Specialists are so busy with their own particular subjects and general
practitioners are so taken up with their daily routine that they
cannot give to the problem of contraception the attention it must
have. Consultation rooms in charge of reputable physicians who have
specialized in contraception, assisted by registered nurses--in a
word, clinics designed for this specialty, would meet this crying
need. Such clinics should deal with each woman individually, taking
into account her particular disease, her temperament, her mentality
and her condition, both physical and economic. Their sole function
should be to prevent pregnancy. In accomplishing this purpose, a
higher standard of hygiene is attained. Not only would a burden be
removed from the physician who sends a woman to such a clinic, but
there would be an improvement in the woman's general condition which
would in a number of ways reflect itself in benefit to her family.
All this for the diseased woman. But every argument that can be made
for preventive medicine can be made for birth-control clinics for the
use of the woman who has not yet lost her health. Sound and vigorous
at the time of her marriage, she could remain so if given advice as to
by what means she could space her children and limit their number.
When she is not given such information, she is plunged blindly into
married life and a few years is likely to find her with a large
family, herself diseased and damaged, an unfit breeder of the unfit,
and still ignorant!
What are the fruits of this woeful ignorance in which women have been
kept? First, a tremendous infant mortality--hundreds of thousands of
babies dying annually of diseases which flourish in poverty and
neglect.
Next, the rapid increase of the feebleminded, of criminal types and of
the pathetic victims of toil in the child-labor factories. Another
result is the familiar overcrowding of tenements, the forcing of the
children into the street, the ensuing prostitution, alcoholism and
almost universal physical and moral unfitness.
Those abhorrent conditions point to a blunder upon the part of those
to whom we have entrusted the care of the health of the individual,
the family and the race. The medical profession, neglecting the
principle involved in preventive medicine, has permitted these
conditions to come about. If they were unavoidable, we should have to
bear with them, but they are not unavoidable, as shown by facts and
figures from other countries where contraceptive information is
available.
In Holland, for instance, where the information concerning
contraceptives has been accessible to the people, through clinics and
pamphlets, since 1881, the general death rate and the infant mortality
rate have fallen until they are the lowest in Europe. Amsterdam and
The Hague have the lowest infant mortality rates of any cities in the
world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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