This was before the war, and England was less enlightened, less eager for medical women’s assistance than the war has made her, and it was then a fight for a girl to get a footing in the hospitals for the wide experience she needed for a general practice.
I vowed to myself that I would never forget that mother, and that some day I would batter at the brazen gates of knowledge on her behalf.
Here was a mother with a glimmering of the truth, seeking passionately for knowledge from the one person she had a right to turn to for this knowledge, and she was put off with lies, encouraged again to bear the cost of a hopelessly doomed birth; to risk the agonies of child-birth, to bring into the world a creature who for a short spell would be tormented and then would cost her a coffin.
By refusing his scientific advice, that doctor in reality sent that woman, whose desire to know was stirred, to the gossip of the slum alley and the street corner. There she would get a blurred and inaccurate, if not actually harmful, idea of what he should have been able to tell her in a clean, simple language based on scientific fact.
When this is put down on paper, I feel as though it would be ridiculous to begin to point out the monstrous cruelty and the monstrous folly of such an action as that doctor’s. Yet such action was not isolated, it did not depend on one man’s warped conceptions of loyalty to another unknown man, “the husband.” Since the war a public realization of the racial destructiveness of such diseases has been increased and the woman and her husband would to-day be more likely to receive medical treatment.
But even to-day if a mother is truly told that there is “something wrong with her man,” would she also certainly be told how in wise and healthy fashion she can herself supplement what his criminal negligence neglected? If a husband is careless and callous a woman must save herself and the community from the waste and the misery of irretrievably doomed births.
She will indeed be an exceptionally lucky woman if she to-day finds in public hospitals doctors to whom she could turn for knowledge how best to control conception, though such knowledge is not only essential to her private well-being, but essential to her in the fulfilment of her duties as a citizen.
This little incident is but one illustration of many aspects of the subject. It is not only disease which necessitates restraint on parenthood. No healthy woman can bear a long series of infants in rapid succession without loss both to them and to herself. This is discussed in my Wise Parenthood.
Any one who thinks will see clearly that no civilized country, not even the richest in the world, can afford babies’ coffins. Though they are smaller than grown-up people’s they are more costly, for they are waste and nothing but waste. A grown-up individual, man or woman, has, we hope at any rate, given some return to the community in work or in ideas for all that his life has cost. But the infant’s death is sheer unmitigated waste.