THE MALTHUSIAN, May 15, 1914. Sexual Ethics. A Study of Borderland Questions. Robert Michels, (Review).
Prof. Michels perceives that race control has two aspects; it may be an urgent duty, and it is in any case an inalienable human right. It may be regarded as a duty to actual or potential children, in view of either bad economic conditions,—such as affect the bulk of all European populations,—or defective heredity, and it may also be considered as an obligation of humanity towards the wife and mother. Prof. Michels here speaks with no uncertain voice: “The type of woman continually engaged in child-bearing is a primitive one, out of harmony with the needs and ideas of modern civilized life. Even as few as six pregnancies that go to full term rob a woman of about ten years of her life, and these the best. It is evidently far easier to provide a clear-sighted affection and a wisely conceived and individualized upbringing for two or three children than it is for eight or nine.”
MR. SIDNEY WEBB, in The Times of October 16, 1906.
Assuming, as I think we may, that no injury to physical health is necessarily involved (in the volitional regulation of the marriage state); aware, on the contrary, that the result is to spare the wife from an onerous and even dangerous illness for which in the vast majority of homes no adequate provision in the way of medical attendance, nursing, privacy, rest, and freedom from worry can possibly be made, it is, to say the least of it, difficult on any rationalist morality to formulate any blame of a married couple for the deliberate regulation of their family according to their means and opportunities.
PERNICIOUS VOMITING
THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF OBSTETRICS. By Joseph B. De Lee, M.D.
Among diseases incidental to pregnancy must be counted pernicious vomiting. Page 370.
Statistics are uncertain, but out of 118 cases there were 46 deaths. Page 357.
The keynote of treatment is to stop the gestation at a point before either mother or child, or both, are in danger to life or to health. Page 1041.
THE PRACTICE OF OBSTETRICS. By J. Clifton Edgar, M.D., Professor of Obstetrics and Clinical Midwifery in the Cornell University Medical College; Visiting Obstetrician to Bellevue Hospital, New York City; Surgeon to the Manhattan Maternity and Dispensary; Consulting Obstetrician of the New York Maternity and Jewish Maternity Hospitals, New York City.