It is difficult to know what percentage of the unwanted children born in the poorer quarters of our large towns are conceived as the result of a culpable aggression on the part of the husband upon his wife――as when he returns home drunk on Saturday night and threatens her with physical violence if she refuses to submit to his conjugal rights――or as the result of an ignorance of Birth Control methods which are familiar to the more educated classes. Certain it is that a large percentage of the children born are unwanted, and equally certain that among the very poor ignorance of contraception is such as to appear incredible to those who have not had personal experience of it. Thus in the Autumn of 1924 a group of seven externs, working in the district covered by Guy’s Hospital, made inquiries of the mothers whose confinements they attended as to whether the child just born had been wanted or not. The inquiries were made, when possible, on the tenth day, when the patients were last visited, in such a way that their answers were more likely to be favourably influenced by fondness for the child than unfavourably by recollection of the pains of labour. Furthermore, where any doubt existed, as for instance when a woman replied that she had not particularly desired the baby before it was born, but would not part with it for the world now, she was given the benefit of the doubt and the baby was counted as wanted. In all, inquiries were made in the case of seventy-eight children born. Out of these, forty-seven were definitely not wanted, and thirty-one wanted; and the writer can vouch for the fact that if these figures erred at all, they did so on the side of moderation. Thus, in at least one poor quarter of London, well over half of the children born were emphatically not wanted. The hardships imposed on the mother by such conditions are sometimes very cruel. Numerous cases have been quoted by advocates of Birth Control in their propaganda which there is not space to reproduce here. The reader can, however, picture to himself the experience of a woman suffering from the sickness, shortness of breath, emotional instability, and deformity of pregnancy, having to maintain life in some squalid slum, house-keeping, cooking, cleaning and tending the children without change of air or scene and without holidays, up till the incidence of the final labour pains. And no sooner is a child born than the husband reasserts his “rights,” and the same dismal cycle repeats itself without prospect or hope of change, or of relief from a body that has ceased to know the easy freedom and self-forgetfulness of good health.