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
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??