Medicine and morality
From Professor T. E. Rowell
Sir: The mounting hysteria in which The Spectator increasingly preoccupies itself with human reproduction is unfitting to a journal with intellectual pretensions. The concepts of biology, demography, statistics, and even sociology merit as serious and level-headed discussion as those of theology or political science.
It also seems totally at variance with the vaunted conservative concern for the freedom of the individual. Nobody is forcing anyone to use contraceptives, or have abortions, or be promiscuous. The Spectator's contributors and their offspring are free to practice chaStity or abstinence, or to have their baby-a-year. with all the more virtue since alternatives are available. What alien totalitarian impulse makes you want to force the rest of us to conform to your beliefs in this particular matter?
Your attack on the FPA is absurd. Everyone who has dealt with them knows them as a band of dedicated compassionate idealists whose main fault was always an over-close adherence to middle class sexual morality.
As an example of the sloppy thinking you permit in this general area, may I refer to the causal relationship suggested recently (August 10) by Dr Link later, between conduct of deliveries and lack of early mother-infant interaction, and maltreatment of infants. An interesting idea, and one I find sympathetic. But the obstetrical practices he condemns have certainly not become ten times more frequent in the last ten years as he tells us has the incidence of battered babies. If we are going to play pseudo-science and compare people to rats, an alternative analogy would be with the experimentally overcrowded rat populations in which maternal infanticide and resorption (the rodent equivalent of abortion) eventually become frequent enough to prevent the population increasing further.
T. E. Rowell 2301 Rose St, Berkeley, California
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