CONCEPTION—ITS LIMITATIONS.
1. A COMMON QUESTION.—The question is often asked, "Can Conception
be prevented at all times?" Let us say right here that even if such an
interference with nature's laws were possible it is inadmissible, and
never to be justified except in cases of deformity or disease.
2. FALSE CLAIMS OF IMPOSTERS.—During the past few years a great deal
has been written on the subject, claiming that new remedies had been
discovered for the prevention of conception, etc., but these are all
money making devices to deceive the public, and enrich the pockets of
miserable and unprincipled imposters.
3. THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER.—Dr. Pancoast, an eminent authority, says: "The truth is, there is no medicine taken internally capable of preventing conception, and the person who asserts to the contrary, not only speaks falsely, but is both a knave and a fool."
4. FOOLISH DREAD OF CHILDREN.—What is more deplorable and pitiable
than an old couple childless? Young people dislike the care and
confinement of children and prefer society and social entertainments
and thereby do great injustice and injury to their health. Having
children under proper circumstances never ruins the health and
happiness of any woman. In fact, womanhood is incomplete without them. She may have a dozen or more, and still have better health than before marriage. It is having them too close together, and when she is not in a fit state, that her health gives way.
5. SELF-DENIAL AND FORBEARANCE.—If the husband respects his wife he
will come to her relief by exercising self-denial and forbearance, but
sometimes before the mother has recovered from the effects of bearing, nursing and rearing one child, ere she has regained proper tone and vigor of body and mind, she is unexpectedly overtaken, surprised by the manifestation of symptoms which again indicate pregnancy. Children thus begotten cannot become hardy and long-lived. But the love that parents may feel for their posterity, by the wishes for their success, by the hopes for their usefulness, by every consideration for their future well-being, let them exercise caution and forbearance until the wife becomes sufficiently healthy and enduring to bequeath her own rugged, vital stamina to the child she bears in love.
6. A WRONG TO THE MOTHER AND CHILD.—Sometimes the mother is diseased; the outlet from the womb, as a result of laceration by a previous child-birth, is frequently enlarged, thus allowing conception to take place very readily, and hence she has children in rapid succession. Besides the wrong to the mother in having children in such rapid succession, it is a great injustice to the babe in the womb and the one at the breast that they should follow each other so quickly that one is conceived while the other is nursing. One takes the vitality of the other; neither has sufficient nourishment, and both are started in life stunted and incomplete.
7. FEEBLE AND DISEASED PARENTS.—If the parties of a marriage are both
feeble and so adapted to each other that their children are deformed, insane or idiots, then to beget offspring would be a flagrant wrong; if the mother's health is in such a condition as to forbid the right of laying the burden of motherhood upon her, then medical aid may safely come to her relief.
8. "THE DESIRABILITY AND PRACTICABILITY of limiting offspring," says
Dr. Stockham, are the subject of frequent inquiry. Fewer and better
children are desired by right-minded parents. Many men and women, wise
in other things of the world, permit generation as a chance result
of copulation, without thought of physical or mental conditions to
be transmitted to the child. Coition, the one important act of all
others, carrying with it the most vital results, is usually committed
for selfish gratification. Many a drunkard owes his lifelong appetite
for alcohol to the fact that the inception of his life could be
traced to a night of dissipation on the part of his father. Physical
degeneracy and mental derangements are too often caused by the parents
producing offspring while laboring under great mental strain or bodily
fatigue. Drunkenness and licentiousness are frequently the heritage of
posterity. Future generations demand that such results be averted by
better prenatal influences. The world is groaning under the curse of
chance parenthood. It is due to posterity that procreation be brought
under the control of reason and conscience.