The Rights of Mothers : Part 1

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

(Page 19 of 28)

We reach here a central question which must be approached from the right point of view or we should certainly fail to solve it. That point of view is the child's. There is a school of thought which approaches the question otherwise - on abstract principles of justice and individual independence. The only objection to them is that, if upheld on modern conditions, these principles would soon leave us without anyone to uphold them. The relation of the mother to the State is central and fundamental, however considered, and the principles on which it must be settled must, above all, be principles which are compatible with the fundamental conditions on which States can endure.

Those principles, surely, are two. The first is that in a State we are members one of another, and that those who need help must be helped. This will be indignantly repudiated by a stern school of thought, but what if it applies, everywhere, always and above all, to children? They are members of the community who need help and they must be helped. The second principle is indeed only a special case of the first. It is that if the State is to continue, it must rear children.

We take it then, first, that the moral and social law is perfectly final as to the right of every child to existence. There are no principles of national welfare which can divorce us from the simple truth that we must regard every human individual as sacred from the moment of its coming into existence - and that is a long time before birth. A familiar medical dogma is, "Keep everything alive." There may be exceptions to it, but it is dangerous to discuss them with the unprepared. The only safe principle is to maintain, as long as possible, the life of all - the centenarian or the embryo conceived since the sun set. At times the State deliberately takes life on behalf of life. The sentence of execution passed upon the murderer may be warrantable passed by the State of the future or its officers upon a monstrous birth, a baby riddled with congenital syphilis or some such horrible fruit of our present carelessness and wickedness in such matters.

The State may regard such children or their survival as illegitimate, since the laws of nature as we see them at work throughout the living world do not approve the survival of such. Apart from these cases, all children are legitimate, and all children are natural. Whatever the history of the reader's parents, he or she was assuredly both a legitimate child and a natural child - a paradox which may be left to the solution of the curious. Directly a new human being has been conceived, its right to existence and survival may be conceded. Vast numbers of human beings are conceived every year whose conception is a sin against themselves and the State. That is a question on which the present writer has written and spoken incessantly for years, and which no one can accuse him of neglecting. But here we have to deal with the facts of the world as they are and as they will be for some time to come.

All children are to be cared for. No child should die; there should be no infant mortality; the children that are not fit to live should not be conceived, and those that are fit to live should be allowed to live; all children are legitimate. If the State has any kind of business at all, this is its business.

Our subject here, the reader may say, is not children, but woman and womanhood. The reply is that unless we have our principles rightly formulated, we cannot solve this question of the rights of women as mothers. Failing our principles, we should be reduced to the prejudices which serve as principles for our political parties. We should have individualist and socialist at loggerheads, the friends of marriage and its enemies, and many other opposing parties who cannot solve the question for us because they have not waited first to discover its fundamentals. The rights of mothers can be approached only from the point of view of the rights of children. We may happen to believe, as the present writer certainly does, that parents should be responsible for their children.

He once lectured for, and published the lectures in association with, a body called the British Constitution Association, which holds the same belief, but when he found as he did that protests were raised against any suggestion to help children whose parents do not do their duty, it became plain that principles which were right in a merely secondary and conditional way were being made absolute and fundamental. The fundamental is that the child should be cared for; the conditional and secondary principle is that this is best effected through the parents. To say that if the parents will not do it, the child must be left to starve, is immoral and indecent. Worse words than those, if such exist, would be required to describe our neglect of illegitimate infancy; our cruelty toward widows and orphans; our utterly careless maintenance of the conditions which produce these hapless beings in such vast numbers.

If every child is sacred, every mother is sacred. If every child is to be cared for, every mother must be cared for. It is true that we may make experiment with devices for superseding the mother. Man has impudent assurance enough for anything, and if Nature has been working at the perfection of an instrument for her purpose during a few score million years - an instrument such as the mammalian mother, for instance - man is quite prepared to invent social devices, such as the incubator, the crèche, the infant milk depot, and so forth; not merely to make the best of a bad case when the mother fails, but to supersede the mother altogether directly the baby is born. Such cases, except in the last resort, are more foolish than words can say. We have to save our children; we can only do so effectively through the naturally appointed means for saving children, which is motherhood. The rights of mothers follow as a necessary consequence from our first principle, which was the rights of children. Because every child must be protected, every mother must be protected, if not in one way, in another.

The State may not be able to afford this. The necessities of existence may be so difficult to obtain, not to mention for a moment such luxuries as alcohol and motor-cars and warships and fine clothes and art, and so forth, that no arrangements for the support of motherhood can be made. If we lay down the proposition that no mother should work because she is already doing the supreme work, it may be replied that this is economically impossible; the thing cannot be done. The only reply to this is that the State which cannot afford to provide rightly for the means of its continuance had better discontinue, and must in any case soon do so. Motherhood is rapidly declining as a numerical fact in civilized communities generally. Not merely does the birth-rate fall persistently and without the slightest regard to the commentators thereon, but it will continue to do so for many years to come.

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