The lawmakers who prevented that woman from having an operation performed legally, (which would remove the fear of crime) safely, by a reputable practitioner, (which would remove the fear of consequences), openly, (which would remove the fear of social ostracism), would have been responsible for the death of several people, had she not accidentally awakened her husband by upsetting a chair on her way back to her bed.
There are thousands of neurotics, suffering from a feeling of inferiority, who are unfit to become mothers until their morbidity has been cured by psychotherapy, and who, if allowed to bear children, will train a new generation to behave in a negative, neurotic, socially baneful way.
The Children of Neurotic Mothers, in whom the fear and hatred of sex and love is rampant, will some day become prostitutes or puritans, both of them degrading love equally.
I cannot follow Freud when he states that every neurosis has its root in a failure of the love life, but some of the artificial obstacles created by a stupid puritanical civilisation between man and the full realisation of his sexual goal have not infrequently wrecked a life which, neurotically oriented as it was, might have gone on, in a socially tolerable way, for years and perhaps until the individual's death.
Difficulties due to the use of improper or misunderstood contraceptive appliances, the terrors of pregnancy, actual or expected, the fear of abortion, the sufferings following abortion in a complex-ridden organism, have too often upset a balance which at best was precarious.
Birth Control and Indulgence. Certain critics of birth control attack it on the ground that it would lead to "overindulgence" of the sex relationship. Those people are generally unprepossessing, worn, individuals who are trying to compensate for their sexual weakness by making a virtue out of an unavoidable inferiority. Their opposition to what they call "overindulgence" (one thing which nature hardly ever allows, barring rare morbid cases of priapism) is grotesque in the case of married couples.
More unions are wrecked by underindulgence due to fear, ignorance of the mates or inhibitions on the part of one or both, than to indulgence of the normal kind.
Anything which prevents or discourages the normal exchange of sexual caresses between those legally entitled to each others enjoyment is pernicious, antisocial and antibiological for, as Grace Potter writes:
"Mating has to do with other creation than that of new human beings. It has to do with every kind of creation—a new state, a poem, a picture, a great bridge, a happier world. Mating is concerned with repeopling the world but also with regeneration of the individual, opening his capacities to growth. Who shall say that the one is not as important as the other? If the second were not as important as the first there would have been hardly any advance in human culture. Of all the errors incident to the development of human beings, in their struggle to attain a consciousness that makes them more than animals, none has had wider ill-effects than our misuse of love.
"There are two equally unfortunate attitudes toward love which perhaps grow out of each other. The one is the puritan attitude and the other is the vulgar one. The puritan attitude is that sex impulses are somehow vile and so, altho they give pleasure, must be denied. The vulgar attitude takes it for granted that sex impulses are vile but as they are pleasant are to be accepted. The one tends to deny physical values to love. This is suppression. The other tends to deny tender values to love. That is suppression also. They have neither one known love. And finally the puritan becomes incapable of tenderness and the vulgar becomes equally incapable of physical expression. It is not a beautiful picture.