SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

The action of the American Unitarian Association in adopting a resolution to promote the birth control movement deserves nothing but commendation. The finger of stigma pointed by modernists at petrified Orthodexy has for once received sufficient proof to the contrary. Any technical discussion of the pros and cons regarding birth control properly belongs to the physician. The qualification to be introduced is only that it should be extended to the general practitioner as well as the highly specialized medicinal student of research.

The question of morals which necessarily intrudes its presence into birth control theory involves an issue upon which tradition and "enlightenment" sharply divide. The younger generation regards the whole matter in two separate classes. As applied to individual cases, they argue that the matter is one of private morals and refuse to brook the intrusion of legislation into a matter upon which it is ill-fitted to judge

When birth control is viewed from the perspective of Humanity in general the matter assumes a different tinge. The Industrial Revolution and its later ramifications extending well into the Twentieth Century have introduced for all practical purposes a new code of morals Separated from the agricultural system where a literal interpretation of Christian tradition could well have been enforced, Youth is bound either to remain celibate under the pressure of the Factory Age or to draw up its own moral code. It prefers the latter, but is hampered by superstition and Victorian prejudice. The paradox of the educated classes with small familles being fairly well-informed of methods of prevention while broods of children infest the home of the laborer is the problem that demands solution by intelligent legislation.

It is in the resolution of the Unitarians that a harbinger for the future is felt. At Harvard where a premium is placed on freedom of morals and liberalism amounts to little less than a fetish, such courageous and unprecedented procedure can no more than receive hearty approbation.