Even this will not be enough. Birth control measures will have to become lawful and the subject of careful scientific teaching before woman can hope to lead her life unenslaved to her children's father.
What of the Child? Besides, in free love arrangements, the mates are not the only parties to be considered. There is a party of the third part: the children, if any.
If a perfectly independent male decides to cohabit for an indefinite period of time with a perfectly independent female, the community can hardly interpose any objection. For after all, most of our ethical indignation at the thought of temporary unions is due to the miserly fear of the community lest a pregnant woman and fatherless children be thrown upon it for support. No one's rights would be trespassed upon by such arrangements, ephemeral as they might be. As they would not cost anyone any money they would be considered acceptable. When a self supporting Sarah Bernhardt or Isadora Duncan bears children out of wedlock and we run no risk of being taxed for the support of her "illegitimate" progeny, we assume more liberal views than we would should a stenographer or a switchboard operator commit the same "errors."
When children are the outcome of any form of union, however, the psychoanalyst, broad as he may be, is compelled to remember the pitiful stories he has heard in his office. No neurotic ever had a pleasant childhood. No neurotic was the child of a father and mother united by real love and manifesting within the family circle the mutual tenderness which is the poetry or the music of the home.
Disharmony Between the Parents, culminating in divorce or desertion, has wrecked the future of thousands of children. Not every unhappy home has produced neurotics, but, every neurotic is the product of undesirable home conditions.
Furthermore, it seems as tho a child in order to reach normal adulthood should be brought up by both a male and female. Many male homosexuals I have observed were brought up by a widowed mother or a woman abandoned by her husband or lover. In other cases, impotence or frigidity affected respectively boys and girls who had lost the parent of the same sex. Many other disturbances of the mental life, due to incompleteness of the parental environment or to its imperfection, could be mentioned if the limits of this book would permit.
From the point of view of psychiatry, there is only one answer to be given to the question if free love is acceptable. Free love must be supplemented by birth control. Those free lovers who decide to procreate children must also agree to live together until the youngest of their offspring has reached at least its fifteenth year.
Creating children with the intention of turning them over to some charitable institution is also a proposition which to a student of mental disturbances appears just short of criminal.
The Institution Child. Few children thrive well mentally or physically under institutional treatment.