This truism, applies to all cosmic action. Nature's laws are inviolable. Nature says that the child of the king and the child of the beggar shall be born in the self-same way. The child of the unmarried mother and the child of the married mother come into the world in accordance with the self-same law of reproduction. Nature may not be always polite, but she is always truthful.
As long as there is any question of the "legitimacy" of any birth, Humanity as a whole cannot be otherwise than inferior, because Humanity cannot rise higher than the ideal of the average. Moreover we are so interdependent that the whole must be affected by the conditions of a part.
Birth is right, or it is wrong. It cannot be right under some circumstances and wrong under others. The primal laws do not take into account our ideas of respectability.
The question then arises: "Are we to consider it moral and legitimate for women to have children before they have been married?"
The obvious answer to this question is, that the mother must be permitted to decide this for herself, since no one has a right to do it for her. Our right of interference in so intimate a matter must begin only at the point where her conduct injures us. If an unmarried woman chooses to give birth to a child, neither you nor I, nor Society is injured, not even if the child becomes a charge of the state, because the cost of maintaining a child is far less than that of maintaining insane asylums and penitentiaries—both of which result from our mistaken attitude toward the sex-relation.
If we are permitted to answer the question of morality and legitimacy by generalities, we will say that any child that comes into the world desired by the mother is born in accordance with the highest possible concept of the moral law. Whenever Society, Church and Governments shall unite to wipe out the stain upon mother and child because of failure to comply with our marriage laws, a better race of men and women will people the earth, because the race-thought will be one of welcome with all that word implies; whereas at the present time, under our undeveloped ideas of morality, doubt, suspicion, and condemnation prevail, with all that these words imply.
When all mothers are honored all women will be willing to be mothers.
As long as dishonor attaches to any instance of motherhood, it is inevitable that motherhood will be avoided, even to the point of child-murder. Not that this practice is confined to the women who would be dishonored by becoming mothers. It obtains rather more perhaps among those women whose wealth and ease would seem to make motherhood desirable. Judging from surface conditions only, one might not see the connection. But that is the trouble with our modern life. We do not look deeply enough to deal intelligently with causes. We are always seeking to check effects.
The average human being is little more than a phonographic record of the dominant race-thought, and race-thought ideas are contagious.
Let us honor and provide for all mothers and all children and we will find that the birthrate will increase among the "rich and respectable," where now we note a determined desire to shirk the responsibilities of parenthood.