World War I not only
provided impetus to the freedom (openness, secularism, liberalism,etc)
movements but it took them to extreme heights. The anti-conceptionist movement
had affected France in particular. For over 40 years, birth rate in that
country had constantly been falling. In Only 20 out of 87 French Districts
birth rate was higher than death rate. Whereas, in the remaining districts, the
average death rate was as high as 130, 140, and even 160, against every 100
births. The nation lacked in a sufficient number of combatant young men. There
was no other mode, except by raising the national birth rate by all possible
means. So the writers, journalists, speakers, even scientists and politicians
came out and raised one universal cry requiring the people to bear more and
more children without even bothering about marriage formalities. Any spinster
or widow, they said, who offered her womb voluntarily in the service of the
motherland, deserved to be honoured rather than censured. Lovers of freedom
seized this opportunity for spreading among the people all their devilish
ideas.
About the same time, the Paris Faculty of Medicine approved a
doctoral thesis and published it in its official bulletin. It contained the
following sentences also:
“We hope the day will come when without cynical boasting or
false modesty we shall say: ‘I had syphilis at twenty years old,’ just as we
say nowadays, ‘I have been sent to the hills for spitting blood,… Whoever has
passed his youth without contracting those troubles which are as it were the
price of pleasure, is but an incomplete being who through cowardice, a cold
nature, or religious scruple, has missed the accomplishment of what is perhaps
the least degraded of his natural functions”. (Towards Moral Bankruptcy, p.151)
French neo-Malthusian leader Paul Robin says:
“Under the influence of a licentious literature and an immoral
stage, divorce and adultery, anti-conceptionist practices and abortion, are
acclimatized in our plan of life. Five-and-twenty years ago the very words
aroused in the immense majority of people violent feelings of revulsion, even
of profound horror and disgust… The automatic reflexes have lost their vigour
because the moral atmosphere has changed”. (Towards Moral Bankruptcy, p.152)
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