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 d