staken notion
that reproduction is an individual problem; Economic and other factors
in the group problem of reproduction.

From the discussion in the preceding chapter, it becomes apparent that
for the half of the female element in a savage society possessing the
most vigor and initiative to turn away from reproduction would in the
long run be fatal to the group. Yet this is what occurs in large measure
in modern civilized society. Reproduction is a biological function. It
is non-competitive, as far as the individual is concerned, and offers no
material rewards. The breakdown of the group's control over the detailed
conduct and behaviour of its members is accompanied by an increasing
stress upon material rewards to individuals. So with growing
individualism, in the half of the race which can both bear children and
compete in the social activities offering rewards, i.e., the women who
are specialized to the former and adapted to the latter, there is a
growing tendency among the most successful, individualized strains, to
choose the social and eschew the biological functions.

Racial degeneration is the result. Recorded history is one succession of
barbarous races, under strong, primitive breeding conditions, swamping
their more civilized, individualized neighbours, adopting the dysgenic
ways of civilization and then being swamped in their turn by barbarians.
This is especially pronounced in our own times because popularized
biological and medical knowledge makes it possible for a tremendous
class of the most successful and enlightened to avoid reproduction
without foregoing sex activity.

In primitive groups, a "moral" control which kept all women at
reproduction was neither eugenic nor dysgenic unless accompanied by
systematic destruction of the least fit children. By "moral" control is
meant the use of taboo, prejudice, religious abhorrence for certain acts
and the like. The carefully nurtured moral ideas about sex and
reproduction simply represent the system of coercion which groups have
found most effective in enforcing the division of reproductive and other
activities among the individual members. When this social machinery grew
up, to regulate sexual activity was in general to regulate
reproduction. The natural sex desire proved sufficiently powerful and
general to still seek its object, even with the group handicaps and
regulations imposed to meet the reproductive necessity. But
contraceptive knowledge, etc.