The power of parenthood ought no longer to be exercised by _all_, however inferior, as an “individual right.” It is profoundly a duty and a privilege, and it is essentially the concern of the whole community. It should be the policy of the community to encourage in every way the parenthood of those whose circumstances and conditions are such that there is a reasonable anticipation that they will give rise to healthy, well-endowed future citizens. It should be the policy of the community to discourage from parenthood all whose circumstances are such as would make probable the introduction of weakened, diseased or debased future citizens. It is the urgent duty of the community to make parenthood impossible for those whose mental and physical conditions are such that there is well-nigh a certainty that their offspring must be physically and mentally tainted, if not utterly permeated by disease. That the community should allow syphilitic parents to bring forth a sequence of blind syphilitic infants is a state of affairs so monstrous that it would be hardly credible were it not a fact. Parenthood, with the divine gift of love in its power, with the glorious potentialities of handing on a radiant, wholesome, beautiful youth should be a sacred and preserved gift, a privilege only to be exercised by those who rationally comprehend the counter-balancing duties. But so long as parenthood is kept outside the realm of rational thought and reasoned action, so long will we as a race slide at an ever-increasing speed towards the utter deterioration of our stock through the reckless increase of the debased, which is necessarily counter-balanced by the unnatural limiting of the families of the more educated and responsible, whose sense of duty to the unborn forbids them to bring into the world children whom they cannot educate and environ at least as well as they themselves were reared.