maternal melan- 
cholia for which there is no balm in Gilead. We do not insist, 
because the results are exceptional, but nevertheless the point is 
worthy of consideration. 
From another viewpoint, the submarining of the home 
through birth control propaganda is a matter of deeper concern. 
It is futile to imagine that such propaganda can be so carried on 
as to reach only the married. In reaching 
the married, it will reach and is reaching 
the unmarried as well. One of the great 
bars that have helped to check immoral re- 
lations among the unmarried is the recog- 
nized danger of pregnancy. Such a bar 
has been and is in all probability a most important factor—far 
more important than appears from our delinquency studies— 
contributing to the appreciably higher standard of morality 
among women as compared with the standard among men, for it 
has been upon the woman much more than upon the man that 
the stigma and handicaps of unmarried parenthood have pressed 
most heavily. The spread of contraceptive propaganda and 
advocacy of contraceptive practices obviously tend to lower the 
bars that have had such a large part in blocking unmarried in- 
continence. This means the increase of immorality and a conse- 
quent greater harm wrought upon the institution of the home of 
which extra-marital continence is the basic safeguard. 
In the foregoing two chapters we have been concerned with 
blocking out roughly the main tendencies and general drift of 
contraceptive practices among average humanity under ordinary 
circumstances. It is on such wide bases that ethical standards 
d. Contraceptive 
Propaganda and 
Extra-marital 
Incontinence THE HOME CIRCLE 
31 
must be built. The so-called exceptional cases must, however, 
be taken into account, and this we shall do in the later pages of 
the present study. 
Much, too, of the discussion up to this point has been diffi- 
cult and perhaps seemingly a little removed from the obvious and 
superficial. We have had to sink our shafts far down into the 
depths of human life and character. But, as we stated in the 
earlier pages of this paper, sex and the parental impulses them- 
selves reach deep down into the lower strata of human conduct. 
They are not mere surface outcroppings. Modern advances in 
the biological, psychological, and social sciences are making 
clearer each year that the sex and parental phases of the human 
make-up lie deeper therein and affect human welfare for weal 
or woe more profoundly than does perhaps any other phase of 
human life. An ethics of sex that neglects to dig far beneath 
the surface of human life and conduct is foredoomed to failure 
and inadequacy. And fully ninety-five if not ninety-nine per 
cent, of the literature of birth control evades this difficult though 
imperative task. 
Having, however, dealt with the less obvious ethical aspects 
of the birth control problem, we may now pass on to the con- 
sideration of its more palpable aspects and, first of all, to the 
question of birth control and population. CHAPTER V 
Overpopulation 
Is the world overpopulated to-day? Will it become over- 
populated at some future day? If it should, what will happen? 
In endeavors to answer these questions, many a quart of ink has 
been squandered, both before and since the days of Malthus, in 
riotous writing. Before joining the riot by attempting an an- 
swer to these questions, it seems necessary to define as clearly 
as possible what is meant by overpopula- 
tion. Perhaps this can be done best by 
an illustration. 
Imagine one hundred people living as 
hunting folks in an utterly isolated and hemmed-in mountain val- 
ley. There is just enough wild game in the valley to supply 
food for one hundred people. The valley would then be in a 
state of saturation. Should the one hundred people increase by 
births to one hundred and twenty-five, we should have an ex- 
ample of overpopulation, for there would not be enough food to 
supply the requirements of all. 
Let us suppose, however, that our isolated hunting group 
break through their mountain barriers and establish trading rela- 
tions with a neighboring fertile agricultural region. By ex- 
changing surplus pelts for food, they become food importers. 
Pressure of population on the soil is thus released, and over- 
population ceases. 
Again the numbers increase from one hundred and twenty- 
five to two hundred and fifty. But owing to insuperable diffi- 
culties in transporting sufficient food over the mountain passes 
and to a deficiency of surplus pelts for trading purposes, enough 
food for only one hundred people can be imported. Here we 
What Is 
Overpopulation? OVERPOPULATION 
33 
should have overpopulation again, unless fifty of the people 
were willing to emigrate from their home valley into other parts. 
Finally, however, our hunting people, taking their cue from 
their more advanced neighbors, take to herding and agriculture, 
that is, develop higher skill in exploiting their natural resources, 
and so increase their food production that they are able to sup- 
ply sufficient food from their own valley for five hundred people. 
Later still, by inventing or adopting better methods of herding 
and crop-raising, they are able to produce enough food for one 
thousand people. Pressure is thus released, the birth rate in- 
creases, and soon eight hundred people living in the valley are 
better supplied with food and farther removed from overpopu- 
lation than were their earlier one hundred hunting ancestors. 
Overpopulation is, in fact, a relative condition. It does not 
depend on numbers or density alone in a given area. Oppor- 
tunities for emigration, resources and facilities for food-impor- 
tation, and varying degrees of skill in food-production must all 
be weighed carefully before it is possible to say that a given area 
is overpopulated, saturated, or underpopulated. So far as world 
overpopulation is concerned, our task is much simplified by the 
fact that emigration and food-importation do not enter into the 
discussion. 
Is the world overpopulated to-day? Or, to use the common 
expression, is population pressing upon the soil? The human 
race has increased with unwonted rapidity 
in the last century or two, having doubled 
during the last one hundred years accord- 
ing to many estimates, or having increased 
about two-thirds since the middle of the 
eighteenth century according to the recent studies made by Will- 
cox.15 Our world is, of course, limited in area. Consequently 
nature’s resources, however bountiful, are not boundless. Are 
there already at nature’s table more mouths than plates, more 
guests than seats? Has population outstripped the available 
food supply? 
Is the World 
Overpopulated 
To-day? 34 
BIRTH CONTROL 
That in this or that corner of the inhabited globe, in certain 
sections, for instance, of India or China or even Europe, there 
may and does exist overpopulation or at least saturation, no one 
need question, although misrule and backward agricultural 
methods are generally more to blame than nature.16 That, how- 
ever, the world’s resources are, under actual conditions of food- 
producing skill, sufficient to support comfortably not only our 
present population of 1,700 millions, but a much larger one, is a 
proposition to which few if any agricultural experts or econ- 
omists of standing would to-day take exception. And so far as 
our own country is concerned, there is equally general agreement 
that our food resources, actual and potential, are much in excess 
of our population. 
There is not a shred of scientific evidence that the resources 
of either the United States in particular or of the world in gen- 
eral are insufficient to support the present population. There is 
abundant scientific evidence to the contrary. Although the 
world’s population has in recent decades been increasing at a 
rapid rate, the world’s food production has been increasing at a 
still more rapid rate. 
Between 1895 and 1912, for example, the increase in the 
world’s crop of wheat was 45%, of corn 43%, of oats 52.4%, of 
barley 59.2%, and of rye 29.5%, while the world’s population 
during this period increased only 12.6%. Between 1900 and 
1911, the rice crop jumped 91.2%, while the population in- 
creased only 8.8%. More recent data summarized by Pearl 
carry the computation up to 1918 inclusive and show the same 
trend of the means of subsistence to increase faster than the 
population until 1916, when, as was to be expected, there was a 
drop owing to the upsetting conditions of the war and to un- 
favorable seasons.17 
There is an impression in the minds of many that the means 
of subsistence are less abundant now than they were formerly. 
The facts, however, even after we allow for a certain element of 
minor error in the crop and population estimates of the last de- OVERPOPULATION 
35 
cades, flatly contradict such an impression. This impression has 
probably been caused chiefly by the higher cost of living. But 
the higher cost of living is not primarily due to any supposed de- 
crease in the world’s food products. In the main, as Russell 
Smith has put it, “the high prices at which we grumble are due 
not to scarcity of resource but to the stupidity and knavery that 
persists in a system of food distribution that should have been 
left behind when Noah went into the Ark.” 18 
There is no evidence of general overpopulation to-day in the 
sense of lack of food products to feed the world’s millions. Our 
best economists and agricultural experts are practically agreed 
on this fact, and their views are based on concrete and detailed 
evidence.19 The rapid growth of population during recent de- 
cades has not nearly kept pace with the increase in production. 
If, however, there is no pressure upon the food and other 
material resources of the world to-day, do 
the prospects for the future appear equally 
satisfactory? We have a number of re- 
cent scientific studies bearing upon this 
question. We shall now give the results 
of these studies, first, for the United States, and, secondly, for 
the world at large. 
For the United States, we have the recent papers of Taylor 
and of Pearl and Reed, and especially those of East and of the 
Agricultural Department experts, Baker and Strong. All agree 
that the United States has actual and 
potential food resources far in excess of 
the needs of the present population, al- 
though, of course, as is to be expected in 
such an intricate subject, their precise estimates of the surplus 
resources differ in detail. 
Our population, according to the 1920 census, was about 105 
millions. Taylor, in his somewhat theoretic though elaborate 
survey, hazards the estimate of 513 millions as the maximum 
potential population of the continental United States. Pearl 
Is There Danger 
of Future 
Overpopulation? 
a. In the United 
States? 36 
BIRTH CONTROL 
and Reed deal explicitly with the ultimate limit at which popula- 
tion will stop increasing and only implicitly with the ultimate 
limit supportable. Basing their conclusions on the rate of 
growth since 1790, they calculate that our population will be- 
come stationary or nearly so about a century hence at 197 
millions.20 
East’s and Baker’s estimates are derived from data of a more 
concrete and less hypothetical nature. East arrives at the con- 
clusion that “the maximum population the United States can 
support under any conditions conceivable to those of us who live 
at the present day, therefore, is 331 millions,” and that “the ul- 
timate limit humanly possible” is 530 millions, although he con- 
siders this latter number as “wholly absurd” so far as the pos- 
sibility or probability of actual future realization is concerned.21 
Baker’s more recent survey of the field in 1922, published at 
the beginning of the present year, is a revision and elaboration 
of the earlier paper published by him and Strong in 1919. In 
Baker’s later paper, he takes into account a number of factors 
omitted by East, arriving at the tentative conclusion that “our 
arable land, present and potential, if fertilized and cultivated like 
the land of Germany, could provide food and fibers in accord- 
ance with our present tastes for about 250 million people, and 
with a largely vegetarian and dairy diet for from 400 to 500 
millions, so long as the supply of fertilizer held out.” 22 
In 1919-1920, there were in the United States, according to 
Baker, 503 millions of acres of improved land in crops and pas- 
ture. He estimates that there are about 300 million more acres 
that could be brought into use by draining, irrigation, clearing, 
and partial utilization for crops of the upland pastures of the 
East and dry-land pastures of the West. By ceasing, in addi- 
tion, to export agricultural products, by using improved pastures 
for crops, and by securing increased yields per acre through 
more intensive cultivation, we could support on our products 
about 250 or 275 millions of people, without any material change 
in our present diet. Such a change of diet, however, in the O VERPOP ULA TION 
37 
direction of substituting dairy products and various vegetable 
proteins and oils for two-thirds or more of our present meat 
consumption, would enable the country to support almost double 
its population. Perhaps a change of the kind is already under 
way. Our beef consumption to-day is only three-quarters as 
great as it was fifteen years ago. Nor would such a change do 
any injury to our welfare. Most physicians seemingly hold that 
we eat too much meat. At any rate, we consume an enormously 
large amount, about one hundred and seventy pounds per capita 
a year, as compared with four pounds in Japan, and with one 
hundred pounds in Germany before the war.23 
Some of the elements in Baker’s computation are un- 
doubtedly open to question. He himself in fact calls it “a long 
flight into the realm of statistical fancy.” But even though we 
make all allowances for error in computation, we in the United 
States are obviously very far removed in time from starvation’s 
door. And Baker is, moreover, not here considering the possi- 
bilities of further supplies of food products through fuller ex- 
ploitation of fisheries, elimination of waste, increase of imports, 
and other means. 
If we may at all confidently predict our future increase of 
population by our population curve of the past, we shall be well 
below the 200 million mark in 2000 A. D.24 Pressure of popu- 
lation on the soil does not exist in the United States to-day. It 
is not likely to occur for a long, long time to come, if we devote 
ourselves to the productive arts of peace instead of to the de- 
structive arts of war. 
What is the situation in and forecast for the world at large ? 
Baker in the same article estimates that of the total land area of 
52,000,000 square miles in the temperate, 
tropical, and sub-tropical zones, probably 
10,000,000 are ultimately arable. Of these 
ten million square miles, about 5,800,000 are to-day cultivated 
or in pasture, and 4,200,000 are potentially available for cultiva- 
tion or pasture. The Australian statistician, Knibbs, cites data 
b. In the World? 38 
BIRTH CONTROL 
from the International Institute of Agriculture to the effect that, 
out of a total land surface of 6042.5 million hectares, nearly one- 
half the total land surface of the world, for which records are 
available, embracing Europe, America, a part of Asia, of Africa, 
and of South America, Australia, and Oceania, 31.19% is classed 
as productive, 17.13% as unproductive, and 51.68% as un- 
specified. As he adds, “it is evident from this that there can be 
a considerable development of population even with existing 
standards of living.” 
Immense areas of the world now unexploited or but crudely 
exploited are capable of supporting an immensely larger num- 
ber of people than are being supported therein or therefrom to- 
day. “Although there is in Siberia a vast expanse of undevel- 
oped arable land, probably as great in amount as the total arable 
land in the United States, both improved and unimproved; and 
although there are considerable areas of fertile land as yet un- 
developed in Argentina, Australia, and other countries of tem- 
perate climate, nevertheless, the great reservoir of unutilized 
agricultural resources is to be found in the tropics. Tropical 
and sub-tropical countries include approximately half of the 
arable land, present and potential, of the world. Of the arable 
land in these countries, less than one-fourth ... is in cultivation 
at present, and possibly one-eighth is used for pasture. . . . 
Apparently the tropics and sub-tropics include about three times 
as large an area of potentially arable land as that which remains 
undeveloped in the temperate zones.” 25 
Nor is this all in the way of future resources. A vast 
amount of rocky, hilly, or mountainous land, now considered as 
unproductive because unsuitable for cereal or vegetable crops, is 
well adapted to the growth of nut-bearing and fruit-bearing trees 
yielding abundant and nutritious food. Again, we have perhaps 
scarcely begun to tap the world’s sea food resources. The total 
estimated arable land of the world is only about one-fifteenth as 
extensive as the area of the seven seas. Three-quarters of the 
earth’s surface, or 150,000,000 square miles, are covered with O VERPOPULA TION 
39 
water. Sea food may not and does not at present constitute a 
great percentage of the world’s food, but does this mean that it 
must ever be so? The two foregoing means of increasing the 
world’s food resources are dealt with in detail by Russell Smith 
in a recent work, and he calls attention to great possibilities along 
other lines, such as scientific improvement, greater use of fertil- 
izers and of mechanical power, the domestication of new plants, 
and better animal breeding. Smith may, it is true, be carried 
away in places by his enthusiasm, but his close adherence in the 
main to concrete facts is fair warrant for the fundamental valid- 
ity of his forecasts.26 
The available evidence makes it obvious that the actual and 
potential food resources of the world can support a far greater 
population than is being supported to-day. Apart even from 
any simplification in our manner of life and from the elimination 
of many comforts and luxuries or near-luxuries that we have 
come to look upon as necessities, there is room for an immensely 
greater population than the world supports to-day, and there will 
be room for generations to come. 
To venture to express more precisely the number of genera- 
tions or years the population can continue to increase, at its pres- 
ent rate, before the pressure of population upon the soil will be 
felt the world over, is to take an excursion into dreamland. It 
all depends. In fact, it depends on so many variable and unpre- 
dictable things that a forecast expressed in exact numbers is little 
more than guesswork. 
Following are some of the guesses. Leroy-Beaulieu believes 
that the population of the world could double or triple without 
overpopulation if properly distributed, while Devas suggests a 
much larger figure. Marshall thinks that pressure “may be held 
in check for about two hundred years, but not longer.” Knibbs 
considers that “the more acute problem of food supplies will not 
occur for a century.” East concluded that world-saturation “is 
not so far distant, but that some of our grandchildren would live 
to see it,” and that the maximum world-population supportable is 40 
BIRTH CONTROL 
about 5,000 millions. Pearl estimates that world-saturation is 
“at most a few centuries ahead.” Taylor offers the figure of 
about two hundred years. And so the estimates run. Baker, 
Hoffman, and Smith are content to abstain from precise numer- 
ical forecasts, while Willcox is, if anything, still more skeptical 
and non-committal.27 
Many of our estimates, however, do not make allowance for 
one very important factor, that is, the actual probable rate of in- 
crease, or else are based on a calculation 
at the present rate of annual increase of 
population. 
The present population of the world is 
probably about 1,700,000,000. For the 
five years ending in 1911, the world popu- 
lation increased, according to Knibbs’ esti- 
mate, at the rate of about 1.16% per year. 
He calculates that at the rate of 1% increase per year, the pres- 
ent population would be in 200 years more than 12 billion, in 
300 years more than 33 billion, in 400 years more than 90 billion, 
and in 500 years more than 246 billion.28 It would be easy 
enough to show by these figures or by a continuation of the cal- 
culation for, say, the next thousand years that the present popu- 
lation could not go on increasing indefinitely at the present rate 
of increase. This is all very interesting, but from the practical 
standpoint it does not mean much. 
The present rate of increase of about 1% per annum is quite 
exceptional in the world’s history. A uniform increase of 1% 
per annum continued for 2,066 1/3 years would, from a single 
couple, people the earth to its present population of 1,700 mil- 
lions. But the race is many times older than 2,066 years.29 
Evidently 1% per annum increase is exceptional. England and 
Wales increased in population from about 5 to 6 millions, or 
only 20%, between 1600 and 1700 A. D., from about 6 to 8.9 
millions, or less than 50%, between 1700 and 1800, and from 
8.9 to more than 32 millions, or from 270% to 280%, between 
An Important 
Consideration: 
The Probable 
Future Rate 
of Population 
Increase OVERPOPULATION 
41 
1800 and 1900. Rossiter concludes tentatively that the Euro- 
pean population increased about one-third per century on the 
average from 1000 A. D. to 1815 A. D., reaching about one-third 
in the seventeenth century and one-half by the eighteenth.30 
Many parts of the eastern and western world have probably 
maintained a practically or nearly stationary population for cen- 
turies. Such was seemingly the case over much of Europe dur- 
ing a large part of the Middle Ages. Increase in population is 
not inevitable. It is probably not even normal in human history. 
It is seemingly abnormal, exceptional, sporadic.31 
The remarkable modern increase in population has been 
made possible chiefly by such things as the invention of labor- 
saving farm machinery, by the development of facilities of rapid 
transportation on land and sea, and by the bringing under culti- 
vation of great areas of hitherto unimproved lands. These things 
have vastly and rapidly expanded the available food supply, and 
population has almost but not quite as vastly and rapidly ex- 
panded accordingly. Increased food supplies have meant more 
marriages and earlier marriages and hence more children for 
great sections of the people in western civilization, even apart 
from the greater ease of emigration to new and underpopulated 
lands. 
That, if the present abnormally high rate of increase should 
continue, population may at some far fu- 
ture day catch up with the available food 
supply, is not improbable. Granting this, 
but remembering the all-important if, 
what may we expect to happen? 
Some of our alarmists have drawn 
lurid pictures of the future day when the 
earth will no longer be able to support her 
teeming billions, when the “grisly servitors of Azrael,” pestilence 
and war and famine, will stalk abroad among the children of 
men, when brother will be arrayed against brother, and people 
against people, in a bloody and desperate life-and-death struggle 
If Overpopulation 
Should in the 
Future Threaten 
or Supervene, 
What Would 
Happen? BIRTH CONTROL 
42 
for bread. The vision is a distressing one, but those who have 
painted it in such vivid colors would have been saved their pig- 
ments and their distress had they taken account of the evidence 
that ethnology and economic history offer us. 
Overpopulation, saturation, and underpopulation are, as we 
have seen, relative things. They depend not on sheer density 
of population, but on the relation between density of population 
on the one hand and natural resources and the state of the food- 
producing arts on the other. Many if not most isolated uncivil- 
ized peoples living to-day under conditions of sparse settlement 
of the land are in the state of saturation. No doubt many a 
time did our nomadic paleolithic ancestors of the caves and river 
drifts press on the thinly populated soil. There was such local 
pressure, to cite a nearer example from Biblical times, when 
Abraham and Lot decided to go their separate ways because the 
land was not large enough for their flocks and tribes. To give 
just one more example, throughout much if not most of the 
medieval period in Europe there obtained a condition of satura- 
tion, a condition that persists even to the present day in many a 
rural section of Europe.32 Any reader who wishes to consult 
the evidence to show that saturation and pressure on the soil 
have apparently been normal in prehistoric and historic times, 
will find it given in detail in Carr-Saunders’ recent study of the 
population problem. 
And what has happened under such conditions of saturation 
or pressure upon the soil ? Many things. Under primitive un- 
civilized conditions, abortion, infanticide, high infant mortality, 
and customary or religious abstention from marital intercourse 
during the nursing and other long periods have helped to relieve 
the tension of population. 
During medieval times, Christian teaching ethically barred 
abortion and infanticide which among so many non-Christian 
peoples had been and are socially recognized methods of releas- 
ing economic pressure, but the same end was obtained through 
other means. The great masses of the people of medieval Eu- OVERPOPULATION 
43 
rope postponed marriage and a large number from among the 
economically handicapped classes remained celibate. Of the lat- 
ter number, many found refuge, as well as consecration to God 
and service to the race, in the clerical and monastic life, for the 
step from economic to religious celibacy was a comparatively 
short one. Overpopulation was averted, and averted without 
either the corroding practices of artificial birth control or the 
frenzied death-struggle of starving men. War, famine, and pes- 
tilence there were, no doubt, enough of them and to spare, but 
overpopulation was, so far as we can judge, a minor factor in 
their genesis and growth; while contraceptive practices among 
the married were apparently not common. 
From our knowledge of what has happened in past centuries 
when population has pressed upon the soil, we can forecast with 
some confidence what may be expected to happen in the future, 
should our successors on earth ever be faced at some distant day 
with overpopulation or saturation on a world-wide scale. Long 
before the stage shall have been reached when men will have to 
tighten their belts to allay the pangs of gnawing hunger or will 
be driven in desperation into the imagined hand-to-hand struggle 
for bread crusts, the situation will have been averted by less 
dramatic measures. The solution certainly can come and prob- 
ably will come quietly, unobtrusively, efficaciously, mayhap un- 
consciously, without elaborate foreplanning and “without obser- 
vation/' unless we deliberately choose for other reasons to re- 
sort to ancient barbarities to untie the knot. Nor need humanity 
choose the plausible but fatal solution held out by the beckoning 
sirens of contraception. Artificial birth control carried out on a 
worldwide scale would undoubtedly avert overpopulation, but it 
would solve the problem in the same manner that beheading 
solves the problem of toothaches. Of this, more later. 
Nor again need we appeal to any supposed law of nature that 
diminishes human fecundity in proportion as civilization ad- 
vances or urban living increases. Does such a law exist? 
Maybe. But anything like adequate scientific evidence of its 44 
BIRTH CONTROL 
existence or operation is lacking.33 Fewer children are born as 
urbanization progresses, but that the cause of the lower urban 
birth rate is chiefly or notably a decrease in physiological fecun- 
dity remains to be proven. 
Should overpopulation ever threaten at some far future day, 
it can and may be averted by measures that are at the same time 
social and ethical as well as efficacious, measures that have 
availed in the past and that avail in many sections of Christen- 
dom to-day. 
The first measure is the deferment of marriage, particularly 
on the part of the woman. The later the age of marriage, the 
shorter is the child-bearing period of the 
woman, and the fewer the offspring. 
Moreover, the later the age of marriage, 
at least after about eighteen to twenty-five 
years, the less the fecundity. Korosi’s study of the data from 
various European surveys gives the following results: The 
chances of a married woman having a child in any given twelve- 
month are nearly one to two if her age be between fifteen and 
twenty-four, about one to three if between twenty-five and 
thirty-four, about one to four if between thirty-five and thirty- 
nine, and about one to ten if between forty and forty-four. 
Fairly similar results have been obtained by other investigators, 
as by Dunlop and Lewis for Scotland and Knibbs for Australia. 
The age of the husband may have some bearing on fertility, but 
seemingly much less than the age of the wife. Regarding the 
husband, much more light is needed, as the results of Knibbs’ 
study of Australia and Korosi’s of Budapest differ consider- 
ably.34 
From the foregoing data, we may conclude that women 
marrying, for instance, at the age of twenty-seven, may be ex- 
pected, roughly speaking, and barring sterility from atrophy, to 
bear four less children than if they had married at eighteen, one 
more than if they had waited until thirty, and two more than if 
they had deferred marriage until thirty-three or thirty-four. 
a. Deferment of 
Marriage OVERPOPULATION 
45 
The second measure available, should overpopulation ever in 
the future become imminent, is that of continence, whether 
within or without the marriage union. Its 
efficacy is obvious. Its possibility, hu- 
manly speaking, is sometimes questioned. 
But as a matter of fact, such continence, either marital or extra- 
marital, has been common in both primitive and advanced cul- 
ture. What has been possible will be again possible, should the 
need ever arise. Of this more will be said towards the end of 
the present pamphlet. Another consideration now calls for 
some notice. 
It is commonly believed that the deferment of the age of 
marriage and the lowering of the marriage rate in any com- 
munity lead to grave sex immoralities. That they may so lead, 
no one questions. That they must so lead, may be flatly denied. 
Whether they will actually do so or not, depends. 
As a matter of fact, such checks on overpopulation have been 
in operation throughout most of human history. He would be 
a bold historian or ethnologist who would venture to set forth 
any exact or approximate correlation between the age of mar- 
riage, the marriage rate, and sex morality. In medieval times, 
the marriage age was higher and the marriage rate apparently 
lower than they are to-day, yet any of us who might be inclined 
to extol our actual modern sex-moral conditions at the expense 
of the medieval, notwithstanding a greater frankness or coarse- 
ness in medieval times, would do well first to look up some of the 
twentieth century vice surveys, as, for instance, the New York, 
Chicago, or Baltimore reports, or Flexner’s study of Europear 
conditions. Most primitive peoples marry young, and among 
most primitive tribes nearly all adults marry, yet the sex stand- 
ards and sex practices of these peoples in the majority of cases 
are greatly inferior to our own. We have data for scores oi 
tribes whose members marry early and marry almost without 
exception, and who nevertheless practise premarital and marita 
laxnesses that are appalling. Among the tribes where very 
b. Continence 46 
BIRTH CONTROL 
early marriage prevails, say, about thirteen years for the girls 
and fifteen or sixteen for the man, some tribes have very high 
standards of chastity, other tribes very low standards.85 
The age and rate of marriage are, no doubt, a factor in the 
total sex morality of humanity, but they are very far from being 
the determinant factor, nor need they be even an important 
one.36 The potential anti-social influence of a high marriage 
age and a low marriage rate can be counteracted by many other 
influences. Among such influences stands out the factor of high 
sex ideals, bred in by careful moral and religious training, backed 
up by strong social convictions, and buttressed by uncompromis- 
ing public opinion. Should overpopulation come upon human- 
ity, we should have to give more attention than we are giving to 
the training of such self-control and self-discipline, and should 
have to show less tolerance of and leniency towards the abom- 
inable double standard. Overpopulation or no overpopulation, 
a little more intensive labor along these two lines would not be 
a work of supererogation even to-day in our time of plenty. 
In the foregoing pages on population we have reviewed cur- 
sorily the evidence showing that overpopulation does not exist 
on any worldwide or America-wide scale, and that so far as the 
evidence goes we have no need to worry about the future for a 
long time to come at the very least. We then entered upon the 
very hypothetical question of whether such overpopulation will 
ever come and what we should have to do if it should come. We 
now leave the shadowy realm of possible far future overpopula- 
tion and come back again to the world of realities. CHAPTER VI 
U NDERPOPULATION 
The future we are actually facing to-day is not a future of 
overpopulation, but a future of underpopulation. This forecast 
is based not on a foundation of ifs, but on a foundation of sim- 
ple, abundant, and obvious biological and sociological facts. 
To sustain the existing population without any increase 
whatever, to maintain merely a stationary 
number in any given community, it is nec- 
essary under our modern conditions that 
each married woman bear about four chil- 
dren. Sprague’s detailed computation 
gives a minimum of 3.7, Dublin’s “close to 
four,” the Whethams’ computation “about 
four,” and Thompson’s 3.5 to 4. Of any 
given number of children born, many will 
die in early infancy or before the marriageable age, and many 
do not marry at all or not until after the reproductive stage, 
while a considerable proportion of marriages are physiologically 
sterile. An average of about four children per married couple 
is needed if the stock is merely to maintain itself without de- 
crease.37 
Are those couples or those groups or classes who practise 
contraceptive measures bringing into the world an average of 
four children? Our various surveys and studies of actual condi- 
tions make it abundantly clear that couples who practise artificial 
birth control fall, as a rule, anywhere from 25% to 75% or 
100% short of reproducing even the required four children. 
Birth control families average closer to two than to four. More- 
Average Number 
of Children 
Required 
Per Marriage 
to Keep 
Population 
Stationary 48 
BIRTH CONTROL 
over, inasmuch as our statistical data point towards a fertility 
record that has consistently and steadily 
fallen during the last few decades, we 
have no reason to think that even the 
present-day two-child regime is not going 
to be reduced down to a still lower 
average. The number of one-child and childless marriages is 
increasing, and will, in all human probability, continue to in- 
crease for a long time to come.38 
So far as the United States is concerned, the immigrant 
groups are in general bearing and rearing more children per 
family than the native-born, the rural population more than the 
urban, the western and southern sections more than the northern 
and northeastern, the less prosperous classes more than the well- 
to-do and wealthy. The older stocks of most of the Middle 
Atlantic States and New England are already failing by a large 
margin to reproduce themselves. From the native-born, urban, 
eastern, and well-to-do groups artificial limitation of fertility is 
spreading apace among the foreign-born, rural, western, and less 
prosperous groups. We have no shred of evidence to reassure 
us that we in America shall not go the way France is going, and 
there are some good grounds for thinking, well within the life 
span of many who are living to-day.39 
So far as the world in general is concerned, the birth rate is 
falling in practically every European country, and in some coun- 
tries at an alarming rate. We again have no shred of evidence 
to reassure us that the nations of western civilization will not 
reach the point that France reached a decade ago when her birth 
rate first fell below her death rate. 
Apropos of this steady decline in the birth rate, Willcox has 
made an interesting computation from the United States census 
statistics. During the sixty-year period, 1850 to 1910, the pro- 
portion of children under five years of age to the number of 
women of child-bearing age in the United States decreased from 
699 to 508, an average of thirty-two per decade. Should this 
Birth Control 
Families 
Fall Short UNDERPOPULA TION 
49 
rate of decrease continue, the proportion would be, in 1950 A. 
D., 380; in 2000 A. D., 220; and in 2070 A. D., zero! Nat- 
urally, neither he nor anyone else predicts that the zero point will 
ever actually be reached. It is the trend that is significant and 
sinister.40 
Given the required average of about four children per mar- 
riage, given the abundantly authenticated fact that groups prac- 
tising birth control are bearing on the average from 25% to 75% 
less than this number, with prospects of 
the average fertility decreasing still fur- 
ther, and given the equally abundant indi- 
cations that birth control practices are 
spreading out and down among larger and larger circles in our 
own country and in most other countries of western civilization, 
we have before our eyes a patent and obvious exemplification and 
evidence of what is or comes near to being a sociological law, 
namely, that the group or nation or civilization that begins to 
tamper with the conceptive process begins to erase itself from 
the pages of life and begins to dig its own grave, chisel its own 
tombstone, and write its own epitaph. 
It is theoretically conceivable that artificial birth restriction 
might be carried out “moderately” and with due regard for race 
maintenance. But we have to deal not with theoretic possibil- 
ities, but with very non-theoretic facts. We are human beings 
living on this earth, not inhabitants of some distant planet, and 
human ethics must deal with human beings, not with hypothetical 
Martians. Theory and hypothesis aside, the rock-ribbed fact 
remains that human groups who are sucked into the vortex of 
artificial birth control do not as groups use “moderation” and 
do not have due regard for racial maintenance. They perish, 
while those more fit to carry on the torch of life survive. 
In the United States to-day and for that matter throughout 
most of western civilization, the one great massive group stand- 
ing out for race maintenance is the Catholic body. Except in 
so far as Catholics may fail in loyalty to their own principles or 
The Prospect of 
Racial Decline 50 
BIRTH CONTROL 
suffer from the infection of their non-Catholic environment, they 
will show themselves more fit morally because they will stand 
for an unselfish attitude towards racial welfare, and they will be- 
come still more fit morally by the training in unselfishness which 
their acceptance of parental responsibilities and sacrifices will 
continue to give them. They will survive. 
Our western civilization, should it continue upon the path of 
artificial birth control which it is so gaily and with such pathetic 
shortsightedness entering, will find itself in the long run and 
perhaps in the short run competing hopelessly with the races of 
the Orient whose religion and culture tie them to a socially far- 
sighted concept of birth release. When these twain meet, as 
meet they shall in peaceful competition or in martial encounter, 
will the outnumbered and shrinking hosts of the West be the 
more apt to bear off the palm of victory ? Those who know the 
Oriental best are least contemptuous of his character and talents 
in peace or war and least confident regarding his supposed infe- 
riority to the son of the Occident. 
But brushing aside these visions of a far from visionary 
future Armageddon, let us return to the actual and present. 
That the effects of contraceptive practices 
to date have been “dysgenic” or even dis- 
astrous, is pretty generally admitted even 
in contraceptive circles. Over and over 
again in almost every article or pamphlet 
or book on birth control written by its 
advocates, the reader finds the recurrent refrain: The “fit,” 
that is, the prosperous and educated and gifted, are not begetting 
children to anything like their capacity, while the “unfit,” that is, 
the rest of us, are multiplying apace. And over and over again 
follows the response to the antiphon: The fit must beget more 
children, and the unfit must beget less. 
That the less prosperous may increasingly beget less children 
is by no means beyond the range of probability. On the con- 
trary, we may expect the plague of contraception to spread far 
Birth Control 
to Date 
Admittedly 
Dysgenic UNDERPOPULA TION 
51 
more widely than it has spread to date, no matter what laws are 
written upon our statute books or deleted therefrom. Its results 
will make themselves felt obviously in our declining population 
statistics and less obviously but still more disastrously in our de- 
clining morale and hardiness and unselfishness, to say nothing of 
the not improbable darker conflict with the hordes of the Orient. 
So far as the notably unfit, in particular the limited number 
of low-grade feeble-minded, are concerned, a special situation 
presents itself. We need merely touch upon it summarily here. 
The feeble-minded tend to have numerous 
offspring, and feeble-mindedness itself is 
highly hereditary. On the other hand, 
feeble-mindedness is a great contributory 
cause of immorality, criminality, alcoholism, unemployableness, 
and pauperism. The most humane method of meeting the situa- 
tion is the one of permanent custodial care in farming colonies 
or similar institutions, with strict segregation of the sexes. One 
of the greatest institutions of the kind in the world to-day is the 
enormous Catholic colony of Ursberg in Bavaria.41 
That the more prosperous and educated and gifted groups 
will hearken to the exhortation of the eugenist and contracep- 
tionist to beget their kind to their reasonable capacity, is so im- 
probable that we may safely dismiss the exhortation back to the 
land of dreams and wishes which gave it birth. “The fit ought 
to multiply.” Yes, they ought. But they don’t. And, to use 
Todd’s expression, “no amount of eugenic scolding” is going to 
get them to do it.42 Contraceptionists and those eugenists who 
counsel contraception advocate the inculcation of a high sense of 
social and national and racial altruism to bring the miracle to 
pass. But all this is very general and very vague. It is a hope, 
or the shadow of a hope, a gossamer velleity, and nothing more. 
The investigator will search in vain in the teeming birth control 
and eugenic literature for anything like practical, practicable, and 
concrete ways and means that offer any ray of promise that such a 
hope and velleity has even a fighting chance of ever being realized. 
The 
Feeble-minded 52 
BIRTH CONTROL 
One final point. Suppose it be granted that quality is more 
important than quantity in matters of population. A teeming 
population of morons and criminals would not be a sight for 
sair een. Two important considerations, however, need to be 
taken into account. 
Quantity may decrease to or to near the vanishing point. 
Bell wrote recently a very curious and ingenious defence of the 
thesis that the most widespread imaginable 
birth control practices would not result in 
total race extinction, because there would 
always be a residue of child-desiring 
adults who would bear and leave offspring as the nucleus of a 
reviving race.43 Waiving the many assumptions too numerous 
to mention here, and speaking from a viewpoint that concerns 
us and our future as a nation practically, we need only remark 
that long before any given group or nation shall have reached 
the lowest stage of underpopulation, it would probably be exter- 
minated or swamped out by hardier contiguous or immigrant 
groups. Such a process has accounted for the disappearance of 
many a now extinct uncivilized people in contact with civilized 
races, and such a process we may see in operation in our own 
Middle Atlantic States and New England to-day, where more 
recent arrivals are swamping out the relatively sterile older 
stock.44 He who advocates contraception may formulate his 
own reply to those who prefer that their progeny possess the 
land of their fathers. 
The second consideration is of an economic order. Even 
granting that quality is worth more than quantity, this is far 
from granting that quantity is worth noth- 
ing. Few economists who agree that 
there is a law of increasing returns would 
be willing to make such an admission. 
Overpopulation may occur. But so, too, 
may underpopulation, that is, such a dearth of numbers that all 
suffer and that all receive a lower return for their labor. 
Quantity and 
Quality 
Economic 
Aspects of 
Underpopulation UNDERPOP ULA TION 
53 
There seems to be a widespread impression that getting a 
living out of nature’s resources is like writing checks on a fixed 
fund deposited in the bank: the more people there are, the more 
checkbooks, and the less available cash for each checkbook 
owner. This conception is un peu simpliste. 
In reality, in any given state of the productive arts and in 
any given district with its natural resources, a certain density of 
population up to a certain amount is required, if all the popula- 
tion is to get the best living. If progress in skill is rapid and 
the, natural resources are sufficient, an increase in population is 
desirable inasmuch as the income per capita will be greater up 
to a certain point. For one reason, a greater degree of con- 
certed labor makes for a higher productiveness, and sparseness 
of population makes against concerted labor. If the population 
decreases too far, again all suffer a decrease of income. 
That, for instance, the United States, Canada, and the 
Argentine Republic have advertised for and helped colonists by 
land grants and government assistance, is not a policy of tender- 
hearted philanthropy. Some parts of these countries have been 
or are urgently in need of a greater population, not only to in- 
crease national wealth, but also because “in many localities, cov- 
ering large areas of the Western World, the population is too 
sparse to support a good, well-organized, well-financed society 
with the necessary schools, churches, and other institutions.” 45 
It would carry us too far afield to go into minute details re- 
garding the economic questions of concerted labor, the law of in- 
creasing returns, and the optimum population. Such details are 
easily available in standard works on economics.46 Most of the 
birth control literature overlooks the economic fact that under- 
population has its perils no less than overpopulation. And of 
the two future possibilities, to many of us it seems that the con- 
crete facts and trends to-day point to much greater probability 
of future underpopulation than of future overpopulation. 
We may sum up the whole foregoing treatment of population 
as follows. There is no evidence of real pressure of popula- 54 
BIRTH CONTROL 
tion upon the soil to-day either in this country or in the world in 
general. Our national and worldwide resources are sufficient to 
support a population far greater than is being supported to-day. 
Should overpopulation ever be imminent, it can be successfully 
averted by efficacious and ethical methods. In reality, we are 
faced by much more probable and imminent racial decay both in 
quality and quantity from our ever decreasing birth rate. We 
are blasting away at the levees. The waters are flooding and 
devastating wider and wider areas. We are creating a formid- 
able and perhaps a hopeless task for the constructive social and 
moral engineers of the generations to come. Social and racial 
blasting is a trade easily learned and easily plied. Constructive 
social and moral engineering is a task of another stripe. CHAPTER VII 
War, Poverty, and Infant Mortality 
The relation of population to war, poverty, and the death 
rate comes up frequently for discussion in connection with the 
birth control question. A few words upon this relation, there- 
fore, may not be unnecessary. 
So far as war is concerned, it is very difficult indeed to trace, 
with any precision whatever, what has or has not been the influ- 
ence of overpopulation upon warfare. Warfare between na- 
tions, like warfare between street urchins, 
may be due to any of a half hundred 
causes, quite regardless of population or 
overcrowding. Isolating and evaluating the factor of overpopu- 
lation among the numerous other factors that have caused the 
wars of history, is a task regarding which the scientific historian 
is inclined to be exceedingly cautious. 
The fact is, overpopulation is, as we have seen, a relative 
matter, depending not only on density or numbers, but also on 
the natural resources, the food-getting skill, and the possibilities 
of importation and of emigration possessed by any group at any 
given time. True and notable overpopulation in human history 
has probably been exceptional, while saturation has probably 
been the rule. The historian will need a more finely ruled yard- 
stick than he has at present even to determine just when and 
where overpopulation has occurred, let alone to determine its 
supposed influence upon martial history. 
On the other hand, we have abundant evidence of peoples liv- 
ing seemingly at a point of saturation verging on overpopulation, 
a. War 56 
BIRTH CONTROL 
but who nevertheless are notoriously peaceful. Among civilized 
peoples may be mentioned, for instance, the Chinese; among the 
semi-civilized, the Javanese; among the uncivilized, the majority 
of the agricultural and most of the lower nomad hunting tribes. 
All of these, and the instances could be easily multiplied, live 
habitually on terms of peace with their neighbors. Potential 
overpopulation has been held in check by numerous measures far 
removed from measure of warlike aggression. 
Our best statistical evidence shows that production has far 
outrun population in western civilization during the last decades. 
None the less, even the most unmitigated militarist would hardly 
describe our present days as piping times of peace. The blame 
for 1914 has sometimes been thrown upon German overpopula- 
tion rather than upon militaristic, imperial, and commercial am- 
bitions. The fact is, however, that, in spite of the comparative 
density of population in Germany, before the Great War there 
was probably less real poverty among the German people than 
among any large nation in Europe, from which we have a pretty 
fair right to conclude that there was little overpopulation or 
pressure on the soil in any true sense. 
About all one can safely say about the relation of population 
to war is that if there be pressure of population on the soil, ag- 
gressive warfare may result, and then again it may not. 
Whether it will or not depends on a score of other things. 
Moreover—and this is the other side of the picture which is 
usually overlooked and which for us is perhaps the more impor- 
tant—underpopulation may invite warlike aggression on the part 
of prolific neighbors who happen to be more powerful or think 
themselves so.47 
Passing on to the question of poverty and population, we 
step at once on to firmer ground. The 
lack of the necessities of life among any 
given people at any given period may be 
due either to overpopulation or to unequal distribution of re- 
sources. There may be too many mouths and not enough food 
b. Poverty WAR, POVERTY, AND INFANT MORTALITY 
57 
to fill them, or there may be quite enough food to fill all the 
mouths and yet some mouths are empty while some hands hold 
more food than needed. There is quite enough of poverty even 
in our flourishing western civilization, as no one will deny. Is 
world-poverty or American poverty of to- 
day due to overpopulation or to unequal 
distribution of wealth and of the neces- 
sities of life? 
That it is not due to overpopulation 
would seem abundantly clear from the 
simple fact that overpopulation does not 
obtain to-day on any worldwide scale, 
while poverty does. As we have seen, food production has very 
considerably outstripped population during recent decades. 
There is quite enough food for all, but it is unevenly distributed. 
So far as the United States in particular is concerned, we 
have three other approaches to the same conclusion. According 
to our most authoritative estimate, the total income of the people 
of the United States in 1918, if divided 
equally among all, would average $586 a 
year per individual, or $2,930 per family 
of five. Our national income would, if it 
were at all evenly distributed, amply meet the needs of our popu- 
lation. In 1918, 1% of the income receivers had nearly 14% 
of the total income in the United States, 5% had nearly 26% of 
the income, 10% had nearly 35%, and 20% had about 47%.48 
While we are here concerned more with the distribution of 
income than with the distribution of wealth, the data on the lat- 
ter are of pertinent interest. One per cent, of the American 
people own more than 50% of our na- 
tional wealth, two per cent, of the people 
own 60% of the wealth, and one-fifth of 
the people own 90% of the wealth. The 
distribution of “surplus” income is, like the distribution of 
wealth, far more unequal than the distribution of income. If 
Poverty Due, 
Not to 
Overpopulation, 
But to Uneven 
Distribution: 
i. Food Supply 
ii. Income in 
U. S. 
iii. Wealth and 
Surplus Income 58 
BIRTH CONTROL 
we consider as surplus income all income over $2,000 a year, we 
find that 2.2% of all income receivers in the United States were, 
in 1918, getting about 71% of the surplus income, and two- 
thirds of one per cent, were getting just about 50% of the sur- 
plus income.49 
Between 1900 and 1919, our products in agriculture, mining, 
and manufacture in the United States increased about 30% per 
capita, yet wages, while they increased in gross amount, actually 
declined in buying power during that pe- 
riod. The workman could buy less for 
the larger wages he was receiving in 1919 
than he could for his smaller wages in 
1900. Their real value was less than it was in 1900. There 
has, it is true, been an increase in purchasing power since 1919, 
but this increase is comparatively slight and still falls very far 
short of the per capita increase in productivity. If wage-earners 
had received a proportionate share of the increased production, 
real wages should now be about 30% to 40% higher than they 
were in 1900.60 
As a matter of fact, the great mass of unskilled workers are 
receiving insufficient wages to support in frugal decency a fam- 
ily consisting of husband, wife, and three children, and more 
than 50% of the women in industry are getting less than a living 
wage.51 Largely out of such underpayment have been created 
our great private fortunes, our notably uneven distribution of in- 
come and wealth, and much if not most of our poverty. 
The causes of poverty and of pauperism are many.52 Low 
wages are not the only cause. But from the very brief sum- 
mary of some of the evidence which we have just given, it is 
apparent that our contemporary poverty is not to any great ex- 
tent the result of overpopulation. It is the result of an unequal, 
an unneighborly, and, to an extent little realized by those not 
familiar with the wage and profit facts of modern industry, an 
unjust distribution of products and wealth. 
Pauperism is one thing and poverty is another. The great 
iv. Wages and 
Production WAR, POVERTY, AND INFANT MORTALITY 
59 
masses of our unskilled workers are not paupers, but they are 
suffering from underpayment. They feel the pinch of poverty 
because they are not receiving a living wage. Our national in- 
come is such that a living wage could be paid to our workers and 
there would still be an ample margin of profit to provide a rea- 
sonable return on capital invested and a reasonable remuneration 
for superior employing ability. 
In reality, the elimination of waste alone in industry would 
provide largely for more equal distribution, apart from the cut- 
ting down of profits and dividends. The recent report of 
Hoover’s committee of engineers on waste in industry gives 
some conception of the enormous annual losses chargeable to our 
haphazard methods in production, losses totalling billions of dol- 
lars annually. In the six major industries studied by the com- 
mittee, the responsibility of the management for the preventable 
waste ranged from 50 to 81 per cent, of the total preventable 
waste, the responsibility of labor from only 9 to 28 per cent, of 
the total.53 
Advocates of birth control have little to say as a rule regard- 
ing the living wage. Some openly oppose it. Many others 
damn it with faint praise or praise it with faint damns, conclud- 
ing with some such statement as, “the 
poor should be counseled to have no 
family or only small families,” or, “the 
poor should not be allowed to have large 
families.” 
Such a loathsomely, even though unconsciously, brutal pro- 
posal smells to high heaven. A small minority reap great profits 
at the expense of the great masses of underpaid unskilled work- 
ers. They withhold from the worker a fair return from the 
profits of industry. Then they say to him: “You have not 
enough to fill the mouths of many children. You must not have 
more children,” or “You must not have children at all.” In 
other words, we unjustly cheat the worker out of his right to a 
fair return from his labor, and then we say to him: “You must 
Proposal of 
Birth Control 
As a Remedy 60 
BIRTH CONTROL 
forego normal family life.” A man’s three most fundamental 
rights are the right to life, the right to family life, and the 
right to the necessities of life as the fruit of his labor. We un- 
justly deprive him of the third right, and then, as a remedy, pro- 
pose to deprive him in addition of his right to normal family 
life. 
The obvious remedy on any ground of ethical justice is first 
to right the economic wrong we are doing him. Pay him a liv- 
ing wage, and he will be in a position to 
take advantage of his right to normal fam- 
ily life. The general payment of a living 
wage, the heart of the Catholic program 
of social justice, would undoubtedly cut down somewhat the dis- 
proportionate returns now accruing to the more prosperous. 
Such a cutting down of profits would still leave an ample margin 
or return for the employing and owning groups. It would no 
doubt mean fewer great fortunes and some simplification in lux- 
urious living. But such a simplification would work hardship 
on no one. On the contrary, there are few eugenists, econ- 
omists, or moralists, Catholic or non-Catholic, who would not 
agree that fewer immense fortunes and more of simpler living 
would make notably for true individual and collective welfare 
and be eugenic in the best and highest sense.54 
The teachings of Malthus and his followers have in the main 
tended to check movements making for social betterment and 
juster wages. Poverty, they have more commonly maintained, 
is chiefly the result of overpopulation; the poor who bring nu- 
merous children into the world have only themselves to blame 
if misery and want follow in the wake of their improvidence; 
the wealthy who give generously in charity or advocate humane 
economic reforms and legislation are merely feeding the flames 
of folly and adding to the sum total of human misery.55 Many 
of the modern disciples of Malthus, while often manifesting sin- 
cere and heartfelt sympathy for the hard lot of the poor, never- 
theless discuss the crucial problems of the living wage and a 
Justice the 
Remedy WAR, POVERTY, AND INFANT MORTALITY 
61 
more equitable redistribution of wealth either antagonistically, 
gingerly, or not at all. We are not questioning their motives. 
Their motives may be and, as we know, often are of the most 
altruistic and humane kind. We are merely adverting to the 
objective fact. And the fact remains that the modern neo- 
Malthusian movement, as a movement, with its emphasis on the 
contraceptive solution of poverty and its relative silence regard- 
ing industrial justice, is shunting attention off the real causes 
of and remedies for modern poverty and is playing into the 
hands of those who, having more than their fair share of this 
world’s goods, are interested in maintaining unmodified the pres- 
ent industrial and economic conditions. 
Even were artificial birth control ethically defensible, such 
propaganda is condemnable as a matter of mere policy, because 
it tends in actuality to block social movements for the living 
wage and economic justice to the poor. “It is a wiser and bet- 
ter policy,” as the National Birth Rate Commission has recently 
put it, “to suit the conditions and environment to the needs of a 
family rather than to reduce the number of children in order to 
fit a defective and injurious state of society.” 56 Wholesome 
family life among the great masses of the people is of infinitely 
more concern to human welfare than is the accumulation of 
great fortunes among the few and the multiplication of luxuries 
and the satisfaction of ever increasing and ever more costly 
whims and desires. 
We may now turn to the relation of the birth rate to the death 
rate, particularly the death rate among in- 
fants. Let us see, first, what are the facts, 
and, secondly, what is their interpretation. 
That a high infant mortality rate is at 
times found where a high birth rate obtains is true enough, but 
the cases to the contrary are so very numerous that the supposed 
correlation means little or nothing. Sweden, for instance, has 
a low birth rate and a low infant mortality rate, while its next 
door neighbor, Norway, has a higher birth rate and a lower in- 
c. Infant 
Mortality 62 
BIRTH CONTROL 
fant mortality rate than has Sweden. Connaught has a very 
high birth rate and an exceptionally low infant mortality rate, 
while France has a low birth rate and a 
high infant mortality rate. During the 
five years that preceded the Great War, 
the ten departments of France with the 
lowest birth rate had a higher average in- 
fant mortality rate than had the ten departments with the highest 
birth rates. In New South Wales, the rural class has the high- 
est birth rate and the lowest infant mortality rate. Instances 
could be multiplied if it were worth while.57 
From the abundant statistical material at hand, it would be 
equally plausible to conclude that a low birth rate causes a low 
infant mortality rate and that a high birth rate causes a low in- 
fant mortality rate. It would be equally plausible and equally 
unscientific and wrong. The relation between the two rates is 
casual, not causal. In the words of the National Birth Rate 
Commission, “the neo-Malthusian contention that the cause of 
a high death-rate is a high birth-rate, and that the only way to 
reduce the death-rate is to reduce the birth-rate, is clearly 
invalid.” 58 
The chief underlying causes of infant mortality are poor 
heredity, poverty, and ignorance of and lack of facilities for pre- 
natal and natal care. The recent notable 
reductions in the infant mortality rates of 
most of the chief civilized countries, in- 
cluding our own, are mainly the result of 
better prenatal and natal care and instruction. A key measure 
in the infant and maternal welfare work has been the substitu- 
tion of breast feeding for artificial feeding. Sweden’s low in- 
fant mortality to which we referred above is probably due in 
large measure to the fact that nearly all Swedish mothers nurse 
their own children. How much farther we shall reduce the in- 
fant mortality rate will depend, not on the number of children 
born per family, but on the amount of money we are willing to 
Birth Rates 
and Infant 
Death Rates 
Causes and 
Remedies WAR, POVERTY, AND INFANT MORTALITY 
63 
invest in providing instruction and care for mothers and expec- 
tant mothers.59 
Poverty is no doubt an important factor in the infant mor- 
tality rate. Our American surveys seem to show a clear correla- 
tion between income and infant mortality. Poverty only too 
often means overcrowded and unsanitary housing, ignorance of 
hygiene, poor and insufficient nourishment, lack of proper med- 
ical and nursing care, all of which make for a higher mortality 
among the infants of the poor. This is all the more reason that 
in charity and justice we insist on living wages for the worker 
and on a more equitable distribution of wealth and income, al- 
though, of course, there would still remain the imperative duty 
of providing adequate health instruction and facilities for med- 
ical attention. Even were poverty banished, ignorance and 
lack of such facilities could easily persist, and the infant mor- 
bidity and mortality rate would then still remain high. 
There is a certain amount of statistical evidence apparently 
pointing to a relatively high infant mortality among unusually 
large families of nine or ten children or 
more.80 Those who, however, draw from 
these facts the conclusion that large fam- 
ilies are themselves the cause of high in- 
fant mortality are drawing a conclusion 
not warranted by the data at hand. 
Bell’s study, for instance, of 2,964 members of the Hyde 
family showed that the proportion of children who not only sur- 
vived but who had the toughness and vitality to survive to ripe 
old age increased progressively with the size of the family up to 
nine to twelve children. Only in the rare families of thirteen 
and more was there an appreciable falling off. Cattell’s data re- 
garding the families of American men of science show an in- 
appreciable difference in child mortality between the smaller and 
larger families, and even this negligible difference is easily ac- 
counted for by the fact that the larger families were raised in 
earlier times when the general death rate of both children and 
Infant Mortality 
and Large 
Families 64 
BIRTH CONTROL 
adults was higher than it is now.61 In Bell’s and Cattell’s data, 
the all-important factors of poverty and neglect are largely 
eliminated. Even in some of the statistical data on less well-to- 
do groups, infant mortality is lower among the seventh, eighth, 
and ninth children than among the fourth, fifth, and sixth.62 
The foregoing facts show pretty clearly that the real cause 
of the seemingly higher infant mortality rate among exception- 
ally large families, particularly of nine or ten or more, is not the 
size of the family. In fact, to a very considerable degree, infant 
mortality itself has much to do with the production of large fam- 
ilies, inasmuch as the early death of an infant from whatsoever 
cause makes conception more likely sooner after childbirth.63 
Our statistical studies take little account of the influence of in- 
fant mortality upon more frequent conception and a higher birth 
rate. They do, however, show a striking relation, and a causal 
relation, between family income and the infant mortality rate. 
If there is a high mortality among families who are at the 
same time poor and prolific, the main cause—though there are 
others, particularly artificial feeding and birth spacing, of which 
we shall speak later—is not the size of the family, but the factors 
we have mentioned on the preceding pages. CHAPTER VIII 
Economic and Health Motives 
We have thus far dealt with the Catholic position regarding 
fertility and the grounds therefor. Some further light is 
thrown on the whole subject by a study of the causes and mo- 
tives that actually lead to birth release or birth control. 
A thorough systematic enumeration, explanation, and evalu- 
ation of all such causes and motives would require many pages 
and would be a more or less profitless undertaking. Those in- 
terested in this phase of the problem can find abundant material 
in readily accessible sources.64 Motives of economy and of 
health figure prominently in questionnaire replies and most dis- 
cussions of the question. We shall treat each of these two 
groups of motives briefly. 
Economic motives may be of many kinds. The economic 
motives usually advanced by those who practise contraception 
are clearly not motives of real want or poverty. The objective 
evidence is unmistakable. For contracep- 
tion is least practised where want and pov- 
erty is greatest, and is most practised 
among the classes farthest removed from 
want and poverty. As a very general rule, the birth rate de- 
creases as income increases. This decrease in the birth rate is 
due, in some degree, to the slightly later age of marriage and 
slightly lower marriage rate among the prosperous and educated 
groups, but the main cause is not the higher marriage age or 
lower marriage rate, but voluntary birth restriction through con- 
tinence or contraception. 
Among many of the well-to-do, especially among the profes- 
sional classes, maximum income is not reached until compar- 
A. Economic 
Motives 66 
BIRTH CONTROL 
atively late in life, and so the costs of child-bearing, child-rear- 
ing, and higher education mount up until they constitute a cer- 
tain drain upon family resources. But generally speaking, the 
economic motives that determine birth restriction, while often 
tinged with prudence and with desire for family betterment and 
filial interests, fall in the main much more clearly within the line 
of timidity, shirking, social climbing, or sheer selfishness. 
Child-rearing demands parental self-denial, anxieties, sacrifices, 
and responsibilities, and moreover, in the game of climbing the 
social ladder, children may become burdensome impedimenta. 
Economic birth restriction is more commonly the product of 
what Leroy-Beaulieu called “l’esprit arriviste ” the product of a 
“neo-paganism” characterized “by the abandonment of high and 
disinterested ideals, the waxing of egoism, the tense pursuit of 
pleasure and ease, the contempt of sacrifice, the weakening of 
the sense of duty. This state of mind finds expression in the 
familiar formulas: ‘the right to happiness,’ the desire ‘to live 
one’s life.’ ”6G 
Newsholme has expressed about the same thought in dif- 
ferent words. “The desires of mankind become more numerous 
and varied with each added possession. When these desires 
lead to interference with family life in persons who are able to 
meet the normal requirements of a normal family, selfishness 
may be regarded as having become the chief motive. The in- 
creasing rarity of the altruism which welcomes the burden and 
joy of family life, in those who are well able to bear it, is one 
of the most unfavorable features of the present day. The ideal 
of portions of the community, especially of a large proportion 
of that part of it which has sufficient and abundant means, is 
one which is almost pagan in its outlook.” 
Or again, in the words of Crum: “Unless a radical change 
is soon effected the historian of no far distant period will be 
compelled to say that the descendants of the colonizers of the 
United States preferred material luxuries to spiritual realities, 
lustful conceits to correct theories of life, and selfish gratifica- ECONOMIC AND HEALTH MOTIVES 
67 
tions of inordinate ambitions to unselfish acceptance of the duties 
of parenthood.” 
Or finally, as Boas puts it: “We are clearly drifting 
towards that danger-line where the individual will no longer 
bear discomfort or pain for the sake of the continuance of the 
race, and where our emotional life is so strongly repressed by 
the desire for self-perfection—or by self-indulgence—that the 
coming generation is sacrificed to the selfishness of the living. 
The phenomenon that characterized the end of antiquity, when 
no children were found to take the place of the passing genera- 
tions, is being repeated.” 66 
The language of these leaders in their respective fields of 
economics, vital statistics, and anthropology—and such state- 
ments could be easily multiplied—is no doubt emphatic. No 
doubt, too, their summing up of motives is sweeping and is open 
to exceptions in the cases of individuals or small minorities. 
But in view of the great obvious objective fact that those most 
evade the responsibilities and sacrifices of adequate parenthood 
who are best situated economically for bearing them, it would be 
driveling sentimentalism to draw any other conclusion. On this 
point, at least, practically all eugenists, Catholic and non-Cath- 
olic, are fairly at one. 
Next to the economic motive, grounds of health, particularly 
the health of the mother, come in most prominently for discus- 
sion. They deserve and call for careful 
and sympathetic consideration from all 
who honor, love, and revere motherhood. 
Three points demand special attention. 
First, how does the bearing of numerous offspring affect mater- 
nal health? Secondly, what is proper spacing between child- 
births? Thirdly, what can be done in individual cases where 
further child-bearing or too frequent child-bearing would seri- 
ously jeopardize the health or life of the mother? 
How does the bearing of numerous offspring affect the 
mother’s health? Scientific advances in the field of obstetrics 
B. The Mother’s 
Health 68 
BIRTH CONTROL 
have cut down considerably the risks to health and life involved 
in child-bearing, but have by no means 
entirely eliminated these risks. Every 
mother who brings a child into the world 
faces a risk, however remote it may be in 
individual cases. This is one reason why humanity reverences 
motherhood. Other things being equal, therefore, we may ex- 
pect a slightly greater mortality among mothers of large families 
than among mothers of small families. 
It is sometimes confidently stated, however, that the bearing 
of numerous offspring is itself, apart from the above risk, or- 
dinarily followed by loss of health or of life on the part of the 
mother, and evidence for the statement is derived from mortality 
statistics. Some of the statistical evidence does indeed show a 
higher mortality among mothers with large families, but nearly 
all such evidence is taken from mortality studies made in con- 
gested city districts where poverty and all its connotes prevail. 
Bell’s study of the Hyde family, Jones’ study of five New 
England families, and Cattell’s study of American men of sci- 
ence, give quite different results. Among those families, where 
poverty did not prevail, the mothers who bore the larger number 
of children were precisely those who lived longer. According to 
Jones’ data, the mothers who lived to the age of from 48 to 62 
years had borne an average of about 5.5 children, those who 
lived from 63 to 82 years about 6 children, those who lived to 
from 83 to 92 years about 7.5 children. It is only among the 
rare mothers—nine in all—who survived to the exceptionally 
advanced age of 93 to 107 years, that there appears a slight fall- 
ing off in fertility to an average of 7.25 children. 
According to Bell’s data, the 164 mothers who lived to the 
age of 40 to 60 years had borne on the average 6.2 children, the 
244 mothers who lived to from 60 to 80 years had borne 6.6 chil- 
dren, and the 133 mothers who lived to 80 years or more had 
borne 7.2 children. Cattell’s study of the mothers of American 
men of science shows a clearly though less markedly greater 
Maternal 
Mortality ECONOMIC AND HEALTH MOTIVES 
69 
longevity among the mothers of from seven to ten children, and 
especially of the mothers of eleven or twelve children, as com- 
pared with the mothers of from four to six children or of from 
three to one. The 45 mothers who had each borne only one 
child and who survived their forty-fifth year, lived to the average 
of 68.6 years, while the 43 mothers who had each borne nine or 
ten children, lived to the average age of 75, and the 13 mothers 
of eleven or twelve children each lived to the average age of 78 
years.67 
Powys’ elaborate study of the general vital statistics of New 
South Wales, including both the poorer and more prosperous 
classes, led him to the conclusions that “the advantage in longev- 
ity is distinctly in favor of mothers of moderate sized families of 
about six children,” that “fertility up to about eight children is 
apparently favorable to longevity, whilst unfavorable beyond 
that number,” and that “mothers of moderate sized families of 
about six live on the average longer than those with smaller or 
larger families.” 68 
The fact that maternal longevity is associated statistically 
with very large or fairly large families in Bell’s, Jones’, Cattell’s, 
and Powys’ data does not, of course, imply that longevity is the 
result of prolific child-bearing. It does show how unscientific 
and unwarrantable it is to draw from slum statistics the sweep- 
ing conclusion that the bearing of a normal or fairly large fam- 
ily is necessarily and of itself, apart from poverty, ignorance, 
medical neglect, and other factors, prejudicial to the life and 
health of the mother. Whether a mother will be short-lived or 
long-lived depends on many things besides the smaller or larger 
number of children she has borne. Two of these things, “spac- 
ing” and individual differences, will be considered in the follow- 
ing paragraphs. 
What is proper “spacing” between child-bearing? Obstetri- 
cians and gynecologists are very cautious about answering this 
question with precision. So much depends on the individual 
mother’s condition. A frequency that might prove a drain upon 70 
BIRTH CONTROL 
the physical energies of some mothers is not at all such for 
others. An interval of about two years 
between births is sometimes mentioned 
as being Nature’s spacing.69 This is 
about the spacing that actually obtains on the average among 
mothers under thirty years of age, where birth restriction is not 
practised. Such at least seems to appear fairly clear from our 
available statistical data. But an average de facto rate does not 
necessarily imply a natural law or rule. The statistical studies 
of the relation between spacing and infant mortality show a two- 
year period between births as correlated with a lower mortality 
rate, but our statistical studies to date fall very far short of 
being a thorough-going analysis of the complex social, economic, 
psychological, and physiological factors, apart from spacing it- 
self, that lie back of and are responsible for the crude statistical 
correlation.70 A little more light may be thrown on the ques- 
tion by the facts of nursing and weaning. 
According to recent American surveys, the death rate among 
artificially fed infants under one year of age, is from three to 
five times as great as it is among breast- 
fed infants, the rate varying according to 
the age of the infant and according to 
hygienic, economic, and industrial condi- 
tions. The Baltimore survey showed a rate from three to nine 
times as high among the bottle-fed. European studies show 
similar results. Breast-fed infants, moreover, show a much 
lower disease rate than do artificially fed ones.71 
The reasons for this lower mortality and disease rate are many. 
The mother’s milk is always warm and is aseptic. It contains 
not only nourishment, but also living ferments and vitamins. 
“There is something in mothers’ milk,” writes DeLee, “that the 
finest chemistry cannot find nor imitate—a life-giving something 
—and it helps the baby to digest and assimilate the supplied 
food.” According to recent studies, the mother’s milk acts as 
an antitoxin and vaccine that protects the new-born baby against 
Spacing 
Maternal 
Nursing ECONOMIC AND HEALTH MOTIVES 
71 
disease germs. In addition, natural nursing helps normal in- 
volution of the uterus and other tissues involved in pregnancy 
and labor, and, from the social and educational standpoint, stim- 
ulates the maternal instinct of the mother and promotes attach- 
ment of the child to the mother and lays the foundation for the 
moral training of the child.72 
In view of the modern statistical and physiological evidence, 
it is very difficult for the moralist by any subtle casuistry to ex- 
culpate the mother who deliberately evades for any but the most 
imperative reasons the task of maternal nursing. There are, it 
is true, a small percentage of mothers who, on account of phys- 
iological or pathological reasons, cannot or ought not to nurse their 
own infants. But most mothers can and certainly ought. Ob- 
stetricians are, to the writer’s best knowledge, unanimous in re- 
garding maternal nursing as a duty. A mother who can fulfill 
this maternal task and who nevertheless evades it in order to 
be freer to come and go or for other self-regarding motives, is 
chargeable either with gross maternal illiteracy or with still more 
gross maternal callousness. 
This seeming digression from our subject is not in reality a 
digression. The question of maternal nursing is intimately 
bound up with the question of spacing and with the whole prob- 
lem of birth restriction, although it is generally passed over in 
silence in contraceptive and anti-contraceptive literature. 
A nursing mother is very much less apt to conceive during 
the normal nursing period than is the mother who does not 
nurse. During lactation the uterus and 
ovaries become to a greater or lesser de- 
gree quiescent and cease to functionate, 
thus bringing about a seemingly protec- 
tive temporary sterility which safeguards 
the mother against having to bear simultaneously the double 
strain of lactation and gestation.73 
In the three thousand and more cases studied and recorded 
by Mayer, Remfry, Essen-Moller, Heil, Fordyce, Tibone, 
Conception and 
Maternal 
Nursing 72 
BIRTH CONTROL 
Jacobius, Bendix, and Roche, when the mother nursed her child 
the menses did not return until some time after the beginning of 
the fourth month following labor in over three out of four cases, 
and not until from the beginning of the seventh month to a year 
or more in nearly two out of three cases.74 
Moreover, in the first place, account has to be taken of the 
fact that the menses are less apt to return at an early date when 
the child is entirely breast-fed than when it is only partly breast- 
fed.75 Secondly, where menstruation begins during lactation, it 
is quite commonly very irregular—in about one-half to three- 
fourths of the cases, if we may generalize from the observations 
made independently by Remfry and Tibone.76 Thirdly, accord- 
ing to independent observations made by Heil, Fordyce, Tibone, 
and Jacob, in later lactations, particularly from the third on, 
amenorrhea is “decidedly commoner” than in first and second 
lactations—about twice as common in later lactations, according 
to Heil’s and Tibone’s observations.77 
Where, on the other hand, the mother does not nurse her in- 
fant, the menses return ordinarily about the sixth week after 
labor. Mayer, for instance, found that among his more than 
five hundred cases of non-nursing mothers, menstruation re- 
turned in 76% of them by the end of the sixth week and in 95% 
of them by the end of the third month.78 
Ovulation, which must precede conception, may occur with- 
out menstruation, but conception is unusual during amenorrhea. 
As Graves expresses it: “Lactating women during the amenor- 
rheic period do not often conceive.” Fordyce concludes from 
his own studies that “conception is rare within the first six 
months of lactation and uncommon before the eighth month.”79 
For the sake of clearness we may summarize the foregoing 
paragraphs on menstruation, ovulation, and conception in a few 
words. Evidently nature intended that ovulation and concep- 
tion should not occur during lactation. Where the mother 
nurses her child regularly without any supplementary feedings 
of artificial food, ovulation and conception do not occur in the ECONOMIC AND HEALTH MOTIVES 
73 
great majority of cases. Where ovulation and conception do 
occur, obstetricians feel that in most cases the nursing has not 
been carried out completely. 
The bearing of the foregoing data upon the birth control 
problem is obvious. Ordinarily an infant does best if weaning 
is completed about the end of the ninth or tenth month. If the 
mother does not nurse her own child, conception becomes pos- 
sible and may occur within a comparatively short time after la- 
bor. If, however, she does nurse her own child for the normal 
six to nine months period, conception is very much less apt to 
occur until after the weaning period is ended. The nine months 
of gestation and the nine months of lactation added bring spac- 
ing up to about a year and a half between conceptions, and usu- 
ally conception does not take place until some months after 
weaning. Thus where the mother nurses her infant a spacing 
of at least two years between births is more common. 
“If the woman’s object in avoiding lactation is a selfish one, 
e. g., to give herself the opportunity of being away from her 
child for long periods of time, or to preserve her figure, she will 
almost always show further evidence of her selfishness by artifi- 
cially avoiding another conception at the early date, which ab- 
sence of lactation would otherwise render probable.’’80 Dr. 
Routh is here apparently referring to the well-to-do English 
classes and is perhaps making too sweeping a generalization, but 
there is, no doubt, enough of factual basis to his statement to 
drive home the close interrelation between the avoidance of lac- 
tation and the avoidance of parenthood. Were maternal nurs- 
ing viewed, as it unquestionably should be on physiological and 
moral grounds, in the light of an ethical obligation, we should 
have a much less acute problem to face in the matter of artificial 
birth control, and far fewer mothers would be in the dilemma of 
birth restriction, or too frequent child-bearing. As matters 
stand, when obstetricians have difficulty in getting perfectly 
healthy mothers of the well-to-do classes to nurse their children 
even for a few weeks, the evasion of the obvious obligation of 74 
BIRTH CONTROL 
maternal nursing leads in numberless cases to the evasion of 
further parenthood itself. 
It has been made evident, we hope, that while fidelity on the 
part of the mother to her own child’s deepest interests cries out 
for maternal nursing on a far wider scale than is practised to- 
day among both the poorer and the wealthier classes in our mod- 
ern civilization, nevertheless the loyal and unselfish acceptance 
of this task by all mothers in a position to accept it would not 
entirely solve the problem of spacing. 
There would still remain exceptional 
cases, where further child-bearing, for a 
time at least, might be gravely prejudicial 
to the life or health of an individual mother. Such cases cer- 
tainly occur at present, and their treatment, whether from an 
ethical or a medical standpoint, calls for the most sympathetic 
and humane consideration. 
Regarding the individual case, it is quite true that modern 
obstetrical knowledge and prenatal and natal technique have 
greatly cut down the sufferings and hazards of child birth. It 
is quite true also that some physicians are too ready to advise 
postponement of further conception on trivial grounds, and that 
the dangers forecasted often do not actually materialize. Never- 
theless there are very real individual cases when further con- 
ception may mean death or grave invalidism for the mother. 
What can be done in such a case? 
There is only one possible solution, whether we consider the 
question from the physical or the ethical standpoint, and that is 
the solution of marital continence. If a 
man’s wife and the mother of his children 
is in danger from further child-bearing, 
be such danger temporary or not, there is 
but one means that will guarantee and assure protection of her 
health and life, and that means is continence. There is no in- 
fallible method of artificial birth restriction as usually under- 
stood, and intelligent birth control advocates themselves know 
The Individual 
Case 
Marital 
Continence ECONOMIC AND HEALTH MOTIVES 
75 
this perfectly well. The following, for instance, is from a con- 
vinced contraceptionist, Dr. Edith Hooker: the currently used 
contraceptive methods “are all more or less offensive to persons 
of refined disposition and are by no means certain to achieve 
their objective. Many persons who have consistently practiced 
birth control by one or another of these methods have produced 
large families without the slightest desire or intention.” And, 
incidentally, she adds: “Moreover, after the children have been 
born, their parents have in an astonishing number of instances 
rejoiced at the new members of their household and have found 
that they could support additional offspring contrary to their ex- 
pectation.” 81 
To call continence in such cases asceticism is simply to mis- 
use the English language. The Century Dictionary, for exam- 
ple, defines “ascetic” as “practising special acts of self-denial as 
a religious exercise; seeking holiness through self-mortification; 
hence, rigidly abstinent and self-restrained as to appetites and 
passions.” This is about the ordinary acceptation of the term 
ascetic or asceticism. What identity there is between the seek- 
ing of holiness through rigid self-mortification and the safe- 
guarding of a beloved wife’s and mother’s health and life by the 
only means that can assuredly safeguard it, may be left to those 
who so misuse the term to make out. 
That continence in married life is easy, no one but a fool 
would hold. But no one except a fool ever held that living up 
to lofty, unselfish ideals of life is easy. The greatest Teacher 
and Exemplar of such lofty ideals of life said very distinctly 
that the way thereto is narrow and steep and thorny. Con- 
tinence, when continence is the only means by which a man can 
protect the life and health of his wife and the mother of his 
children, may call for all the manhood in him. It calls for no 
asceticism. 
Such continence is not easy. It is possible. And it is ac- 
tually practised far more than is often imagined. To look upon 
sex hunger as an overmastering impulse which will brook no 76 
BIRTH CONTROL 
control within the marital bond is to justify prostitution and in- 
fidelity. At certain times, as within the weeks immediately fol- 
lowing childbirth, the carrying out of marital relations would be 
brutal cruelty. Would we care to plead in defence of the un- 
principled wretch who is disloyal to his wife during her very 
confinement? What, too, of the cases and circumstances where 
a wife is ill or an invalid over long periods, or where husband 
and wife are separated for months at a time? Are commercial 
travelers and army and navy men by the very fact of their sep- 
aration from their wives unfaithful? What, too, of recently 
bereaved widows and widowers ? 
That some psychical harm many result to the super-sexed 
under such conditions of self-control is just possible, if there be 
an underlying pathological emotional condition. The Freudian 
evidence may seem to point in this direction. That such harm 
will result, if the individual be otherwise stable emotionally, re- 
mains yet to be proven. We have yet to get a shred of scientific 
evidence that sex self-control is hurtful under ordinary condi- 
tions, and it is the general consensus of the informed medical 
profession that continence is not hurtful.82 Moreover, even 
were it proven that in exceptional but normally stable individuals 
some psychic harm might result from such self-control, we 
should have to say that here, as often in ethical matters, the indi- 
vidual interest has to give way to the broader interests of the 
many. And this brings us to our concluding section and a brief 
consideration of what we may call the wedge principle in ethics. CHAPTER IX 
Conclusion 
In many matters that concern morality and human welfare, 
the acquiescence in and approval of exceptions to a general 
ethical or social standard of conduct is a first break in the dam. 
Through such a break, small though it be 
at first, the devastating floods of mischief 
pour in progressively increasing volume 
There are, no doubt, exceptional cases 
where, for instance, the vendetta, or lynch 
law, or polygamy, or infanticide, or outright slander, or delib- 
erate betrayal of confidence might promote individual or collec- 
tive welfare, even under civilized conditions. Admit, however, 
such exceptions as ethical, and you open up a first fissure in the 
solid masonry that holds back the impounded waters, the first 
small fissure that widens and widens until the destroying flood 
sweeps down the valleys below. 
Such wedge action, as we may call it, tends to be operative 
particularly where, on the one hand, human interests and hun- 
gers of high driving power urge for satisfaction, and where, on 
the other hand, there prevails no impartial moral standard or 
unbiased tribunal to determine whether, in view of deeper and 
broader considerations of human welfare, the more egoistic in- 
terests and hungers should be released and satisfied or else in- 
hibited and controlled. The actual decision and course of ac- 
tion tends to be along lines suggested by the egoistic interests 
and cravings themselves rather than along lines demanded by 
altruistic ethics. The individual human animal is a proverbially 
poor judge in his own cause.83 
Perhaps in no field of human activity is the operation of this 
Wedge 
Principle in 
Ethics 78 
BIRTH CONTROL 
wedge action more obvious than in the race-preservative field of 
sex and parenthood, of home and family life. Divorce, for ex- 
ample, was rare in early Greece and Rome. But once admitted 
as under certain conditions ethical, it spread apace among the 
upper and middle classes until it split in twain the domestic life 
of classic civilization. We witness around us to-day the same 
divorce wedge driving deeper and ever deeper into our own 
modern family life. The divorce rate is progressively increas- 
ing with a deadly consistency in nearly every occidental nation 
into which divorce has been introduced.84 It has progressively 
increased in our own United States until in some sections one 
out of every two or three marriages ends in dissolution by 
divorce. Nor have we any good reason to expect that the wedge 
will not penetrate still deeper in the coming years. 
The same sinister wedge action is unmistakably apparent in 
the matter of artificial birth control. The consistently progres- 
sive decline in fertility and the birth rate among those sections of 
our modern western culture that have adopted the theory and 
practice of contraception is a matter of common knowledge and 
has been dealt with in the preceding chapters. Masterful in- 
terests and cravings, unchecked by uncompromising standards of 
conduct or by competent impartial tribunals, have already 
brought about gravely anti-social and dysgenic results that are 
deplored even by most thinking contraceptionists themselves. 
To admit contraception as under some circumstances ethical 
and at the same time to counsel “moderation” and adequate ful- 
fillment of responsibilities is worse than playing with fire. It is 
starting a conflagration. The evidence jumps at us from every 
fence corner. Such a program might conceivably work out in 
practice with some other race on some other planet. But we 
are concerned with our own race on this our own planet, and no 
sociological fact rests on a firmer observational and statistical 
basis than the fact that practically and in reality the groups that 
admit and practice contraception, for whatsoever reason and in 
whatsoever exceptional situations, do not practice it in “modera- CONCLUSION 
79 
tion,” nor have we a single workable suggestion that offers a 
ghost of a hope that we can ever get them to practice it in “mod- 
eration.” The wedge, once allowed entrance, pierces ever 
deeper and deeper.85 
The Catholic position that holds artificial birth control as ad- 
mitting no exception does unquestionably call at times for self- 
mastery of a high order, but, on the other hand, it is the one po- 
sition that can adequately and in practice safeguard individual 
and collective welfare. It may and does involve in exceptional 
cases an unselfishness that borders upon the heroic, but, if 
through exceptions the wedge be permitted entrance at all, in 
the end the very foundations of the home will be split asunder. 
It may and does involve sometimes real sacrifice on the part of 
the individual, but the wellbeing and higher interests of the 
many are thereby protected. It may and does involve in certain 
instances some immediate hardship, but in the long run human 
welfare is incalculably promoted.86 
As in the matter of the indissolubility of the marital tie, so, 
too, in this matter of the decency of the marital relation, the 
Catholic Church is uncompromisingly championing an unpopular 
cause. She is championing the cause out of a deep sense of 
loyalty to the best and highest human welfare. She will con- 
tinue to champion it uncompromisingly regardless of conse- 
quences to herself. 
In so doing she is actuated by no motives of a trivial or super- 
ficial nature. Most of the literature on contraception both pro 
and con shows little or no appreciation of the deeper issues at 
stake. The Catholic Church is concerned for the maintenance 
in wholesome integrity of the race-preservative sphere because it 
is one of the most basic if not the most basic thing in human 
life and society. Her intimate and agelong experience has given 
her a keen realization of the crucial position that the sex and 
parental impulses hold in human life, and that the home and the 
family hold in human society. Recent advances in the psycho- 
logical, psychiatrical, and social fields are corroborating in un- 80 
BIRTH CONTROL 
expected ways this traditional Catholic view, for they are shed- 
ding new and brilliant light upon the paramount importance and 
wide-pervading influence of the sex and parental impulses in 
making or marring human character, and of home and family 
life in building or blasting human society. 
Most non-Catholics and some Catholics themselves seem to 
labor under the impression that the Catholic position on birth 
control is grounded on purely “theolog- 
ical” bases, whatever be meant by that. 
In reality, the Catholic position is a corol- 
lary of the religious and moral principle 
common to many or most of the religions 
and philosophies of humanity, the principle of love of neighbor, 
of concern for human welfare, both individual and collective. 
The misunderstanding occurs because the corollary, like many 
other ethical corollaries, especially in the sex sphere, is not so 
obvious to the casual observer. The corollary is a long circuit 
conclusion from the premise of neighborly love rather than a 
short circuit conclusion. 
The Catholic position on birth control no doubt articulates 
with and is organically linked up to Catholic faith and theology 
—but in a manner totally different from that commonly sup- 
posed. We may do well to outline this articulation briefly. The 
outline will also serve as a partial summary of the long and com- 
plicated discussion which has formed the body of the present 
study. 
God is our Father. He loves us. He is concerned for our 
temporal as well as for our eternal welfare. His moral law is 
no arbitrary set of rules. It is the prod- 
uct of His love for us. It is a code that 
guides man’s relations to his Father in 
heaven and to his brethren on earth. So 
far as our brethren on earth are con- 
cerned, the moral law furthers human welfare by protecting hu- 
man rights and by fulfilling human needs. God is coerced by 
Birth Control 
and Catholic 
Theology 
a. God’s Concern 
For Human 
Welfare CONCLUSION 
81 
His very concern for our earthly welfare to insist without 
favoritism upon universal democratic fidelity to His moral law. 
Birth control hurts human welfare most obviously by leading 
to underpopulation and extinction where it is practised. But it 
hurts human welfare perhaps even more profoundly in subtler 
and less obvious ways. In its essential tendencies, it eliminates 
from marital life the very elements that throw about that life 
the mantle of the sacred and the reverent. In the long run, it 
undermines higher love itself. It thus tends to break down the 
loftier reverence and love between husband and wife. It iso- 
lates physical sex gratification from its normal unselfish accom- 
paniments and correctives, centers attention upon the self-re- 
garding phases of sex, and helps to enthrone selfishness and 
flabbiness at the very heart of character. It reduces the marital 
relation to a level not superior to or different from the level of 
solitary vice and extra-marital indulgence. It robs the child of 
the natural education that comes from growing up as one of 
many equals in a normally-sized family. In a word, birth con- 
trol tends to destroy the finer flower of human character, the 
higher functions of family life, the loftier sentiments of human 
mating, and the inner sanctities of the home. 
God, as our Father, is also our divine Educator. Our life 
here is a living project in which we grow and develop in contact 
with our fellowmen by practising unselfish 
loyalty to them in their rights and needs. 
The moral history of mankind is the rec- 
ord of this ancient and perennial divine 
education of humanity in unselfish love. 
Schools are only a small fraction of the human educational sys- 
tem. All life is a school, and it is in this divinely planned school 
of life that our higher selves are “drawn out” and expanded and 
developed towards the ideal of unselfish living that is the core 
of the Christian concept of life. 
In this divinely planned educational project, no element holds 
a more central place than the element of sex and parenthood. 
b. God’s Plan for 
Human Moral 
Education 82 
BIRTH CONTROL 
The race-preservative impulses in our lives are, with the excep- 
tion of the physical sex drive, primarily unselfish and other- 
regarding, as the self-preservative impulses are primarily selfish 
and self-regarding. It is out of the higher elements of love and 
parental devotion within the race-preservative complex that 
spring most if not nearly all of the natural unselfish trends and 
tendencies and driving forces in our lives. 
Parental love, paternal and maternal devotion and sacrifice, 
marital love, fraternal love, and probably neighborly love itself, 
have their natural origin in and get their natural driving power 
from the higher elements in the race-preservative instinct and 
impulses.87 Our education and development in loving our 
neighbor as ourselves is largely and probably fundamentally the 
“drawing out” and expansion and sanctification of inborn and 
inherited unselfish impulses and forces arising from and closely 
associated with the higher elements of love and parental driving 
powers in our nature. 
Physical sex gratification is self-regarding. Love and the 
parental impulses are other-regarding. God’s educational strat- 
egy in our regard consists, in large measure and probably fun- 
damentally, in utilizing our more selfish physical sex-trends to 
urge us into the task of home-building and child-rearing, the 
task that awakens and calls out and stimulates into activity the 
great latent, unselfish love-trends in our nature. Home-build- 
ing and child-rearing call forth unselfish devotion of mate to 
mate and of parents to offspring throughout the greater ex- 
panse of adult life. The responsibilities and sacrifices of child- 
rearing are the factors in the schooling of character that urge 
into action the sleeping courage and hardihood and robustness 
that else may readily remain asleep or atrophy. These respon- 
sibilities and sacrifices urge into action and sustain at high ten- 
sion the unselfish love for others that gives to humanity its 
radiant tinge of the divine.88 
Artificial birth control evades and undercuts this whole pro- 
ject. Those who practise contraception do indeed gratify selfish CONCLUSION 
83 
physical sex desires, but while so doing evade child-bearing and 
child-rearing, the very element in the project that educates and 
develops hardihood and unselfishness. If we may speak of the 
practice in theological language, we may say that it sets at 
naught and frustrates and eludes a fundamental and perhaps the 
fundamental divine plan for our higher moral education, for our 
development and growth in unselfish love. 
And yet, even this seeming outwitting of Nature is a short- 
lived victory. Nature has reserve strategies by which she out- 
manoeuvers us in our puny and short-sighted evasions of her 
laws. Nature speaks to us as a rule in the persuasive words of 
natural wisdom. But nature speaks when 
she must in language less soft and gentle. 
Against those who will not hearken to the 
laws of life, she urges one last argument. 
It is decisive, final, ruthless, inexorable. It is not an argument 
of words or of ideas. It is an argument of fact. It is the 
argument of death. Here are two statements of it, the one 
biological, the other ethical. 
“Unfortunately this [race suicide] is not a case of mere dif- 
ference of opinion between men; it is a case of antagonism be- 
tween men and nature. If a race hypnotize itself into thinking 
that its views about race suicide are superior to nature’s views, 
it may make its own end a little less painful; but it will not 
postpone that end for a single minute. The contest is to the 
strong, and although numbers are not the most important ele- 
ment in strength, it is very certain that a race made up of fam- 
ilies containing one child each will not be the survivor in the 
struggle for existence.” 89 
“It might be said that the faithful followers of the higher 
Ethics cannot convince their opponents; they can only breed 
them out! Thus will they fulfil the word of the Ethical 
Teacher: ‘The meek shall possess the land.’ ” 90 
One recent moderate advocate of birth control, while frankly 
recognizing the breeding-out consequences of contraception, 
The Iron Law 
of Survival 84 
BIRTH CONTROL 
strikes a somewhat more hopeful note. “Birth control will ul- 
timately have a selective effect on the pop- 
ulation in that the selfish and unpatriotic 
will have a better opportunity to eliminate 
themselves and leave the world to more 
normal and wholesome stocks.” 91 If so, some strange possibil- 
ities are suggested. 
The vast Catholic multitudes, in holding out from high mo- 
tives of conscience against the easier way of birth control, are 
being forced regretfully into a contest for survival with the 
groups who practise contraception. Will the Catholic multi- 
tudes survive in the contest, as more than one recent writer is 
intimating? 92 And if they survive, will it be because they will 
have shown themselves less “selfish and unpatriotic,” “more nor- 
mal and wholesome,” and hence morally fitter to survive ? 
It all reminds us vaguely of one of the most pregnant pas- 
sages in modern literature: “If we do revive and pursue the 
pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we shall end 
—where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in 
destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity.” 93 
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1923, xiv, 51-60, 139-144. 
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Knibbs, G. H., (b) “The Problems of Population, Food Supply and 
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Yule, G. U., The Fall of the Birth-Rate, Cambridge. 1920. 92 
BIRTH CONTROL 
NOTES AND REFERENCES 
1 For fuller treatment, see Cooper, a. 
2 On Catholic teaching regarding mid-menstrual abstinence, see Ver- 
meersch, 261; Sutherland, 153; Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 1st Report, 391. On 
the disputed physiological data, see F. II. A. Marshall, 132-3; Barrett, 39; 
Vermeersch, 9-10; Graves, 59-60; Child Care and Child Welfare, 22—espe- 
cially Marshall, Graves, and Barrett. 
3 For fuller data on the Catholic position regarding contraceptive methods, 
see Ryan, d, 684-7; Ryan, e, 228; Vermeersch, 217, 261, 266-78. On Catholic 
view regarding “avalanche of babies,” see Jordan, 45-7. 
4 Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 1st Rpt., 69. Cf. Foerster, 99. The use of the 
adjective “instinctive” in the quotation is in the present state of our psy- 
chological and sociological knowledge inexact or at least open to exception. 
Such repugnances may perhaps better be called social intuitions. 
5 For further data, see East and Jones, 244; Babcock and Clausen, 553, 
581-2. 
e St. Thomas, 2a 2a;, Q. 154, art. 9; Freud, 176-7, 290ss. 
7 See, for instance, Thomson, 8; Graves, 113-4; Sutherland, 83-7; Mar- 
chant, 125-6; Lorand, pt. i, ch. x, and pt. ii, ch. vii; Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 
2d Rpt., 245-6. 
8 Cf. Galloway, 15-16. 
9 Shaw cited by Sutherland, 93; Kelly, 380; St. Augustine, cap. xv. 
10 Woods and Kennedy, 281-2. 
11 Our best treatments of the parental impulses are McDougall, 68-84, in 
ch. iii; Coe, 123-29. 
12 Newsholme, 59-60. 
13 The best statements to the writer’s knowledge of the psychological and 
educational aspects of contraception are those of Ryan, c, 332-5; d, 690-2; e, 
235; f, 300; and of Foerster, ch. vii. Cf. also Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 2d 
Rpt., p. 1, and Coe, 216. 
14 Cf. Westermarck, iii, 366-7, for summary of evidence. 
is Willcox, b, 646. 
16 Cf. Devas, 199, on India, and Durand, b, on Eastern Europe. 
17 Hoffman, 36-7; Pearl, a, 641-4. For source data, cf. Statistical Annuals 
of International Institute of Agriculture and Yearbooks of U. S. Dept, of 
Agriculture. 
18 Smith, 566. 
19 In addition to sources to be cited in following pages, cf. Austin, 368; 
Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 1st Rpt., 42; Dublin, b, 11. 
20 Taylor, 400; Pearl and Reed, 285-6. Cf. Baker, 4-5. 
21 East, b, 555-7. 
22 Baker and Strong; Baker, 15. 
23 Baker, 7-8, 14-5, 24. 
24 Baker, 4-5. 
25 Baker, 24-5; Knibbs, b, 493-4. Cf. certain restrictions noted by Durand, 
a, 130-9. NOTES AND REFERENCES 
93 
26 See especially Smith, ch. xxv-xxvi and passim. On sea resources, cf. 
Martin; and East, a. 619, with East, c, 219. 
27 Leroy-Beaulieu, 60, 62; A. Marshall, 180, note; Knibbs, b, 494-5; East, 
c, 217; Pearl, b, 214; Taylor, 402. 
28 Knibbs, b, 485-6. East’s estimate (c, 216) is an average annual in- 
crease of 0.7% during last century, and a current increase of 0.9%. 
29 Knibbs, b, 485. 
30 Leroy-Beaulieu, 1-2; Bossiter, 562-3; Yule, 35. 
31 Carr-Saunders, 309, and ch. vii-xi. Carr-Saunders’ work is perhaps 
our best historical and prehistorical study of population. 
32 A. Marshall, 182-7; Carr-Saunders, 264-6, 278-85. 
33 For summary of evidence, see Newsholme, ch. iv, 29-35. Yule’s re- 
cent theory to the contrary (32-7) does not seem very convincing. See also 
the evidence of contraception in references under note No. 64. 
34 Koriisi, 792-800; Dunlop, 265-6; Lewis, 29-32, 44; Knibbs, b, 488-9; 
Powys, 256-76. Duncan’s earlier data on Scotland can be dispensed with in 
view of Lewis’ and Dunlop’s studies. 
35 Cf. the data on chastity in Westermarck, i, ch. iv, 126-59, with any 
good treatise on ethnology. For some further data on primitive chastity, see 
Father W. Schmidt’s Die Stellung der Pygmaenvoelker, Stuttgart, 1910, 155-65. 
36 See Westermarck, i, 160-5. 
37 Sprague, a, 158-9; Dublin, a, 889, and b, 7; Whetham, a, 122-3, and b, 
59; Thompson, b, 268. Cf. also National Birth-Rate Comm., 1st Rpt., 328. 
38 Our original sources of evidence are very numerous. For summary 
reviews of the evidence, see, for instance, Popenoe and Johnson, 259-69; 
Sprague, a, 160-1; Nearing, art.; Hunt, 53-5; Cattell, 260-1. See also Crum, 
216-9; Cattell, 250; Phillips, 566; Johnson and Stutzmann, 250; Brown, 
Greenwood, Wood, 199-203; Bureau, 184-5; Dauchez, 626-30 (these last two 
particularly for the French conditions). The writer does not mean to im- 
ply that the low birth rates observed and reviewed by the foregoing author- 
ities are due entirely to voluntary birth restriction. Other factors are also 
undoubtedly at work, but the evidence adduced by Newsholme, 29-35, and 
others (cf. Popenoe and Johnson, 269-70), and the evidence that comes to us 
from questionnaire studies of the subject (see references under note No. 64) 
can leave little doubt that the declining fertility of the educated and well- 
to-do classes is in the main the result of voluntary restriction, and more 
commonly voluntary restriction by contraceptive measures. 
39 On the differential birth rate among various classes and sections, see 
for United States, Thompson, c, 97-101 and passim; Hill, art.; Crum, 216; 
Popenoe and Johnson, 138-9; for England, see Yule, 31; for France, see 
March, art.; for general European data, see summary in Popenoe and John- 
son, 140-3. 
40 Willcox, a, 11-2. 
41 Schrott-Fiechtl; Gerrard, 28-9. Cf. Slater, 268-71; Ryan, d, reprint, 
17-22. 
42 Todd, 266. Compare Guyer, 308. For a review of the persistent but 
futile efforts to increase the birth rate of the Roman citizenry under the Em- 
pire, see Stangeland, 32-9. 
43 Bell, b. 
44 Cf. Crum. 220-1. ' 
45 Smith, 527. 
46 See, for instance, Cannan, b, 40-71 (cf. Cannan, a, 123-82); Devas, 58- 
64. Cf. short statement in Austin, 368. It is well recognized, of course, that 94 
BIRTH CONTROL 
a certain density of population is necessary for the development of higher 
civilization. Without such density, it is difficult if not impossible to build 
up the surplus wealth which is the material basis of civilization. To deter- 
mine just what density is necessary is not an easy task. In fact, the whole 
question of what constitutes the optimum population is involved by numer- 
ous complexities and hypotheses. 
47 See short treatments of this complex subject in Carr-Saunders, 301-7, 
313, and Leroy-Beaulieu, 292-4. 
48 Mitchell, King, et al., 68, 147. On the data of Mitchell for 1918, the 
Douglases, pp. 89-93, have calculated incomes for 1921. Cf. also Soule, a, 
306. 
49 Gilchrist, 364-6; Hoyt, 650-1. Hoyt’s estimates of surplus income are 
based on data in Mitchell, King, 134-6. 
so Ogburn, 135; Manly, 19; Soule, b, 131-3. 
51 Manly, whole pamphlet; Child Care and Child Welfare, 304-5; Ogburn, 
123-8; Douglas, 49-55. For review of all evidence on women’s wages, see D. 
C. Minimum Wage Cases, Brief for Appellants, ii, 687-1022, and short sum- 
mary of some of evidence in Cooper, b, 43-5. 
52 On causes of poverty, see, for example, Glllin, 50-119; Kerby, 10-34; or 
short summary by Ryan, b. 
53 A summary of the conclusions of the Hoover committee is given in 
Gadsby, esp. pp. 13-4. 
54 Cf. Popenoe and Johnson, 276; Thompson, a, 164, and especially Ryan, 
e, 180-216, essay on False and True Welfare. 
55 See Gide and Rist, 134-6; Ingram, 118-9; O’Hara, 294-5; Devas, 198-200; 
Ryan, a, 279. 
56 Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 2d Rpt., p. li. 
57 Tables in Woodbury, b, 2, 23. On Sweden and New South Wales, see 
Woodbury, b, 2, 23, and Powys, 277, 281-4; on Connaught, Nat. Birth-Rate 
Comm., 2d Rpt., Ixxxix; on French departments, Sutherland, 41-2. Cf. 
Popenoe and Johnson, 272. “The correspondence between low birth rates 
and low infant death rates is by no means a close one,” Woodbury, b, 24. 
58 Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 2d Rpt., Ixxxix. 
59 Child Care and Child Welfare, 16-19; Hibbs, b, 71, 75; Nat. Birth-Rate 
Comm., 2d Rpt., 377. Cf. Willcox, b, 646, on health as purchasable. As an 
excellent concrete study of the factors responsible for high infant mortality 
rates and of practical measures for reducing these rates, see Woodbury, b. 
eo Hibbs, a, 629-33, for summary of greater part of evidence to date. 
ei Bell, a, 47; Cattell, 374-5. 
62 Hibbs, a, 631, 633. 
63 The point will be treated more in detail infra. Cf., meanwhile, Pope- 
noe and Johnson, 272-3; Powys, 277; Westergaard, 268-71; Woodbury, a, 47. 
64 On motives as stated in answers to questionnaires, see Davis, 175; Nat. 
Birth-Rate Comm., 1st Rpt., 323, 330-1; Brown, Greenwood, 199-203. On 
more general and fuller studies of motives, see especially Thompson, c, 118- 
39; b, 154-65, 258-64; Jordan, 341-55; Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 2d Rpt., 394-6. 
Cf. Hourwich, 226. 
65 Leroy-Beaulieu, 403, 411. 
66 Newsholme, 39-40; Boas, 477-8; Crum, 221. 
67 Jones, 207; Bell, a, 37; Cattell, 370. 
68 Powys, 239-40, 244, 247. 
69 Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 2d Rpt., xciii, 284. NOTES AND REFERENCES 
95 
70 Cf. Westergaard, 366-71; Hibbs, a, 637-41; Woodbury, a, 43-7; Ewart, 
a, 151; b, 211-3. 
71 Child Care and Child Welfare, 72; Woodbury, a, 38-9; McClanahan, art. 
72 DeLee, 176, 405; “Science,” Jan. 12, 1923, Ivii, p. ix; Nat. Birth-Rate 
Comm., 2d Rpt., xci-xciii, 286, 376-7; McClanahan, 660. 
73 Graves, 543, 560, 56. 
74 A careful tabulation of the results of their observations of 3,204 cases 
gives us the following averages. Total amenorrhea persisted throughout the 
whole of the nursing period in 48.9% of all cases. Nursing mothers were 
amenorrheic until after the end of the third month after childbirth in 76.6% 
of the 2,293 cases in which information was obtained, and were amenorrheic 
until from the end of the sixth month to a year or more in 62.3% of the 
1,262 cases in which information was obtained. 
The total record and percentage for the 3,204 cases is based on Mayer, 
137-8; Remfry, 24; Essen-Moller, 176; Heil, 344; Fordyce, 221; Tibone, 130: 
Bendix (cited by Heil, 343); Roche (cited by Tibone, 130). The percentage 
for the 2,293 cases is derived from the data given by Remfry, Bendix, 
Essen-Moller, Tibone, Mayer, Jacobius, and Fordyce; that for the 1,262 cases 
from Essen-Moller, Tibone, Mayer, Fordyce, and Jacobius. In computing 
the last two of the three percentages, proportionate allowance was made 
for the fact that in a stated number of their own cases, Mayer and Essen- 
Moller knew that the lactating mother had menstruated, but did not know 
the exact date when the menses first returned. Had such allowance not 
been made in the computation, the percentages would have been 78.2% 
and 66.6% instead of 76.6% and 62.3% as in the preceding paragraph. 
Some data of a non-statistical nature bearing on the relation of lacta- 
tion to menstruation may be found in Crossen, 827, 830; Graves, 571; F. H. 
A. Marshall, 69, 600; Van Blarcom, 135; West, 31-2; Howell, 927; Child Care 
and Child Welfare, 67. Crossen, for instance, sums up the question as fol- 
lows, p. 838: “As a rule, a woman does not menstruate while nursing a 
baby. There are, however, many exceptions to this rule, especially after 
the first six months. Quite frequently a patient, while nursing her child, 
will begin to menstruate within five or six months after labor and occa- 
sionally within two or three months. This happens most frequently in 
those cases in which the mother has only enough milk to partly nourish 
the baby.” 
75 Crossen, 838. 
76 Remfry, 24; Tibone, 130. 
77 Heil, 346, and citing Jacob, 344; Fordyce, 222-3; Tibone, 131, and 
citing Jacob, ibid. Essen-Moller did not And evidence of the fact in his 
own cases, 177. 
78 Mayer, 138; Remfry, 26. 
79 Graves, 571, 59-60; Fordyce, 223; DeLee, 39; Howell, 930; Child Care 
and Child Welfare, 27; Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 2d Rpt., 287; F. H. A. Mar- 
shall, 638, 132-3. Remfry (26) drew from his own observations the conclu- 
sion that the chances of conception are only one-tenth as great among nurs- 
ing mothers who are amenorrheic as among nursing mothers who have 
begun to menstruate. 
80 Nat. Birth-Rate Comm., 2d Rpt., 285. 
81 Hooker, 95. 
82 Exner, 14; Vermeersch, 33-6; Bureau, 294-302. Cf. Bolduan, 40-2. 
83 Cf. Foerster, 52-6, on value of “forms”; Todd, 265-6, on optional 
polygamy. 
84 Westermarck, ill, 364. 96 
BIRTH CONTROL 
85 Some couples consider that after they have borne three or four chil- 
dren they have done their part. In reality, if all couples should adopt this 
practice, numerical racial decline would result, inasmuch as an average of 
about four children is required to keep numbers stationary, and many 
couples on account of age or supervening sterility cannot produce four chil- 
dren. Moreover, were such a practice given ethical sanction, we should 
leave a clear way open for the operation of the wedge principle just touched 
upon in the text. Finally, such a practice is open to practically all the 
anti-social consequences we have dealt with in the earlier chapters of this 
study, particularly in chapter three. 
86 Foerster, ch. vii, especially p. 105. 
87 McDougall, 68-84. 
88 Cooper, a, 462-3. 
89 Popenoe and Johnson, 256-7. 
so McNabb, 207. 
91 Sprague, b, 60. 
92 Popenoe and Johnson, 273; Booth, 154, 142, and passim; Ryan, c, 335. 
93 G. K. Chesterton, Heretics. N. Y. and London, 1909, 170. The whole 
chapter contains, beneath the author’s characteristic tomfoolery, an in- 
teresting evaluation of the ethics of “self-realization.”