The most
merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members
is to kill it. The same factors which create the terrible infant
mortality rate, and which swell the death rate of children between the
ages of one and five, operate even more extensively to lower the
health rate of the surviving members. Moreover, the overcrowded homes
of large families reared in poverty further contribute to this
condition. Lack of medical attention is still another factor, so that
the child who must struggle for health in competition with other
members of a closely packed family has still great difficulties to
meet after its poor constitution and malnutrition have been accounted
for.
The probability of a child handicapped by a weak constitution, an
overcrowded home, inadequate food and care, and possibly a deficient
mental equipment, winding up in prison or an almshouse, is too evident
for comment. Every jail, hospital for the insane, reformatory and
institution for the feebleminded cries out against the evils of too
prolific breeding among wage-workers.
We shall see when we come to consider the relation of voluntary
motherhood to the rights of labor and to the prevention of war that
the large family of the worker makes possible his oppression, and that
it also is the chief cause of such human holocausts as the one just
closed after the four and a half bloodiest years in history.
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