most desirable to be preserved.

Given the fundamental assumption that the group is to survive--to be
perpetuated by the one possible means--if it withdraws all solicitude
about the handicap this entails to women as a whole, introducing a
spirit of laissez-faire competition between men and women, the women
with sense enough to see the point will not encumber themselves with
children. For each one of these who has no children, some other woman
must have six instead of three. And some people encourage this in the
name of democracy!

The most involved problems must inevitably centre around the women who,
to quote Mrs. Hollingworth, "vary from the mode," but are yet
functional for sex. Some have no sex desires at all, some no craving for
or attachment to children, some neither of these. It is a question still
to be solved whether some of them ought, in the interest of the race, to
be encouraged to reproduce themselves. In less individualized primitive
society, seclusion, taboo and ignorance coerced them into reproduction.
Any type of control involving the inculcation of "moral" ideas is open
to the objection that it may work on those who should not reproduce
themselves as well as those who should.

In a sense, this problem will tend to solve itself. With the
substitution of the more rationalized standards of self-interest and
group loyalty for the irrational taboo control of reproductive
activities, there will be as much freedom for women to choose whether
they will accept maternity as there is now, in the period of transition
from the old standards to the new. The chief difference will be that
many of the artificial forces which are acting as barriers to motherhood
at the present time--as for example the economic handicap involved--will
be removed, and woman's choice will therefore be more entirely in
harmony with her native instinctive tendencies. Thus those women endowed
with the most impelling desire for children will, as a rule, have the
largest number. In all probability their offspring will inherit the
same strong parental instinct. The stocks more poorly endowed with this
impulse will tend to die out by the very lack of any tendency to
self-perpetuation. It is only logical to conclude, therefore, that as we
set up the new forces of social control outlined in this chapter, we are
at the same time providing more scope for natural selection, and that
the problem of aberrant types consequently becomes only a transitor