The Hygiene of Eugenic Generation
- Author:
Wallace “VVallin, Ph.D.,
fcj V v’ Director Psyclio-educational Clinic, St. Louis Public Schools. 0Concluded.) Of 57 children of 10 alcoholic families, only 15 per cent were entirely normal, while of 61 children of 10 non-alcoholic parents 82 per cent were entirely normal. Eighty-five per cent of the alcoholized progeny were idiots, epileptics, choreics, dwarfs, deformed, or died in early infancy (Demme). A study of about 20,000 children from 5846 families indicated in general that the percentage of miscarriages and deaths varied with the amount of alcohol consumed (Laitenen). On the other hand, it has been shown that the number of deaths and miscarriages has decreased as national sobriety has increased (English study).
The vitality or chances for survival are less for the children of later pregnancies of maternal inebriates. Thus the mortality among the first born of a certain group of alcoholic mothers was 33.7 per cent as against 72 per cent among the sixth to tenth born; while the number of still-births among the first born was 6.2 per cent as against 17.2 per cent for the later pregnancies. The injury which alcohol exerts upon the generative processes apparently increases with time.
Both paternal and maternal alcoholism imperil the ability of mothers to nurse their offspring. Of the daughters of a given group of confirmed topers, only 21 per cent were able to nurse their babies. In a group of non-habitual drinkers, 50 per cent of the mothers retained their nursing capacity, while only 2.6 per cent of daughters of confirmed paternal drinkers were able to lactate (Bunge). Whatever impairs natural nursing is of moment to eugenics, owing to the vital relation of breast feeding to the normal growth and development of the infant. In a German investigation covering the first five years of the children’s lives, it was found that not a single death had occurred among 109 breast fed children from 24 families, while during the corresponding period every one of 33 families in which the babies were all bottle fed had lost one or more infants. In another group of 29 families with 85 breast fed infants and 109 bottle fed, all the breast fed were alive at the end of eleven years, while 57 per cent of the bottle fed were dead. A third group of 13 families con(170) tained 48 breast fed infants, all alive at the end of ten years, and 23 bottle fed babies, all dead at the end of the same period. In certain districts in Austria where mothers are accustomed to giving the babies the breast, from 16 to 17 out of every 100 born alive die during the first year, from 6 to 7 die during the first month, while the number of still-births is from 9 to 15 per 1000. In other districts (apparently industrial) where breast feeding is abandoned during the period from the first to the fifth month, the mortality is from 18 to 23 during the first year, 6 to 8 during the first month; while the still-births number from 20 to 41 in 1000. The mortality among breast fed infants less than nine months old which came under the supervision of the Board of Health of New York City in 1907 amounted to 25 per cent, while the mortality among the artificially fed was 74.9 per cent. Of 3000 infant deaths in Birmingham, the rate for the breast fed was 8 per 1000, while for the artificially fed it was 252. One authority estimates the mortality of the bottle fed as three times that of the breast fed (C. L. Wilbur), another from eight to ten times (Collins H. Johnston) and a third fifteen times. While there has been considerable improvement in the art of artificial feeding within recent years, and while the decrease in the mortality of nursing babies cannot be wholly due to the influence of the mother’s milk but to favorable factors which go with nursing but do not go with bottle feeding, there is no doubt that the milk of the mother is the natural food for the baby. The mother’s breast is not only the best instrument at our command for combatting fatal issue, but it is the source of the prime nutritive elements upon which to rear a strong and hardy stock. There is no specific superior to the mother’s milk as a prophylactic against acute infectious diseases, intestinal catarrh, scurvy, rickets, marasmus, soft teeth and bones, and retarded development. Breast fed babies grow more rapidly than bottle fed, the former doubling their weight at the end of the fifth month and trebling it at the end of the twelfth month, while the latter require a year to double, and treble only in the course of the second year.
These truths need to be dinned into the ears of the motherhood of America, for there has been a growing tendency for years to substitute artificial feeding for natural nursing, particularly in the centers of congestion. In the majority of cases the reluctance of mothers to nurse their babies is due purely to social and psychological causes; to a combination of indolence, selfishness, the desire to pursue pleasure at all hours, in and out of season, in drawing rooms, theatres, teas and clubs and the shirking of any duty that interferes with the regular satisfaction of such desires; and, finally, subservience to the Zeitgeist: the apish adherence to the conventions, fads and fashions of the day no matter how trivial, ridiculous, barbarous or eugenically indefensible. Presupposing hygienic preparatory care, it rarely happens that mothers are physically incapacitated from nursing their offspring. To uproot, in a measure, some of these noxious psychic weeds, maidens who look forward to assuming the function of maternity should be given courses in young motherhood classes on the hygiene of infant feeding. They should be taught that one of the effective ways to kill, maim, or impair the lives of many infants is to feed them at the bottle, that artificial feeding is eugenically and morally indefensible, unless breast feeding is contraindicated, and that the only contraindications in the mother to nursing are certain cardiac disorders, eclampsia, nephritis, serious anaemia, tuberculosis, pregnancy, prolonged infection, and possibly various acute infections, epilepsy and insanity. Personally, I believe that a race of naturally nursed people will, all in all, be more eugenically fit than a race of artificially fed people. I am not sure that unwilling mothers can be legislated into hygienic practices by the imposition of fines upon those who can but will not nurse their babies, and I would advocate the enactment of such laws only as an extreme measure. But I do feel that the eugenic appeal should be presented and that, if properly presented, it cannot fail to stir countless mothers to perform more conscientiously their physical duties to their dependent offspring.
The weight of evidence seems to indicate that parental alcoholism may produce at least a certain amount of mental and moral deficiency, disorder or degeneracy in the offspring. The role of the alcoholic factor, however, is very differently estimated by different investigators and various surveys have given flatly contradictory results.
Forty per cent of the pupils in the special classes for deficient children in London and Birmingham were found to have intemperate parents, while the corresponding per cent for pupils of the same age in the regular classes was only 6 per cent. In another inquiry 32 per cent of school children doing satisfactory work were found to have alcoholic parents and 68 per cent abstaining parents; while 85 per cent of the pupils doing unsatisfactory work had intemperate parents and only 15 per cent abstemious parents. Of 6624 pupils studied in 1901 in the New York schools who had alcoholic parents, 53 per cent were laggards (“dullards, very deficient and deficient”), while only 10 per cent of 13,523 children of abstaining parents were laggards. The alcoholic habits were traced through three generations for 3711 children. In the families which were free from alcoholic taint, 96 per cent of the children were proficient while 18 per cent had some organic or nervous abnormality and only 4 per cent were classed as laggards. On the other hand, in the alcoholically tainted families, 77 per cent of the children were dullards, 76 per cent had nervous or organic disorders, while only 23 per cent were proficient (Alexander MacNicholl).
In an academy in Utah the students of narcotized parentage required about one year longer to graduate from the grades and averaged one year and seven months older in the academy than their classmates (J. E. Hickman).
The percentage of parental alcoholism found in the study of 1200 English institutional feebleminded cases varied from 13.2 per cent (Royal Albert Asylum) to 19.5 per cent (Darenth,?Shuttleworth and Beach); 7.7 per cent of 250 defective children in Manchester gave a marked alcoholic history while no other factor was discernible in 1.9 per cent of the cases (Lapage). A very careful investigation into the family histories for three or four generations of 150 cases living in and around London showed paternal inebriety in 46.5 per cent of the cases, although five-sixths of these showed a prior neuropathic heredity (Tredgold). A comparative study of the family histories of 250 mentally defective and 100 normal children in Birmingham indicated alcoholic parentage for 41.6 per cent of the former and 22 per cent of the latter group. Parental alcoholism was found in 62 per cent of 1000 French ‘idiots’ (Bourneville), in from 50 to 60 per cent of one group of Norwegian idiots (Dahl), in 3.7 per cent of another Norwegian group (Karl Looft) and in 11 per cent of German (Kind) cases investigated. Of 800 feebleminded cases in a Pennsylvania institution, 14 per cent gave a history of chronic alcoholism in one or both parents (J. M. Murdoch). In other American investigations, the per cent of parental alcoholism has been found to be 38 per cent (Kerlin) and 50 per cent (Howe).
It is reported that in some wine-growing cantons in France and in wine-growing districts of Austria the schools have been flooded with an army of laggards seven years after good wine years. In a study based on 8196 feebleminded children in Switzerland, the conception in the majority of cases took place during the periods of greatest debauch (New Years, the Carnival and the grape harvest: Bezzola).
Parental alcoholism, it is alleged, produces more epilepsy than parental epilepsy itself. Thus in a group of 572 epileptics, 15 per cent showed parental insanity associated with epilepsy, while 17.5 per cent showed parental intemperance (Echeverria). In another study 30 to 40 per cent of the children of inebriates were epileptics (Molli). Of 150 insane epileptics in the Salpetriere, 60 per cent had intemperate parents; of 200 descendants of 90 alcoholized parents, 75 per cent were epileptics who were mentally degenerate before the seizures became established (Alfred Gordon). While an American investigator (Sprattling) found that 16 per cent of 1000 institutional cases of epilepsy had epileptic parents and only 14 per cent inebriate parents, a French investigator (Dejerine) found that 51.5 per cent of the child epileptics investigated showed alcoholic parents, while only 21 per cent showed parental epilepsy; and a German investigator (Binswanger) found chronic parental alcoholism in 21 per cent and parental epilepsy in only 11 per cent of the cases studied. Moreover, a first and only alcoholic debauch on the part of the father at the time of conception is said to have been the causative factor in seven cases of epilepsy recently studied in Philadelphia (Matthew Woods).
That mental defectiveness and alcoholism are frequently associated admits of no doubt. But there is considerable diversity of opinion as to whether the antecedent condition is alcoholism or mental defectiveness. The Galton workers strenuously maintain that the causative factor is defective, neuropathic heredity, and that inebriety is merely the effect. All careful observers of mentally degenerate stocks know that degenerates manifest an excessive propensity for alcohol?a sort of hereditary alcoholic diathesis?as well as an extreme susceptibility to its demoralizing influence. But this tendency must itself be explained. May it not be that ultimately the alcoholic tendency of degenerates is resolvable into the alcoholic habits of generations of ancestors?
Not the least pernicious accompaniment of parental alcoholism is the drugging of children with alcohol by parents who are addicted to its use. Of large numbers of children investigated in New York 27 per cent of those rated “good and prosperous” as against 50 per cent of those rated “poor” consumed some form of alcoholic beverage. Only 30 per cent of the good pupils had drinking parents as against 85 per cent of the “poor” (MacNicholl). Small quantities of wine administered experimentally to 20 children between six and fifteen years of age produced mental impairment after its use (Maurice Kende). An examination of 591 Viennese school children showed that the best scholarship certificates were held by those who entirely abstained from alcoholic indulgence, while the poorest certificates were held by those who took alcohol two or three times a day (Hercord). In Hungary, children are frequently found in school in a dazed condition due to the use of alcoholic beverages. Recently in examining children in a western Pennsylvania city I was struck by the fact that most of the children had unusually small heads and were deficient in stature. The head girth of many boys from thirteen to fifteen years of age was like that of a five or six year old child. Out of twenty-one cases examined seven were feebleminded. Many of these were children of Hungarian immigrants who, judging by the available reports, were addicted to excessive indulgence in alcohol. In the London County Council Schools 40 per cent of the children investigated under the age of eight imbibed alcohol more or less regularly. In one school of 300 pupils, 11.8 per cent drank daily, while 34.1 per cent drank occasionally. Much of the mental and physical torpor, scholastic retardation, and proneness to infectious diseases of school children is due to precocious inebriety. Precocious inebriety is, no doubt, also partly responsible for the social and industrial inefficiency of many adults. Juvenile alcoholism is essentially anti-eugenic. My own conclusions of the relation of alcohol to eugenics may be summarized as follows: children conceived in drunkenness frequently come into the world with diminished powers of mental and physical development (sometimes resulting in pronounced infantilism), with lessened immunity to diseases of an infectious origin (e. g., tuberculosis, pneumonia, diphtheria), and with increased predisposition toward the development of nervous disorders, peevishness, infantile marasmus, infantile colic, carious teeth, bodily deformities and disharmonies, convulsions, inanition, and mental and moral abnormalities. Sometimes parental alcoholism slays the progeny outright; sometimes it dooms it to temporary or lifelong invalidism, inefficiency, dependency, and mental and moral bankruptcy. Children fed on alcohol before they are born cannot be regarded as fit progenitors of a race of men and women healthy in body and mind. At the same time, I cannot agree with those who maintain that even could we eliminate the entire army of eugenically unfit with one fell swoop, two or three generations of inebriety, gonorrhea, and syphilis would restore the original number of degenerates. To reach the eugenic Utopia we must do more than restrict the evils of inebriety and venereal infection. We must make it impossible for persons to breed who suffer from transmissible defects, whatever the cause of the defects may be.
4. From the standpoint of the eugenic ideal it is desirable to prevent procreation during the periods of physiological immaturity and of involution, and to prevent over-many or unwilling conceptions. Precocious marriages tend either to curtail the life expectancy of the progeny, to retard the development of the foetus, or to issue in sterility. Statistics indicate that the highest percentage of child mortality occurs when the pregnancies take place at or before the age of 16, and the lowest when they take place between 29 and 32 (Quetelet). Based on a study of the families of English peers the percentages of children dying before attaining a marriageable age were as follows: for parents 15 years old at time of marriage, 35 per cent; for those between 16 and 19, 20 per cent; for those between 20 and 23, 19 per cent; and for those between 24 and 27, 12 per cent (Sandler). As regards weight, one investigation showed that when mothers at the birth of their first child were under 20 years and weighed less than 120 pounds the children were of inferior weight (Schafer). A second investigation showed that the first born males of poor mothers between 14 and 16 years of age average only about 6| pounds (3.124 grams) as against 7yV pounds (3.310 grams) for the first born males of mothers of the same class between 30 and 35 (Sigismund Peller); while a third investigation indicated that those children weighed the most who were born of mothers between 25 and 30 (Matthews Duncan). Deficiency of weight at full-term birth means retarded or arrested development in utero. Not only so, the fertility rate seems to be higher for those who marry during the more favorable child-bearing years. The average number of births for each family of English peers was as follows: for those marrying at 15, 4.40; for those marrying between 16 and 19, 4.63; between 20 and 23, 5.21, and between 24 and 27, 5.43 (Sandler). Moreover, the claim has been advanced that most famous men have been begotten between 25 and 36. It thus appears from several points of view that the eugenic age for procreation is between 25 and 35. The marriage legislation of the ancient Spartans indicates remarkable prescience of eugenic laws. The Spartans by legislative enactment established 25 years as the age for the beginning of procreation. It is not certain that it will be to the advantage of the race to defer marriage to the middle twenties so far as concerns the mass of the population (marriage is frequently an effective prophylactic against eroticism and vice), but eugenically it seems advisable to restrict generation to the period which is ‘biologically most apt’ for child bearing. At any rate, this is a question which it is well worth while for the eugenist to subject to unbiased and fearless scientific investigation.
Too frequent pregnancies are also anti-eugenic. Thus it is known that very short intervals between pregnancies upset the progressive increase in weight which is known to occur from the first to the last born (average weight of 1729 first born, 3254 grams; of the second and subsequent births, 3412 grams?Ingerslevs), while long intervals do not disturb the increase (Wernicke). There are numerous women who are in an almost chronic state of semiinvalidism because of the strain and exhaustion incident to frequent parturition. Many women who are nervously exhausted, anemic, or run down cannot bear healthy, vigorous children and it is eminently humane and in accord with scientific and eugenic principles to relieve them of the burden. We know that by giving expectant mothers a ten-day rest period before confinement the weight of the newly born can be increased 10 per cent. The cause most frequently ascribed to Mongolian imbecility is uterine exhaustion. In a considerable number of my clinic cases of backward children I have been able to find no other factor than the nervous exhaustion of the mother during gestation.
Not only so, there are hundreds of thousands of families producing a progeny too multitudinous for their bank account. As a consequence the children grow up in squalor, inadequately fed and clothed, poorly safeguarded from moral contamination and physical injury, and indifferently disciplined and educated. Moreover, the parents involuntarily transmit their poverty as a social heritage to their offspring. Poverty tends to increase with the number of children, at least under modern urban conditions. Since the children are forced to go to work before they have been trained to the point of social and industrial efficiency, they are obliged to engage in unskilled labor which offers practically no opportunity for advancement with increasing maturity, and which, while it may yield returns sufficient for the needs of one person, will not provide food and shelter for the large family which seems to be the birthright of the degenerate and the poor. The associations for the improvement of the poor know only too well that the inadequately trained children of the poor who are forced into early employment are rarely able to earn a family wage in a modern urban industrial environment.
Again, many of these poor children?as well as children born in better circumstances?are unwelcome arrivals. The parents frankly did not want them, and because they were not desired, the children are neglected or abused. To prevent their birth attempts are frequently made to abort them, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully, and sometimes to the permanent injury of the mother or the child. The public at large has no idea of the great number of unwelcome embryos which are murdered year in and year out, of the number of premature or still-births which are directly due to instrumental interference or the use of abortifacients, and of the number of infanticides which are committed by parents of unwelcome children. For the greater number of illegal abortions never become a matter of record. It is claimed that the abortion rate is increasing in all civilized countries (Kaye). Since 1870 the number of abortions, still-births, deaths from prematurity, and the sale of abortifacients, have greatly increased in England. Among 14,000 confinements in 1904 and 1905 there were 49 miscarriages to every 1000 labors?how many of these were due to attempted interference with normal generation no one can say. The number of women brought to Berlin hospitals for treatment after abortion (exclusive of syphilitic cases) amounted to 317 in 1900, 841 in 1910, and to 1694 in 1913. This increase of over 500 per cent in 13 years was mainly among younger women (Bleichroder).
A concrete case recently came to my notice, that of a married woman who had been deliberately and successfully aborting her unborn children for years. She failed, however, in her last attempt and it is alleged that she now often neglects her unwelcome child, sometimes leaving it to squall for hours at a time. One of the saddest tragedies of life is to permit the birth of unwelcome children; but there are no more heartless crimes recorded in the annals of man’s brutality to man than infanticide or the annihilation of the unborn innocents who have become quick with life. No nation in antiquity or in modern times has ever been able to enact criminal statutes sufficiently terrifying to suppress the practice of abortion, just as no statutes ever have or ever can be enacted that will effectually suppress the prompting of the sex instinct, or the exercise of the marital functions between countless pairs of mates who ought not to beget children. These facts suggest the query whether it is not in the interest of social morality to instruct people in the use of harmless regulatives or to encourage the practice of sterilization, especially in the harmless forms of vasectomy and fallectomy. The objection to vasectomy is largely, if not entirely, sentimental: the mutilation of an alleged sacred function. Nature herself, however, does not regard the function as sacred: she sterilizes both the man and the woman who will not live within the moral law. The compulsory sterilization of all who ought not to beget children and the optional sterilization of those who do not want children will, I believe, some day become the practice of the land. The objection to enlightenment in the use of harmless regulatives is based on the fear that we should all lapse into libertinism and that the population would become decimated. But does the fear of venereal infection and of illegitimate issue now deter men and women from illicit indulgence? I do not believe that fear of consequences exercises any considerable restraining terror on those who will not live within the moral law. People who now live moral lives would probably do so under any other system of privileges or penalties. Possibly the results would tend to a slight decrease in the population. But even relative depopulation is better than degeneration. Limitation of offspring is better than corruption, pauperization, or criminalization. Moreover, the depopulation would principally affect the lower social strata?and this would be a blessing rather than a curse?because interference in some form or other is now very widespread in the higher social strata. Yet so barbarous are the laws of our country that should anyone attempt to give specific advice to those who most need it, he would be given a term of from five to ten years in prison. It is otherwise in various European countries where scientific books may be circulated through the mails, and where hygienic advice on the limitation of offspring may be, and frequently is, given in public lectures. Thanks to the science of eugenics it is now possible even in America to discuss in a broad scientific spirit at least the foundations and implications of the sex relationship. Not only so, the ethics of the future will increasingly get its sanction from eugenics. When the ethics of eugenics has become ingrained into the psychic warp and woof of the leaders of thought and action some of our barbarous laws and practices will be relegated to the limbo of the past. Eugenics is not merely a biological conception of life; it is a system of dynamic ethics that must function in the workaday life of the people.
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