New marriage laws needed.—One of the best remedies for the present divorce evil would be a campaign of education and legislation on courtship and marriage. Marriage needs to be elevated in the public mind to a plane of dignity, honor and responsibility. To secure this we need uniform state laws requiring of all candidates for marriage a fair knowledge of heredity and prenatal culture, the duties and responsibilities of marriage and parentage and of marital rights. For this to be possible, all candidates for marriage should be required to register their proposed marriage with the county clerk two months before the license is issued, and their proposed marriage should be published in at least one paper during this time. This would prevent clandestine and bigamous marriages and would deprive the White Slave procurer of one of his chief methods of securing his victims. When a proposed marriage is registered, the state should furnish each with a book presenting in simple language such information as is indicated above. They should be required to give evidence of having a fair knowledge of the facts contained in the book and to present a certificate of good physical and mental health before the license is finally issued.
How enforced.—These rules and laws should be taught, required and enforced in a spirit that would lead the public to see, and the candidates for marriage to feel, that these young people are assuming responsibilities and that the state is conferring an honor and trust upon them far greater than a governor-elect assumes and the state confers on him when he takes the oath of office. The home builder is a nation builder. Such education and legislation would not only promote domestic harmony, reduce the divorce evil, give to children a good heredity, but it would check the growth of all forms of human degeneracy and add to our nation’s strength and life and make for greater domestic happiness.
Effects of bad customs.—I would not censure those who have married in childhood. The mistake has been made. Bad customs have led many good people to make mistakes. The custom of thrusting little girls into society, resulting in immature marriages, should be checked.
Chief cause of homicide and suicide.—There are one and a half million children born in the United States annually. It is estimated that there are 250,000 abortions that come to medical attention. If this number require medical attention then there must be 100,000 who succeed without medical attention. One thousand prenatal murders a day. Then there must be 100,000 attempts to destroy unwelcome life which fail. Children born under these conditions cannot receive a good heredity. Many will be born with suicidal and homicidal tendencies. This is no doubt the chief cause of homicides and suicides. There were 172,000 illegal murders last year and nearly half that number of suicides. One homicide every thirty seconds and one suicide every seventy seconds is our criminal record. Crime has increased 300 per cent. above the normal increase of population in the last twenty years. Crime has increased two and one-half times faster among children than among adults. This last is due in part to a lack of moral training in the home and school, to the vivid and attractive portrayal of crime in the cheap shows, and at the same time it is largely due to the increase of abortion among mothers. The causes of crime among adults are as follows: fifteen per cent. of our foreign born population commit thirty-five per cent. of our crime, drunkenness, non-enforcement of law and criminal abortion. Some leading students of heredity believe that efforts to destroy unwelcome life is the principal cause of crime.
A doctor’s testimony.—At the close of a lecture in St. Louis, one of the doctors present told me of a lady in good standing in society and the church, who came to his office and requested his services in producing abortion. Her reason was that she had three children and her husband’s income was not sufficient to support four children. He suggested that if the presence of four children in the home would lead to the death of the whole family by starvation, that she return home and kill one of the three. She was horrified at the doctor’s suggestion that she murder one of the children. The doctor explained that if she followed his suggestion her health would be protected and there would be but one guilty of murder, while, if he followed her wish, her health would be injured and there would be two responsible for the murder of her unborn child. “But, doctor,” she replied, “that would not be murder, would it? I have not felt its movements.” The doctor explained to her how life began at the moment of conception, how the little embryo was as much a living human being as when it had become strong enough to make its movements known. The true mother-love triumphed and she returned home resolving to protect, love, welcome and toil for four instead of three.
Men as guilty as women.—Ignorance concerning sex, the rights of marriage and the double standard of marriage are responsible for this crime which exists in the church as well as on the outside. Men are fully as responsible for race suicide as women are.
Social and economic conditions are largely responsible for families shrinking from an average of eight children to two in less than a century. If these conditions were normal large families would be commendable. A large family of fourteen children will always be more honorable than an imitation consisting of a husband, wife and a poodle dog.
Sensible women are convinced that a family of from four to six children well born and well environed is wiser than double this number poorly born and poorly environed. They will, if necessary, prefer going through life childless to bearing defective children.
Two kinds of race suicide.—Criminal prevention and willful abortion. This is the only form of race suicide the public recognizes. This cannot be too severely condemned by the press, platform and pulpit. But there is another form of “race suicide,” equally great, but largely overlooked.
Defective children born of enslaved motherhood. Sensual men are largely responsible for this form. Which would be the greater crime, for a nation to pass out of existence because children are not born, or to have a dense population of paupers, idiots, imbeciles, thieves, suicides and homicides—the children of drunken, feeble-minded, criminal and otherwise defective parents, born of stupid ignorance and blind chance? Multiple child-bearing produces invalid wives and kills many loving mothers and fills our penitentiaries and asylums with delinquents.