France and Birth Control

Extract

In his new study of The Problem of Population, Mr. Harold Cox presents the popular case for birth-control with his customary lucidity and with that command of statistics that can compel conviction for any argument. But one rubs one’s eyes with amazement to find so stalwart a champion of individual liberty carried, by his enthusiasm for what he regards as the moral duty of birth-control, into advocating the most intolerable of all forms of State interference with personal rights. Can it indeed be Mr. Harold Cox who declares emphatically (p. 153) for the compulsory sterilisation by State-appointed practitioners, of large classes of mankind? ‘To sum up,’ he concludes roundly, ‘those persons who, as the result of physical or mental defects, are unfitted to produce children should be sterilised, with their consent or with the consent of their guardians, at the expense of the State.’ One wonders whether Mr. Cox himself, or any one of his friends whom he might name at random, would be able to satisfy a Government medical board that they possess that ‘freedom from any heritable taint’ which he postulates as being the essential condition of the right to have children. If words have any meaning at all, Mr. Cox expressly asserts that anyone in whose family there is hereditary disease—be it blindness or consumption or mental instability—must be ruthlessly forced to undergo a sterilising operation.