Medicine: The Vanishing Family

Last week 200 earnest characters met in Los Angeles for pregnant shoptalk about sterility. With straight scientific faces, the American Society for the Study of Sterility (western branch) sat down to consider the fact that one-seventh of all U.S. couples are childless, and why. When Paul Popenoe, director of Los Angeles' American Institute of Family Relations, rose to speak, he nearly stopped the show. Said he:

"It must be remembered that half of all childlessness is voluntary. . . . Study of 8,370 completed families (those in which the wife had passed the child-bearing age) revealed that of the childless couples, 59% were happy; of the parents of three or more children, 71% were happy. It is clear that happiness increases with the number of children. . . . Most couples who go into the divorce court are childless. No one can escape the conclusion that the divorced population represents to some extent a biologically inferior part of the population."

As soon as the boat stopped rocking, conferees settled down to hear a learned talk by U. C. L. A.'s Dr. Harry B. Friedgood. His thesis: the state of a woman's nerves may have a good deal to do with whether she has children.

The nervous system, Dr. Friedgood explained, affects the pituitary and hypothalamus glands, which, in turn, control the production of sex hormones. Hence a neurosis may well upset hormone production and produce sterility.

Women with deep emotional conflicts, Dr. Friedgood pointed out, often show psychosexual disorders. A fairly common one: false pregnancy among i) unmarried women who feel guilty about illicit interr course, 2) wives who fear pregnancy, 3) older women who want children.

In Manhattan, family matters came up again at a meeting of the American Social Hygiene Association. Summing up a 15-year study of the family system in the Western world, Dr. Carle C. Zimmerman, a Harvard sociology professor, drew a gloomy conclusion. The family system, he said, is likely to break up before the end of the 20th Century.

"The family system ... of the 'classes' is already badly gone. The next part . . . to break up [will be] that of the masses. Evidence indicates that our middle-class family system has reached its maximum demoralization. . . . The ethical content of recent middle-class family problem novels is really surprising. Even the superficial characters drawn by Ilka Chase are always 'crying in bed.'

"Civilization will have to be sold on the aspirin level [by] Hucksters of Civilization, Inc., a nonprofit, mass moral educational organization."