36 HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN 



congress in London last year, although a medical man accustomed to look- 

 ing such matters in the face, was so shocked by what he heard and saw that 

 he retired on the second day, and has since written a very able paper against 

 birth control as now practiced. While not materially affecting the more 

 ignorant and less desirable classes, he found birth control diminishing births 

 among superior individuals and families. Let us therefore consider birth 

 control as one of the more or less radical departures from fundamental 

 principles of our present social structure not only in the religious but in the 

 ethical and moral fields. More or less sincere advocates of contraception 

 claim that it is one of the greatest social discoveries ever made by man, an 

 ideal method of controlling over-population, a promising agency of social 

 regeneration, and that it goes further than any previous social measure in 

 the emancipation of womankind. 1 



Directly bearing upon the purposes of the present Eugenics Congress is 

 the claim that contraception is wholly eugenic. A considerable section of 

 the public has thereby been persuaded that contraception and eugenics are 

 identical and that in general birth control has a eugenic endorsement. The 

 fact that the subject of birth control was not admitted to the two previous 

 International Congresses on the ground that it had not yet met the full 

 tests of scientific inquiry is sufficient answer to the most extravagant of 

 these claims. The fact that birth control is being indirectly considered 

 in the present International Eugenics Congress embodies the admission 

 that eugenics must now take their part in more or less worldwide inquiry 

 and inductive testing of claims which thus far have been largely theoretical 

 or hypothetical. 



As regards the limiting of population in the overcrowded communities of 

 Europe the birth control propagandists advocate contraception on the one 

 hand as indirectly eugenic by the reduction of offspring among the undesir- 

 able element. According to Dr. Louis I. Dublin, this need not apply to the 

 United States. As quoted by Campbell, Dublin "has lately made a most 

 thorough and painstaking estimate of population trends in the United 

 States, and, not allowing for the further success of contraceptionists, he 

 reaches the conclusion that the birth rate and the death rate will become 

 equal in the United States in about thirty years, after which the population 

 will not increase. This should quiet the fears of the neo-Malthusians, and 

 at the same time it negates the contention that the general practice of 



1 This paragraph, and parts of the succeeding discussion, are quoted or expanded from 

 a paper by Dr. C. G. Campbell, "'Birth Control' and Its Implications," published in 

 altered form as "The Bio-Social Implications of Contraception," Proceedings of the 

 Second International Congress for Sex Research, 1930. 



