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maternity, and aims to supply GRATIS medical and nursing facilities
to slum mothers. Such women are to be visited by nurses and to receive
instruction in the "hygiene of pregnancy"; to be guided in making
arrangements for confinements; to be invited to come to the doctor's
clinics for examination and supervision. They are, we are informed, to
"receive adequate care during pregnancy, at confinement, and for one
month afterward." Thus are mothers and babies to be saved. "Childbearing
is to be made safe." The work of the maternity centers in the various
American cities in which they have already been established and in which
they are supported by private contributions and endowment, it is hardly
necessary to point out, is carried on among the poor and more docile
sections of the city, among mothers least able, through poverty and
ignorance, to afford the care and attention necessary for successful
maternity. Now, as the findings of Tredgold and Karl Pearson and the
British Eugenists so conclusively show, and as the infant mortality
reports so thoroughly substantiate, a high rate of fecundity is always
associated with the direst poverty, irresponsibility, mental defect,
feeble-mindedness, and other transmissible taints. The effect of
maternity endowments and maternity centers supported by private
philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most
dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the
function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute
necessity is to discourage it.

Such "benevolence" is not merely superficial and near-sighted. It
conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face
unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women
to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the
human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question
its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never
the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and
often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the
choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after to time to bring
children into the world. It merely says "Increase and multiply: We are
prepared to help you do this." Whereas the great majority of mothers
realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing
the children they have already brought into the world, the maternit