To put the facts in the form of a truism, part of the children born in
any district in a given year are doomed by heredity to an early death;
and if they die in one year they will not be alive to die in the
succeeding year, and vice versa. Of course there are in addition infant
deaths which are not selective and which if prevented would leave the
infant with as good a chance as any to live.
In the light of these researches, we are forced to conclude that
baby-saving campaigns accomplish less than is thought; that the supposed
gain is to some extent temporary and illusory.
2. There is still another consequence. If the gain is by great exertions
made more than temporary; if the baby who would otherwise have died in
the first months is brought to adult life and reproduction, it means in
many cases the dissemination of another strain of weak heredity, which
natural selection would have cut off ruthlessly in the interests of race
betterment. In so far, then, as the infant mortality movement is not
futile it is, from a strict biological viewpoint, often detrimental to
the future of the race.
Do we then discourage all attempts to save the babies? Do we leave them
all to natural selection? Do we adopt the "better dead" gospel?
Unqualifiedly, no! The sacrifice of the finer human feelings, which
would accompany any such course, would be a greater loss to the race
than is the eugenic loss from the perpetuation of weak strains of
heredity. The abolition of altruistic and humanitarian sentiment for the
purpose of race betterment would ultimately defeat its own end by making
race betterment impossible.
But race betterment will also be impossible unless a clear distinction
is made between measures that really mean race betterment of a
fundamental and permanent nature, and measures which do not.
We have chosen the Infant Mortality Movement for analysis in this
chapter because it is an excellent example of the kind of social
betterment which is taken for granted, by most of its proponents, to be
a fundamental piece of race betterment; but which, as a fact, often
means race impairment. No matter how abundant and urgent are the reasons
for continuing to reduce infant mortality wherever possible, it is
dangerous to close the eyes to the fact that the gain from it is of a
kind that must be paid for in other ways; that to carry on the movement
without adding eugenics to it will be a short-sighted policy, which
increases the present happiness of the world at the cost of diminishing
the happiness of posterity through the perpetuation of inferior strains.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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