Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 | Page 5

of
Eugenics--Ellen Key and Sir Francis Galton--Our Debt to
Posterity--The Problem of Replacing Natural Selection--The Origin
and Development of Eugenics--The General Acceptance of Eugenical
Principles To-day--The Two Channels by Which Eugenical Principles
are Becoming Embodied in Practice--The Sense of Sexual
Responsibility in Women--The Rejection of Compulsory
Motherhood--The Privilege of Voluntary Motherhood--Causes of the
Degradation of Motherhood--The Control of Conception--Now
Practiced by the Majority of the Population in Civilized Countries--The
Fallacy of "Racial Suicide"--Are Large Families a Stigma of
Degeneration?--Procreative Control the Outcome of Natural and
Civilized Progress--The Growth of Neo-Malthusian Beliefs and
Practices--Facultative Sterility as Distinct from
Neo-Malthusianism--The Medical and Hygienic Necessity of Control
of Conception--Preventive Methods--Abortion--The New Doctrine of
the Duty to Practice Abortion--How Far is this Justifiable?--Castration
as a Method of Controlling Procreation--Negative Eugenics and
Positive Eugenics--The Question of Certificates for Marriage--The
Inadequacy of Eugenics by Act of Parliament--The Quickening of the
Social Conscience in Regard to Heredity--Limitations to the
Endowment of Motherhood--The Conditions Favorable to
Procreation--Sterility--The Question of Artificial Fecundation--The
Best Age of Procreation--The Question of Early Motherhood--The Best
Time for Procreation--The Completion of the Divine Cycle of Life.




CHAPTER I.

THE MOTHER AND HER CHILD.
The Child's Right to Choose Its Ancestry--How This is Effected--The
Mother the Child's Supreme Parent--Motherhood and the Woman
Movement--The Immense Importance of Motherhood--Infant Mortality
and Its Causes--The Chief Cause in the Mother--The Need of Rest
During Pregnancy--Frequency of Premature Birth--The Function of the
State--Recent Advance in Puericulture--The Question of Coitus During
Pregnancy--The Need of Rest During Lactation--The Mother's Duty to
Suckle Her Child--The Economic Question--The Duty of the
State--Recent Progress in the Protection of the Mother--The Fallacy of
State Nurseries.
A man's sexual nature, like all else that is most essential in him, is
rooted in a soil that was formed very long before his birth. In this, as in
every other respect, he draws the elements of his life from his ancestors,
however new the recombination may be and however greatly it may be
modified by subsequent conditions. A man's destiny stands not in the
future but in the past. That, rightly considered, is the most vital of all
vital facts. Every child thus has a right to choose his own ancestors.
Naturally he can only do this vicariously, through his parents. It is the
most serious and sacred duty of the future father to choose one half of
the ancestral and hereditary character of his future child; it is the most
serious and sacred duty of the future mother to make a similar choice.[1]
In choosing each other they have between them chosen the whole
ancestry of their child. They have determined the stars that will rule his
fate.
In the past that fateful determination has usually been made helplessly,
ignorantly, almost unconsciously. It has either been guided by an
instinct which, on the whole, has worked out fairly well, or controlled
by economic interests of the results of which so much cannot be said,
or left to the risks of lower than bestial chances which can produce
nothing but evil. In the future we cannot but have faith--for all the hope
of humanity must rest on that faith--that a new guiding impulse,
reinforcing natural instinct and becoming in time an inseparable
accompaniment of it, will lead civilized man on his racial course. Just

as in the past the race has, on the whole, been moulded by a natural,
and in part sexual, selection, that was unconscious of itself and ignorant
of the ends it made towards, so in the future the race will be moulded
by deliberate selection, the creative energy of Nature becoming
self-conscious in the civilized brain of man. This is not a faith which
has its source in a vague hope. The problems of the individual life are
linked on to the fate of the racial life, and again and again we shall find
as we ponder the individual questions we are here concerned with, that
at all points they ultimately converge towards this same racial end.
Since we have here, therefore, to follow out the sexual relationships of
the individual as they bear on society, it will be convenient at this point
to put aside the questions of ancestry and to accept the individual as,
with hereditary constitution already determined, he lies in his mother's
womb.
It is the mother who is the child's supreme parent. At various points in
zoölogical evolution it has seemed possible that the functions that we
now know as those of maternity would be largely and even equally
shared by the male parent. Nature has tried various experiments in this
direction, among the fishes, for instance, and even among birds. But
reasonable and excellent as these experiments were, and though they
were sufficiently sound to secure their perpetuation unto this day, it
remains true that it was