The decline of human fertility in the United Kingdom and other countries as shown by corrected birth-rates / by Arthur Newsholme and T.H.C. Stevenson.

  • Newsholme, Arthur, 1857-1943.
Date:
[1906]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The decline of human fertility in the United Kingdom and other countries as shown by corrected birth-rates / by Arthur Newsholme and T.H.C. Stevenson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    illegitimate birth-rates (column 7, Tables I—VI, Appendix), and thence by addition, the corrected total birth-rates (column 9). The proportion per i,ooo of population of women, not wives, aged 15—45, was ascertained for each community,9 and the proportion, 1327 per 1,000 in England and Wales, 1901, was taken as a standard. The crude illegitimate birth-rate per 1,000 of total population in each community was then reduced or increased in accordance with the excess or deficiency of the proportion of women not wives at child-bearing ages. In this case it will be noted that the correction, as in Dr. Farr’s method on p. 3, is only for numbers and not also for age; the proportion of the total birth-rate affected is so small that the further correction is an unnecessary refinement. Illustrations of Necessity for Corrected Method. We next proceed to consider the changes effected by the application of the above method. Tables I—-VI, Appendix, give a comparison for the United Kingdom and different parts of it between the birth-rate in 1881 and that in 1903 (Scotland, 1902), and for other countries as nearly as possible between the same years, a comparison of recent experience with that of twenty-two years earlier being thus secured. There are special reasons for selecting 1881 as the earlier limit of comparison. It is a census year, and it is near the year 1876, in which the highest recorded birth-rate of England and Wales occurred, and the year 1875, in which the registration of birth became compulsory.10 It must be remembered that by the method of calculation adopted in this paper, the influence of differences in the proportion of wives and in the ages of these wives has been eliminated, and we are thus enabled to separate between what we may call the arithmetical and the pathological causes of decline in the birth-rate. France is the best instance of a pathological birth-rate. The term (“ natalite “ pathologique ”) is used by Dr. Jacques Bertillon, the head of the Statistical Bureau of the City of Paris. France has rather a larger number of wives aged 15—45 than England and Wales per 1,000 of total population. But its corrected legitimate birth-rate is 29 per cent, lower, and its total corrected birth-rate 24 per cent, lower than that of England and Wales. Ireland, on the other hand, has a low crude birth-rate, which becomes one of the highest in Europe when correction is made for the fact that only 76-5 per 1,000 of 9 By subtracting in Tables I—VI the figure in column 11 from that in column 10. 19 Census Kcporf, 1901, p. 4S.