Medicine: Baby Induction

The belief that if a childless couple adopt a baby they may soon after produce one of their own is as old as the Bible. Abraham’s Sarah bore Isaac 14 years after Ishmael entered their Canaan tent. Jacob’s Rachel finally bore Joseph and Benjamin after Jacob begat ten sons and a daughter by other women of his tenthold. A reasoned explanation of such phenomena was offered last week by a zoologist of Burlington, Vt.

Overanxiety for children, apart from actual physical impediments to childbirth, is a great cause of childlessness, declared Director Henry Farnham Perkins of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont. In the Eugenical News he cited this evidence: “The relation of the endocrine secretions to the reproductive functions is beginning to be understood by biochemists and physiologists. It is known that a very delicate acid-base equilibrium is essential for conception. This equilibrium is very easily upset, and nothing seems to affect it more quickly and decisively than psychological disturbances. . . . The thyroid gland is especially prompt in its reaction to psychological stimuli. Its secretions, containing thyroxin, are produced during normal sexual intercourse in such abundance as almost to constitute an eruption. This energetic secretion of thyroxin would appear to be an essential preliminary to conception. Inhibiting the function of the thyroid by emotional stress or other conditions is therefore at least one, and an important, factor in infertility.”

Constant contact with a little child can bring about a wholesome effect in an overanxious household, Dr. Perkins finds. “Attention is distracted from one’s own personal problems through the outpouring of interest and affection on behalf of the newcomer . . . and it is by no means an uncommon experience for persons who have been victims of sexual frigidity to discover that the intimate responsibility and care of a little child have aroused a long postponed reaction.”

Lest childless couples disbelieve that experience, Dr. Perkins cited another experience “which is frequent enough to be called common.” “I refer,” wrote Dr. Perkins, “to the stimulating effect upon the nervous centres controlling the reproductive apparatus which is experienced as a result of the proximity of a little child. The maternal instincts, not quite the same as but certainly very closely associated with the reproductive urge, are definitely aroused by this contact. Perhaps the reason why it has not been brought to general notice more forcibly is that the people who have experienced this sensation are a little ashamed of it and have accordingly said nothing to anybody about it and have even proceeded to forget it. Social workers who have the care of little children, especially when transporting them by train or motor to clinics, boarding homes, or other destinations, have after questioning confessed in a number of instances that they knew all about this sort of experience. They had observed it in themselves many times. Surely a stimulus of this strength would produce profound changes in the functioning of the ductless glands, a restoration of the normal balance in cases of earlier unbalance.”

Result of Dr. Perkins’ investigations is a formula for reproduction: 1) consult the family doctor. If he can find no reason for infertility, 2) consult a gynecologist. Failing there, 3) consult a competent psychiatrist. Then, 4) adopt a child.

Couples who followed this formula produced their own children as early as nine months after the adoption. One couple was not affected until 19 years had elapsed. Another couple, primed by adoption, got 15 children.