It needs no imagination to realize, when you have once grasped these facts, that poor people are much less able to spare the cost of a doomed baby than are the better class people. Then why do they so often indulge in this tragic luxury? Chiefly through lack of knowledge, through ignorance, particularly on the part of the mother.
Often ignorance is blind and unaware that it is ignorance, stupidly blundering through life; but this is not always the mother’s attitude. She may, indeed she often does, passionately desire knowledge and seek for it wherever she thinks she may find it in her restricted circle. Too tragically often she is baffled in her search.
Some years before the war, when I was lecturing at a Northern University, a little incident opened my eyes to this fact. I was young and had not encountered this aspect of life before, and it burnt itself into my consciousness as one of the most vivid impressions of my life. It was this:—
One of my students was a woman who was hoping to qualify as a medical doctor, and she was having tea with me and chatting about the events of the day. As part of her training she had been assisting the doctor in dealing with out-patients at a hospital, and a woman had brought in a miserable little baby, which wailed all the time and which the mother explained wouldn’t put on any flesh or grow into a nice, healthy baby whatever she did with it.
The mother, with tears in her eyes, made an intensely earnest appeal to the doctor to tell her what was to her unaccountably wrong with the infant.
She was a fine strapping woman, and thought her babies ought to be large and healthy. She said this was her third or fourth, and the others had all died when they were very little.
This happened more than seven years ago. Thank God our racial attitude has changed since then.
The doctor put her off with some soothing platitudes, but the woman driven to despair said: “I believe there’s something wrong with my man. If there’s something wrong with my man I won’t have babies no more—it’s just cruel to see them miserable like this and have them dying one after the other. Won’t you, for God’s sake, tell me whether there’s anything wrong with my man or not?” This appeal was met by the assurance that there was nothing wrong, and she should go on having babies and do her duty by her husband.
My medical woman student said that it was glaringly obvious that the baby was syphilitic.
I asked her why she did not immediately tell the mother the truth. She shrugged her shoulders and said: “I’ve got my exam. to pass; if I did a thing like that Dr. —— would stop me going to the hospital. I can’t afford to take risks like that. Why, he might not only stop me, but it would do the other women students a lot of harm too.”