On Choosing a Husband : Part 3

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 18 of 27)

But here it will be well to consider and meet a possible criticism. This is none the less necessary because there is a very common type of mind which listens to the enunciation of principles not in order to grasp them, but in order to point out exceptions. Such people forget that before one can profitably observe exceptions to a principle or a natural law it is necessary first of all to know rightly and wholly what the principle is. Now in this particular case our principle is that the cause of the future must not be betrayed, and the essential argument of this chapter is that faithfulness to the cause of the future does not involve, as is commonly supposed, any denial of the interests of the present, since, as I maintain, he who is best worth choosing as a partner for life is in general best worth choosing as a father of the future.

Now what one must here reckon with is the existence of individual cases, - much commoner doubtless in the imagination of critics than in reality, but nevertheless worthy of study - where a man may gain a woman's love of the real kind and may return it, and yet may be unfit for parenthood. The converse case is equally likely, but here we are concerned especially with the interests of the woman. She is, should we say, a nurse in a sanatorium for consumptives or, to suppose a case more critical and complicated still, she may herself be a patient in such a sanatorium. There she meets another patient with whom she falls in love. Now these two may be well fitted to make each other happy for so long as fate permits, but if the interests of the future are to be considered they should not become parents.

I must not be taken as here assenting to the old view, dating from a time when nothing was known of the disease, which regards consumption as hereditary. It is evident that quite apart from that question the couple of whom we are thinking should not become parents. It is possible that the disease may be completely cured, and the situation will then be altered. But only too often the patient's life will be much shortened and children will be left fatherless; they also in certain circumstances will run a grave risk of being infected by living with consumptive parents. If in the case we are supposing the woman be also consumptive, it is extremely probable that motherhood on her part would aggravate and hasten the course of the disease, it being well-known that pregnancy has an extremely unfavorable influence on consumption in the majority of cases.

Many other parallel cases may be imagined. Woman's love, based perhaps mainly upon the maternal instinct of tenderness, may be called forth by a man who suffers from, should we say, hemophilia or the bleeding disease. He may be in every way the best of men, worthy to make any woman happy; but if he becomes the father of a son, it will probably be to inflict great cruelty upon his child.

What, in a word, are we to say of such cases as these? There is here a real opposition, as it would appear, between the interests of the present and the interests of the future. But the answer is that, just because, and just in so far as, human beings are provident and responsible and worthy of the name of human beings, the opposition can be practically solved. Not for anything must we betray the cause of the unborn, but marriage does not necessarily involve parenthood, and the right course - the profoundly right and deeply moral course - in such cases as these, is marriage without parenthood.

On every hand in the civilized world we now see childless marriages, the number of which incessantly increases; they are an ominous symptom of excessive luxury and other factors of decadence, if history is to be trusted. But it is not permissible for us, without special knowledge, to condemn individuals, whatever we may think of the phenomenon as a whole. Yet convention and prejudice are curious things, and people who are themselves married and deliberately childless, others of both genders who are unmarried, people who have never raised their voices against themselves or their friends who, though married, are childless, because they have little courage or because they permit compliance with fashion's demands to stifle the best parts of their nature - such people, I say, will actually be found to protest, with the sort of canting righteousness which does its best to smirch the Right, against this doctrine, Marry, but do not have children, as the rule of life in the cases under discussion. Nevertheless, this is the moral doctrine; this is the right fruit of knowledge, and knowledge will more and more be applied to this high end, the service alike of the present and the future. We must not allow our minds to be bullied out of just reasoning because the possibility of marriage without parenthood is often abused.

All forms of knowledge, like all other forms of power, may be used or may be abused. Knowledge has no moral sign attached to it, but neither has it any immoral sign attached to it. The power to control parenthood is neither good nor evil, but like any other power may serve either good or evil. Dynamite may cause an explosion which buries a hundred men in a living grave, or it may blast the rock which buries them and set them free. The man of science is false to his creed and his cause if he declares that there is any order of knowledge or any kind of power which were better unknown or unavailable.

For many years past we have been told that the power to control parenthood is wicked, flying in the face of providence, interfering with the order of Nature - as if every act worthy of the human name were not an interference with the order of Nature, as Nature is conceived by fools; and even today the churches, violently differing from each other in the region of incomprehensible, are at least agreed in anathematizing the knowledge and the power to control parenthood. The reply to them is the demonstration, here made, of the fact that this knowledge may be used for no less splendid a purpose than to make possible the happiness and mutual ennoblement of individual lives in cases where otherwise such a consummation would have been impossible without betrayal of the life of this world to come.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.