A Review of Dr. Walid Qamhawi's Book “Birth Control”

Among the important problems occupying the world's thinkers is the problem of the standard of living. It has become well-nigh self-evident that the degree of a society's advancement stands in proportion to the rise — or the failure to rise — of its standard of living.

Raising the standard of living comes about by providing the three essentials: food, medical care, and education. The individual's claim upon his society in these matters has become a natural right, like his right to breathe the air and drink the water.

And if some objector should protest that this provision, for all its idealism, is beyond the reach of the poor countries — that is precisely what Dr. Walid Qamhawi sets before us in his valuable book, recently published under the title “Birth Control.”

The author begins by laying out the problem, showing it first as a world problem, one taken up by the world economist Malthus more than a generation ago. He expressed his fear that human beings would multiply to the point where the earth could no longer hold them or provide them with food, and he urged abstaining from marriage as far as possible, to lighten the weight of the danger of increasing offspring.

The author soon presents the problem in the field of the Arab world, reviewing the calamities that have come one after another upon this society: natural ones, which have made most of its land deserts; then internal calamities, such as the misuse of the land and the confinement of settlement to isolated or half-isolated districts owing to the difficulty of communications; and external ones, chief among them the colonialism that crouched upon its breast for ten centuries, and the successive migrations into some of its lands, which crowded them with inhabitants over and above the growth of population by natural increase.

Then, after reviewing all this, he records, in the light of the Egyptian statistics, that the average length of life is thirty-one years for males and thirty-six for females, and that this is due to the malnutrition arising from the terrible trinity of “poverty, disease, and ignorance” — that trinity which is the direct result of the calamities set forth above.

The author then comes to review the position of the individual in Arab society, and here he turns photographer, catching pictures as they pass before him, each picture representing one class of society. Here is a woman married before she had passed her thirteenth year, fated to conceive in order to give birth and to give birth in order to conceive, until death does her the kindness of swallowing her and delivering her from a life in which every one of her days showed her a misery harsher than death. There is a man reckoning twice over — adding, subtracting, and multiplying — in the hope of covering one part in ten of the needs of his ten children. And there is a wife imploring the doctor to deliver her of a piece of her own heart, the fifteenth of her children. Many are these pictures, before which a man stands and takes warning. The most wretched thing about them is that no one can deny the misery they portray, for they are true copies of the life of this miserable society, with no exaggeration in them and no embellishment. The reader does not reach the last of them before there rises up plainly before him the solution the author intended — the title of his book, “Birth Control,” carried out in a manner that makes society able to keep the number of its members in balance.

Dr. Qamhawi asks: “In whose interest have the laws and statutes of peoples differing in homeland, temperament, inclinations, and aims agreed to oppose birth control and make war upon it?” He answers this question by listing four such interests: the individual interest, whose source is selfishness, ostentation, and the enslavement of children; the clannish interest, which springs from the herd instinct and the fear of every tribe other than one's near kin; the mistaken economic interest, built upon deficient conceptions and values; and the aggressive interest, which rests upon creating problems that demand living space for their solution “and justify the waging of barbarous wars of aggression.”

And after the author succeeds in convincing the reader of the harms of unrestricted procreation, he takes up its regulation as a world question, saying:

“The knot of the world's problems is the ever-growing disparity between the number of human beings and the natural resources.” This disparity the author examines in the light of the solutions laid down of old to check it: leaving the matter to the natural factors that hold human numbers in check; relying on man's unlimited productive powers; or distributing people and resources in one form or another. He concludes that all these are temporary solutions which have not stood the test of experience and the advance of science and industry. He then takes up new solutions, forming them into a pyramid whose three faces are the mastering of the natural factors, the multiplication of agricultural and industrial production, and the distribution of people and resources, and whose base is birth control, within which lies the standard of human life that mankind must attain. And just as the building of a pyramid can begin only from its base, so the human pyramid cannot be built except by beginning with birth control, which is a twin born together with this just distribution of the world among men, and of men over the world. After studying the history of this regulation in countries that have outstripped us by whole stages in civilization — such as England, northern Europe, and America — he arrives at the examination of the question in the Arab homeland in the light of the possibility of building the world pyramid. He sees how diseases, “chief of the natural factors, with their soldiery, wreak fearful havoc in the structure of this homeland, raising the death rate to more than twenty-one per thousand yearly and not permitting the average Arab lifespan to exceed thirty-five years, spent in sickness and misery and ended before a man has served others or profited himself.”

He holds that the only way to overcome disease lies in the nationalization of medicine, and for this nationalization to become possible the birth rate must fall, “for there is no state in the world whose resources could secure medical care for its inhabitants if they went on increasing at a steady rate matching the increase of births in this Arab homeland.”

He then takes up the second face of the pyramid, the increase of agricultural and industrial production, saying that it is a disgrace to the inhabitants of the Arab homeland that the waters of the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Jordan, the Yarmouk, and others are not put to use in bringing millions of feddans to life, and that if sleeves were rolled up in earnest and these possibilities employed, the hopes would be realized and the needs of the inhabitants met — “on condition that these do not increase at the present speed, which outstrips by whole stages any speed in the growth of production.”

As for the industrial renaissance — which the Doctor has called “the spinal column of the Arab homeland,” because of its natural resources of oils and minerals — it can be attained, especially now that “experience has proved that any backward country, if it mobilizes its human forces and exploits its natural resources, can reach the level of the civilized countries within a generation of time” — on condition that the growth of population slow down somewhat, so that the agricultural and industrial renaissance may be given the chance to grow and gather strength.

As for the distribution of people and resources, the author passes over it rapidly, showing how this maldistribution is at its very worst — whether in the distribution of population, or in the distribution of cultivated lands, or in the distribution of wealth.

And this maldistribution keeps pressing steadily forward, until it increases the prosperous in prosperity and the wretched in wretchedness (to him who has shall be given, and more; and from him who has not shall be taken away). “This state of affairs is seen and heard in the streets and the dwellings, the cities and the villages, and can be read in the face of every inhabitant of this region — the look of paradise or the mark of hell.”

Yet the just distribution of people and resources is possible only “if the rate of population growth is allowed to quiet down and catch its racing breath.”

Finally, the author holds that the task of birth control in the Arab homeland is an easy one, owing to the absence of doctrinal resistance to this regulation and the absence of opposition from the laws laid down concerning it.

And birth control, says the writer, is “the individual's cause,” for it delivers him from a threefold misery: the bodily and psychological misery of woman and man; the economic misery of the family and of mankind; and the social misery of societies that have not yet succeeded in establishing equality as one of the rights of the individual. For there is the tyranny of man over woman, and the tyranny of society over the child, so long as people are measured by the measure of age, the child being compelled to submit in all his affairs to whoever is older and bigger in body than he.

Dr. Qamhawi ends his valuable work by setting out the positive solutions in which the work of birth control is carried on, namely:

1 — The coordination of pregnancy, by limiting and adjusting it, provided this is not done by disposing of a pregnancy already accomplished or by putting an end to a life already begun; and he presents some of the means to which a special body in every society can direct, by its counsels, those who consult it.

2 — The regulation of parenthood, by valuing it at its true worth, standing ready to bear its burdens, and constantly maintaining one's fitness for it. Chief among these is the endeavor to create a physiological, psychological, and social partnership between the two spouses before they attempt to bring children into the world.

3 — The betterment of offspring, and this is achieved by way of appreciating the responsibility laid upon the two parents as a connecting link between deadly diseases and their descendants; and here society must do its duty toward those incapable of understanding this responsibility.

4 — The regulation of abortion, which should not be permitted except in exceptional cases in which the attempt to preserve the pregnancy has not succeeded.

5 — The treatment of sterility — for a tenth of the marriages in the world are threatened by it — thus delivering husbands and wives from psychological pains, family disturbances, and social problems by ridding them of it.

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Thus we see that the author has given his study its full due, and has hoped, through birth control, that human beings may one day come to be happy in one another, each one of them knowing how to call himself to account and ask himself: “Have I been able to lighten the misery of my fellow men?”

Birth control is “the individual's cause”: it delivers him from a threefold misery — the bodily and psychological misery of woman and man, the economic misery of the family and of mankind, and the social misery of societies that have not yet succeeded in establishing equality as one of the rights of the individual. What, then, is the way to the solution of this problem??