BIRTH CONTROL

a movement of recent growth aiming at family limitation in the interest of society at large and specially aiming at improving living conditions among the poor. <A number of Birth Control Leagues have been formed in leading centers of the country to enlighten their communities as to the real meaning of the movement. Its leaders insist that it is not a subject that should be tabooed nor its adoption be regarded as violating mor. or statutory laws. Free speech became involved in developing the movement and ‘attempts have been made to suppre meetings by the police, a notable instance occurring New York in 1921. The movement seeks to present the subject as one that serious and healthy minded people can consider without regarding it as objectionable. Birth control is held to be of great benefit to the poor, who generally have families far in exce of the ability of the parents adequately to support them. As a measure of health it has been urged for birth control that it would be a needed restriction to the fecundity of the underfed, badly housed, tu osis, degenerate, alcholics, and the mentally defective. Children of such people, especially the tuberculosis, come to the world with a lowered vitality, having an inheritance of physiological poverty. Joined with a high birth rate of such cla es is a high child mortality, which it is maintained would be appreciably reduced by family limitation. In illustration of these arguments, Holland is pointed to as a country where teaching by the medical profe ion of the most hygienic methods of birth restriction has enabled the Dutch poor to have small families which they can raise to be better equipped, physically and morally, than formerly. In Australia and New Zealand free speech on birth control is reported to be general, the means of artificial restriction being widely circulated and the control of family numbers widespread. In the United States public opinion has not yet ripened on the subject in face of legal and religious vetoes placed upon it. In New York the establishment of birth clinics and the di emination of contraceptives and birth control information have been held as violating the State penal code. In eighteen other states there is no law forbidding the giving of contraceptive information verbally, but such information under federal law is not mailable. The movement has long spread over Europe, represented by national bodies and is developing in Latin America,