Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics 1921 : American Museum of Natural History)
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

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

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    285/534 (page 269)
    CONTROL OF PARENTHOOD 269 of two responsible individuals. Society would indeed hestitate to disrupt such a family, and is it not possible that society would have much to lose by such disruption? 2. Shall absolute continence be imposed, if so, how, and with what results? 3. Shall parenthood be risked by a chance that amounts to negative compulsion? or 4. Shall there be made possible to the members of this union immunity from disgenic parenthood, through control of conception by information which we know exists today? These are the phases of the problem of birth control, as it relates to the individual family. But what of the field of social relationship at large? From the well-known Studies in Infant and Maternal Mortality by the Children's Bureau, the Report and Evidence of the National Birth-Rate Commission of Great Britian, the statistical publications of organizations conversant with nation and statewide problems of social pathology, and the case records of innumerable social service agencies of the country, we see something of the panorama of tragedy in society at large. Is it true that we have defective children doomed to defect from the moment of conception? Dependent and delinquent children and adults strongly predisposed to pathologic careers not by environment alone, but by congenital defect that becomes effective by heredity or transmission in one of the other possible channels? Children conceived of parents suffering from tuberculosis, psychopathic and neuropathic instabihty, some higher form of mental defect, or venereal disease, when we are more certain than uncertain that in many cases these defects are transmissible? Children that continue to be born against the judgment and the will of parents, only to augment the problem of relief and increase the number of persons already destined to the humiliation of dependency upon the patronage of others? And is it true that many of these children will pay for their intrusion the penalty of early labor? Is it true that women, many times mothers in the midst of squalor, are seeking the knowledge by which they may cease to burden themselves and society, and impair the race? That, upon being refused this knowledge, by those professions to whom they look for advice in other matters, they resort to such modes of self-help as only frenzied minds can conjure up? Is it true that entire neighborhoods of mothers succumb to horrible remedy because prevention is denied to them? And all this, in an age of the glori¬ fication of Motherhood, and the existence of knowledge,—we may be permitted to assume—sufficiently ethical, aesthetic and physically non- injurious to receive the approval of the most exacting classes of our society today!