ook forward to the happy realization of
motherhood with greater satisfaction."

The facts brought forward by obstetricians concerning the good
results of early pregnancy, as regards both mother and child,
have not yet received the attention they deserve. They are,
however, confirmed by many general tendencies which are now
fairly well recognized. The significant fact is known, for
instance, that in mothers over thirty, the proportion of
abortions and miscarriages is twice as great as in mothers
between the ages of fifteen and twenty, who also are superior in
this respect to mothers between the ages of twenty and thirty
(_Statistischer Jahrbuch_, Budapest, 1905). It was, again, proved
by Matthews Duncan, in his Goulstonian lecture, that the chances
of sterility in a woman increase with increase of age. It has,
further, been shown (Kisch, _Sexual Life of Woman_, Part II) that
the older a woman at marriage, the greater the average interval
before the first delivery, a tendency which seems to indicate
that it is the very young woman who is in the condition most apt
for procreation; Kisch is not, indeed, inclined to think that
this applies to women below twenty, but the fact, observed by
other obstetricians, that mothers under eighteen tend to become
pregnant again at an unusually short interval, goes far to
neutralize the exception made by Kisch. It may also be pointed
out that, among children of very young mothers, the sexes are
more nearly equal in number than is the case with older mothers.
This would seem to indicate that we are here in presence of a
normal equilibrium which will decrease as the age of the mother
is progressively disturbed in an abnormal direction.

The facility of parturition at an early age, it may be noted,
corresponds to an equal facility in physical sexual intercourse,
a fact that is often overlooked. In Russia, where marriage still
takes place early, it was formerly common when the woman was only
twelve or thirteen, and Guttceit (_Dreissig Jahre Praxis_, vol.
i, p. 324) says that he was assured by women who married at this
age that the first coitus presented no especial difficulties.

There is undoubtedly, at the present time, a considerable amount
of prejudice against early motherhood. In part, this is due to a
failure to realize that women are sex