Further, the law totally ignores the interests of the future in conspicuous cases where one or other possible parent is hopelessly unfit for such a function. In the interests not only of the individual but the future it would be advisable to grant divorce to a person whose partner had been confined in a lunatic asylum for, say five years, and who could be certified as likely to remain insane permanently, or whose partner had been confined in an Inebriates' Home for, say, two terms of one year, or who could be proved and certified to be an incurable drunkard.
We must abolish these atrocious Separation Orders, with their direct promotion of every kind of immorality, illegitimacy and cruelty to women. But perhaps this chapter may be brought to a close since in England the matter is now before a Royal Commission, and since our stupidities are of no direct interest to the American reader. It was necessary, however, to deal with the subject because of its immediate and urgent bearing upon many of the problems of Womanhood.
CHAPTER XIX
THE RIGHTS OF MOTHERS
We reach here a central question which must be approached from the right point of view or we shall 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 warrantably 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.