As I Please
"It is not fair to the public to treat all-important subjects in this slapdash way."
The April issue of Common Wealth devotes several paragraphs to the problem of the falling British birthrate. A good deal of what it says is true, but it also lets drop the following remarks:
The know-alls are quick to point to contraceptives, nutritional errors, infertility, selfishness, economic insecurity, etc., as basic causes of decline. But facts do not support them. In Nazi Germany, where contraceptives are illegal, the birthrate has reached a record low ebb, whereas in the Soviet Union, where there are no such restrictions, population is healthily on the up and up . . . . Reproduction, as the Peckham experiment has helped to prove, is stimulated in an environment marked by fellowship and cooperation . . . . Once meaning and purpose are restored to life, the wheels of production are kept humming, and life is again an adventure instead of just an endurance, we shall hear no more of the baby shortage.
It is not fair to the public to treat all-important subjects in this slapdash way. To begin with, you would gather from the passage quoted above that Hitler lowered the German birthrate. On the contrary, he raised it to levels unheard-of during the Weimar Republic. Before the war it was above replacement level, for the first time in many years. The catastrophic drop in the German birthrate began in 1942, and must have been partly caused by so many German males being away from home. Figures cannot be available yet, but the Russian birthrate must also certainly have dropped over the same period.
You would also gather that the high Russian birthrate dates from the Revolution. But it was also high in Czarist times. Nor is there any mention of the countries where the birthrate is highest of all, that is, India, China, and (only a little way behind) Japan. Would it be accurate to say, for instance, that a South Indian peasant’s life is ‘an adventure instead of just an endurance”?
The one thing that can be said with almost complete certainty on this subject is that a high birthrate goes with a low standard of living, and vice versa. There are few if any real exceptions to this. Otherwise the question is exceedingly complex. It is, all the same, vitally important to learn as much about it as we can, because there will be a calamitous drop in our own population unless the present trend is reversed within ten or, at most, twenty years. One ought not to assume, as some people do, that this is impossible, for such changes of trend have often happened before. The experts are proving now that our population will be only a few millions by the end of this century, but they were also proving in 1870 that by 1940 it would be 100 millions. To reach replacement level again, our birthrate would not have to take such a sensational upward turns as, for instance, the Turkish birthrate did after Mustapha Kemal took over. But the first necessity is to find out why populations rise and fall, and it is just as unscientific to assume that a high birthrate is a byproduct of Socialism as to swallow everything that is said on the subject by childless Roman Catholic priests.
This is an extract from a longer piece first published in Tribune, 14th April 1944.