WHEN SHOULD A WOMAN AVOID HAVING CHILDREN?
Are overburdened mothers justified in their appeals for contraceptives
or abortions? What shall we say to women who write such letters as
those published in the preceding chapter? Will anyone, after reading
those letters, dare to say to these women that they should go on
bringing helpless children into the world to share their increasing
misery?
The women who thus cry for aid are the victims of ignorance. Awakening
from that ignorance, they are demanding relief. Had they been
permitted a knowledge of their sex functions, had they had some
guiding principle of motherhood, those who at this late day are asking
for contraceptives would have swept aside all barriers and procured
them long ago. Those who are appealing for abortions would never have
been in such a situation.
To say to these women that they should continue their helpless
breeding of the helpless is stupid brutality. The facts set forth
earlier in this book, and the cries of tortured motherhood which echo
through the letters just referred to, are more than ample evidence
that there are times when it is woman's highest duty to refuse to bear
children.
There has seemed to be a great deal of disagreement among the medical
authorities who have attempted to say when a woman should not have
children. This disagreement has been rendered even more confusing by a
babel of voices from the ranks of sociologists. Within the past few
years, however, so much light has been shed upon the subject that it
is now comparatively easy for the student to separate the well-founded
conclusions from those which are of doubtful value, or plainly
worthless. The opinions which I summarize here are not so much my own,
originally, as those of medical authorities who have made deep and
careful investigations. There is, however, nothing set forth here
which I have not in my own studies tested and proved correct. In
addition to carrying the weight of the best medical authority, a fact
easily confirmed by the first specialist you meet, they are further
reinforced by the findings of the federal Children's Bureau, and other
organizations which have examined infant mortality and compiled rates.
To the woman who wishes to have children, we must give these answers
to the question when not to have them.
Childbearing should be avoided within two or three years after the
birth of the last child. Common sense and science unite in pointing
out that the mother requires at least this much time to regain her
strength and replenish her system in order to give another baby proper
nourishment after its birth. Authorities are insistent upon their
warnings that too frequent childbearing wrecks the woman's health.
Weakness of the reproductive organs and pelvic ailments almost
certainly result if a woman bears children too frequently.
By all means there should be no children when either mother or father
suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis,
cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness and mental disorders. In the
case of the mother, heart disease, kidney trouble and pelvic
deformities are also a serious bar to childbearing.
Thousands of volumes have been written by physicians upon the danger
to mothers and offspring of having children when one or both parents
are suffering from the diseases mentioned above. As authorities have
pointed out in all these books, the jails, hospitals for the insane,
poorhouses and houses of prostitution are filled with the children
born of such parents, while an astounding number of their children are
either stillborn or die in infancy.
These facts are now so well known that they would need little
discussion here, even if space permitted. Miscarriages, which are
particularly frequent in cases of syphilis and pelvic deformities, are
a great source of danger to the health and even to the life of the
mother. Where either parent suffers from gonorrhea, the child is in
danger of being born blind. Tuberculosis in the parent leaves the
child's system in such condition that it is likely to suffer from the
disease. Childbearing is also a grave danger to the tubercular mother.
A tendency to insanity, if not insanity itself, may be transmitted to
the child, or it may be feebleminded if one of the parents is insane
or suffers from any mental disorder. Drunkenness in the parent or
parents has been found to be the cause of feeblemindedness in the
offspring and to leave the child with a constitution too weak to
resist disease as it should.
No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy
themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally
defective. No matter how much they desire children, no man and woman
have a right to bring into the world those who are to suffer from
mental or physical affliction. It condemns the child to a life of
misery and places upon the community the burden of caring for it,
probably for its defective descendants for many generations.
Generally speaking, no woman should bear a child before she is twenty-two
years old. It is better still that she wait until she is twenty-five.
High infant mortality rates for mothers under twenty-two attest
this fact. It is highly desirable from the mother's standpoint to
postpone childbearing until she has attained a ripe physical and
mental development, as the bearing and nursing of infants interferes
with such development. It is also all important to the child; the
offspring of a woman who is twenty-five or somewhat older has the best
chance of good physical and mental equipment.
In brief, a woman should avoid having children unless both she and the
father are in such physical and mental condition as to assure the
child a healthy physical and mental being. This is the answer that
must be made to women whose children are fairly sure of good care,
sufficient food, adequate clothing, a fit place to live and at least a
fair education.
A distinctly different and exceedingly important side of the problem
must be considered when the women workers, the wives and the mothers
of workers, wish to know when to avoid having children. Such a woman
must answer her own question. What anyone else may tell her is far
less important than what she herself shall reply to a society that
demands more and more children and which gives them less and less when
they arrive.
What shall this woman say to a society that would make of her body a
reproductive machine only to waste prodigally the fruit of her being?
Does society value her offspring? Does it not let them die by the
hundreds of thousands of want, hunger and preventable disease? Does it
not drive them to the factories, the mills, the mines and the stores
to be stunted physically and mentally? Does it not throw them into the
labor market to be competitors with her and their father? Do we not
find the children of the South filling the mills, working side by side
with their mothers, while the fathers remain at home? Do we not find
the father, mother and child competing with one another for their
daily bread? Does society not herd them in slums? Does it not drive
the girls to prostitution and the boys to crime? Does it educate them
for free-spirited manhood and womanhood? Does it even give them during
their babyhood fit places to live in, fit clothes to wear, fit food to
eat, or a clean place to play? Does it even permit the mother to give
them a mother's care?
The woman of the workers knows what society does with her offspring.
Knowing the bitter truth, learned in unspeakable anguish, what shall
this woman say to society? The power is in her hands. She can bring
forth more children to perpetuate these conditions, or she can
withhold the human grist from these cruel mills which grind only
disaster.
Shall she say to society that she will go on multiplying the misery
that she herself has endured? Shall she go on breeding children who
can only suffer and die? Rather, shall she not say that until society
puts a higher value upon motherhood she will not be a mother? Shall
she not sacrifice her mother instincts for the common good and say
that until children are held as something better than commodities upon
the labor market, she will bear no more? Shall she not give up her
desire for even a small family, and say to society that until the
world is made fit for children to live in, she will have no children
at all?