“There is nothing on earth like the times of waiting,
The days of springtime, the days of blossoming;
Not even May can diffuse a light
Like the clear light of April.”
On the other hand, it is a demand of true morality that healthy men and women between the ages of twenty and thirty years should enjoy the possibility of marriage—of free marriage. This possibility can, however, be secured only by economic reforms.
The author then considers the very important point of love’s choice, and demands above all the compulsory provision of a medical certificate of health before entering on marriage.
“It is absolutely beyond question that the healthy self-seeking which wishes to safeguard the personal ego, in conjunction with the increasing valuation of a healthy posterity, will hinder the contraction of many unsuitable marriages. In other cases, love might overcome these considerations, as far as husband and wife are themselves concerned; but they must then renounce parentage. In those cases, on the contrary, in which the law would distinctly forbid marriage, one could naturally not prevent the sick persons from procreating independently of marriage; but the same is true of all laws: the best do not need them, the worst do not obey them, but the majority are guided by them in the formation and development of their ideas of what is right.”
As immoral, Ellen Key indicates:
“Parentage without love.
“Irresponsible parentage.
“Parentage on the part of immature or degenerate human beings.
“Voluntary unfertility on the part of a married pair who are competent to reproduce their kind.
“All manifestations of the sexual life resulting from force or seduction, or from the disinclination or the incapacity for the proper fulfilment of sexual intercourse.”