Safe Marriage | Page 7

fashion:--
"The point is that large numbers of innocent women have suffered from disease. They are rendered sterile, have miscarriages and abortions, and large numbers have been ruined. I have been connected with the London County Asylums for twenty-five years, and I have seen in those asylums people from all states of society, and I have seen them die of general paralysis. Five per cent. of the people who get syphilis, in spite of treatment, develop this disease. That is only one aspect of it. I was on the Royal Commission on Venereal Disease, and Sir William Osier, who was a great authority, said that he could teach medicine on syphilis alone, because every tissue in the body is affected by it, and that the diseases of blindness, deafness, insanity and every form of disease may be due to syphilis. You have only to consider the effect that it had upon the army, and I understand that more than two army corps were invalided during the war on account of venereal disease. What have you to say to that? Does not that create some anxiety?"
It is difficult even to read this eloquent appeal--the more eloquent perhaps because it was quite unpremeditated--without being deeply moved. Yet the witnesses opposing Sir Frederick Mott were apparently unaffected. Of them, as of men of old, it might justly be said:--
"He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted."
And now large numbers of hospitals all over the Empire are issuing appeals for the means to treat venereal disease.
"It is tragic," says one London hospital, "to see the sufferers--men, women and even little children--innocent little mites, knowing not from what they suffer or why they should. It is thought by many that venereal disease is a sign of guilt, but large numbers of our patients are innocent victims."
Is it not time then that we all stopped repeating timid platitudes about making vice safe, and did something practical to make marriage safe?
Why don't we?
Is it because we are afraid to define the terms we use so glibly? We talk of promoting chastity, for example. What is chastity? Surely chastity is happy, healthy sexual intercourse between a man and a woman who love one another; and unchastity is sexual intercourse between those who do not love one another. No sexual intercourse at all is neither chastity nor unchastity; it is the negation of both, and it ends in extinction. Why trouble so much about a negation that inevitably means racial death? Why not devote ourselves to life and love; to the building of a happy healthy human family--a family that instinctively realises that the clean blood-stream of a nation is its most priceless possession?
But the national blood-stream can never be clean until there is a complete knowledge of sexual control and sanitation among all of us, and especially among women. One of the very first things which women must learn to understand is the control of conception and the control of venereal diseases. They must learn how to prevent the birth of the unfit; how to secure the birth of the fit; and even though their husbands are infective they must learn how to break the chain of infection in their own bodies, so that what is bad for the race does not become worse. If women are brave enough and wise enough, they can in most cases _wipe out the scourge of venereal diseases from their own hearths and homes_, and ensure that every child born is at least physically fit. But this cannot be done without knowledge, and that knowledge is at present lacking.
The following pages are written with the object of imparting useful, practical knowledge to sensible and serious women. The women who accept and apply this knowledge can rest calm in the sure and certain faith that it is their offspring who will build up the coming race.

II.--PRACTICAL METHODS OF PREVENTION.
A. FOR WOMEN:
SEXUAL REPRODUCTION.
To understand the practical methods of birth-control, or the control of conception, we must first have a clear view of the processes involved when the reproductive organs are in activity, and of the nature and situation of the sexual organs themselves. The diagrams on pages 34, 35 and 36 show in general outline the reproductive organs of man and woman.
Now fertilisation does not necessarily occur whenever the male organ comes in contact with the female organ. Fertilisation occurs only when a male-cell (spermatazoon) unites with a female-cell (ovum); in other words, when the spermatazoa in the seminal fluid of a man meet and unite with the germ or ovum in the body of a woman. That is the beginning of the child. This union of the two cells need not take place during or immediately after