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14
Ln addition, the population in the 15 - 29 age group constitutes
a much higher percentage of the total female population (28.7%) than
the national average (18.5%) and the London Administrative County
percentage (21.3%). Also, the percentage of single females in the
15 - 29 age group at 73.5% is significantly higher than the percentage
for England and Wales (51$), or London Administrative County (58$). In
four wards in Kensington the figure is over 80%. Thus, the Kensington
and Chelsea population includes a significantly higher percentage of
those to whom illegitimate births occur.
Another contributory factor is temporary residence. Of the 540
cases of illegitimate births reviewed, at least 174 could not be traced
within a short time after confinement. A special mother-and-baby unit
for unmarried girls located in the King's Mead institution remained in
operation until 1967. There are six maternity units in or adjacent to
the borough. In these, several thousand births occur. Apart from
temporary residence during pregnancy and childbirth, there is a large
annual population turn-over, in some wards of the order of 25$ or more.
There is also the matter of regular cohabitation without marriage. As
previously noted, in 191 of the 540 cases investigated, the parents
were in regular cohabitation, presumably unmarried either by choice;
because of legal obstacles; or because of their non-acceptance of
formal marriage as a social custom. On the last, however, I am advised
that, in general, this is diminishing owing to resultant complications
and deprivation of benefits with official departments. In fact, in at
least one of the registration districts, the number of legitimation
applications consequent upon the marriage of the parents has increased
enormously.
The question of illegitimacy was the subject of comment by a
perspicacious predecessor, Dr. Louis C. Parkes, Medical Officer of
Health for Chelsea. In addition to prescient comments on the health
aspects of London locomotion, he advised the Royal Commission on
Divorce in 1912 that Bank Holidays should be abolished as "One
frequently sees a number of births returned within about nine months
after the Bank Holidays. The workhouses and 'lying-in institutions in
Chelsea were full of Bank Holiday babies sired by fugitive fathers".
The greatest single cause of maternal death is no longer sepsis
or haemorrhage. It is abortion which accounts for about 20% of such
deaths and, in the majority of cases, is the result of unskilled
interference. In this connection, a 1966 Report by the Council of
the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists comments that
termination of pregnancy is a second best. "The unwanted or harmful
pregnancy should not occur. Here is a field in which preventive
medicine has an important place If advice on contraception and
the necessary materials were made freely available to all who seek
them, by way of the hospital, general practitioner, or local health
authority services, the need for therapeutic abortion would not arise
so frequently. The Council takes the view that such arrangements
should be made, and made on the scale now necessary to satisfy the
public demand".
In the light of this, the local situation and the Government's
legislation and directives regarding family planning, the Council
have made arrangements whereby advice is freely available to all
married or unmarried persons through the medium of the Family
Planning Association.