"I have for many years asked women who came to me desiring children whether they have ever practised prevention, and they very frequently tell me that they did so during the early days of their married life because they thought that their means were not adequate to the support of a family. Subsequently they found that conception, thwarted at the time that desire was present, fails to occur when it becomes convenient. In such cases, even although examination of the pelvic organ shows nothing abnormal, all one's endeavours to secure conception frequently go unrewarded. Sometimes such a woman is not only sterile, but nervous, and in generally poor health; but the more common occurrence is that she remains fairly well until the time of the change of life, when she frequently suffers more, on the nervous side, than does the woman who has lived a natural married life." The late Dr. F.W. Taylor, President of the British Gynaecological Society, wrote as follows in 1904: "Artificial prevention is an evil and a disgrace. The immorality of it, the degradation of succeeding generations by it, their domination or subjection by strangers who are stronger because they have not given way to it, the curses that must assuredly follow the parents of decadence who started it,--all of this needs to be brought home to the minds of those who have thoughtlessly or ignorantly accepted it, for it is to this undoubtedly that we have to attribute not only the diminishing birth-rate, but the diminishing value of our population. "It would be strange indeed if so unnatural a practice, one so destructive of the best life of the nation, should bring no danger or disease in its wake, and I am convinced, after many years of observation, that both sudden danger and chronic disease may be produced by the methods of prevention very generally employed.... The natural deduction is that the artificial production of modern times, the relatively sterile marriage, is an evil thing, even to the individuals primarily concerned, injurious not only to the race, but to those who accept it." That was the opinion of a distinguished gynaecologist, who also happened to be a Christian. The reader may protest that the latter fact is entirely irrelevant to my argument, and that the value of a man's observations concerning disease is to be judged by his skill and experience as a physician, and not by his religious beliefs. A most reasonable statement. Unhappily, the Neo-Malthusians think otherwise. They would have us believe that because this man was a Christian his opinion, as a gynaecologist, is worthless. C.V. Drysdale, O.B.E., D. Sc., after quoting Dr. Taylor's views, adds the following foot-note: "I have since learnt that Dr. Taylor was a very earnest Christian, and the author of several sacred hymns and of a pious work, _The Coming of the Saints_." [68]