The State may
regard such children or their survival as illegitimate, since the laws
of nature as we see them at work throughout the living world do not
approve the survival of such. Apart from these cases, all children are
legitimate, and all children are natural. Whatever the history of the
reader's parents, he or she was assuredly both a legitimate child and a
natural child--a paradox which may be left to the solution of the
curious. Directly a new human being has been conceived, its right to
existence and survival may be conceded. Vast numbers of human beings are
conceived every year whose conception is a sin against themselves and
the State. That is a question on which the present writer has written
and spoken incessantly for years, and which no one can accuse him of
neglecting. But here we have to deal with the facts of the world as they
are and as they will be for some time to come.
All children are to be cared for. No child should die; there should be
no infant mortality; the children that are not fit to live should not be
conceived, and those that are fit to live should be allowed to live; all
children are legitimate. If the State has any kind of business at all,
this is its business.
Our subject here, the reader may say, is not children, but woman and
womanhood. The reply is that unless we have our principles rightly
formulated, we cannot solve this question of the rights of women as
mothers.
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