ID# 1602:
"Birth Control and the Racial Future," by Frank H. Hankins, People (April 1931)
Date:
1931
Pages: (1|2|3|4|5)
Source:
Cold Spring Harbor, ,

&quote;Birth Control and the Racial Future,&quote; by Frank H. Hankins, People (April 1931)

PEOPLE 15 sex to an increased control over their physical and social destinies. This indicates the development of an ethics of humanism, involving the recasting of thought and popular mores on a vast scale. From this new viewpoint we see that unregulated fertility affects the health of thousands of mothers for whom one pregnancy follows another with excessive rapidity. If the physical resources of the mother are depleted, the previous child is inadequately nourished and the one on the way will start with the double handicap of reduced vitality and inefficient nurture. Under the stresses of modern life, especially in our great urban centers, family limitation is a necessity in the interest of both mother and child in a multitude of cases. Here the problem becomes primarily a medical problem and the line of advance is in the improvement of contraceptive technique. Such improvement is an essential feature of the preventive medicine of the future. Closely associated is the dreadful problem of hundreds of thousands of abortions from which thousands of women die annually. Once we have become fully inured to a humane ethics we shall doubtless legalize abortion and thus cast out another barbarous iniquity from the civilized code. I need not speak of the devastating effects of the fears of too numerous pregnancies on marital peace and mental poise. Logically there would seem to be the same necessity for effective contraception as a preventive of neuroses and psychoses that there is for physical debility or deficiency. And these latter cases are in total numerous. There are also cases of diseased or defective husbands. When all these aspects of the matter are once vividly comprehended, birth control is seen as a hard-working element in any sound program for social welfare or race betterment. The only fear that seems to have the least warrant is that the perfection and universalization of contraception will result in depopulation. That is a problem to be met when such a prospect becomes of some real significance for western nations. This much at least is clear: we dare not go on reproducing mainly from the lower classes. We cannot claim to have solved the problems of civilized living so long as we are under the necessity of maintaining a mass of poverty-stricken people in order that we may have births enough to outrun the deaths. We shall ultimately have to elevate the status of motherhood so that the educated and refined women of the community shall find in it full compensations for its sacrifices. If this cannot be done then perhaps our culture has gotten onto the wrong track altogether. [photo, mid page][photo credit]Underwood and Underwood [photo caption]They Won't Turn Back An outdoor class in biology at a girl's college. These young women won't return to the patriarchal conception of woman's destiny, Dr. Hankins holds. "Family limitation is . . . . a logical necessity, because it is an essential foundation for all that their standard of life leads them to hold dear." [end]

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