"
The women who thus cry out are pleading not only for themselves and
their children, but for society itself. Their plea is for us and
ours--it is the plea for happier conditions, for higher ideals, for a
stronger, more vigorous, more highly developed race.
The letters in this chapter are the voices of humble prophets crying
out to us stop our national habit of human waste. They are warnings
against disaster which we now share and must continue to share as it
grows worse, unless we heed the warning and put our national house in
order.
Each and every unwanted child is likely to be in some way a social
liability. It is only the wanted child who is likely to be a social
asset. If we have faith in this intuitive demand of the unfortunate
mothers, if we understand both its dire and its hopeful significance,
we shall dispose of those social problems which so insistently and
menacingly confront us today. For the instinct of maternity to protect
its own fruits, the instinct of womanhood to be free to give something
besides surplus of children to the world, cannot go astray. The rising
generation is always the material of progress, and motherhood is the
agency for the improvement and the strengthening and guiding of that
generation.
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