By reducing infant
mortality and teaching mothers to feed their babies naturally, the
infant mortality movement is thereby reducing the birth-rate in the
poorer part of the population, a eugenic service which to some extent
offsets the dysgenic results that, as we shall show in the last chapter,
follow the "Save the Babies" propaganda.
With the spread of the birth control and infant mortality movements one
may therefore look forward to some diminution of the differential
element in the birth-rate, together with a further decline in that
birth-rate as a whole.
Such a situation, which seems to us almost a certainty within the next
decade or two, will not change the duty of eugenics, on which we have
been insisting in this chapter and, to a large extent, throughout the
present book. It will be just as necessary as ever that the families
which are, and have been in the past, of the greatest benefit and value
to the country, have a higher birth-rate. The greatest task of eugenics,
as we see it, will still be to find means by which the birth-rate among
such families can be increased. This increase in the birth-rate among
superior people must depend largely on a change in public sentiment.
Such a change may be brought about in many ways.
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