Infant and maternal mortality in relation to size of family and rapidity of breeding : A study in human responsibility / [Clarice Margaret Burns].

  • Burns, C. Margaret (Clarice Margaret)
Date:
1942
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Infant and maternal mortality in relation to size of family and rapidity of breeding : A study in human responsibility / [Clarice Margaret Burns]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    256/264 (page 244)
    246 successful financier, may marry a woman of such a low grade of intelli¬ gence that no efficient employer would even consider offering her a post in his business. Similarly, the so-called protective instinct may lead an intelligent woman to a union with a man who could not earn a living except as an unskilled labourer. These matters are common knowledge, but it is difficult to prove that the progeny of such unions should be classed with the submerged tenth. One would need to compare the fitness for life of half-brothers, and there are not enough of them in high places for statistical comparison. These are authoritative statements. They can be checked and tested. You may not agree with them, but that does not invalidate them. If you do agree, what is to be done about putting this part of our national house in order ? Some people can be induced to act by carefully reasoned arguments, others by fear of approaching doom (but the doom must be appreciably near or they emulate Micawber), while many act only on sentimental grounds. 'Sir Auckland Geddes proceeded to affirm that in politics, in the affairs with which Governments have to deal, it is not accurate knowledge which matters, it is emotion concluding with an exhortation that we should let ourselves go on the great wave of emotion sweeping the nation towards the millennium which the Ministry of Reconstruction, unhampered by accurate knowledge, was preparing for us.' (Dean Inge—report of Galton L,ecture, 1919, in Outspoken Essays.) In the case histories of the problem families, (page 62) in the story of the wastage of potential citizens by early death or lack of health, and in the toll of motherhood, adequate grounds are given for an appeal to reason, to fear or to emotion for action to be taken now. In any sound scheme of social reconstruction, some method must be thought out (1) to enable those who desire children to have them at a safe age, either [a) by some form of family endowment to allow of early marriage and/or [Ъ] by making it possible for women who so wish, to continue part-time paid work after marriage and so re-arranging domestic work that it will be a job done by those who want to do it. This would give the women a sense of self-reliance and a real sense of citizenship, (2) to reduce the flotsam in future generations. This is the most difficult problem. It cannot be solved by doles or patchwork legislation but, after a sympathetic study of the causes of the evil, these causes could, in a large proportion of the victims of bad biological breeding, be removed by education. They are, in large part, not bad people, but just feckless and so require guidance and constant super¬ vision. In time, the defects could be bred out. The black spot cannot be bred out of a terrier's litter by merely giving the mother a good kennel. Meantime, one must try not so much to fit the people to their environment as to adapt the environment to fit the people.