The torturing agony of birth might so easily have been averted by Nature had the construction of our bodies differed but very slightly from those which we to-day possess in common with most of the higher animals. The human baby when the hour comes for it to sever its connection from its mother, and as an independent individual to venture into the open air of the world, has to make its way through the arched gateway of bone fixed and set by the mother’s own requirements as a frame to her own structure. The encircling archway of bone through which the infant has to pass is but three or four inches in diameter. It would have been possible had our evolution taken a different turn for the infant to have made its exit through the soft wall of the mother’s body instead of through this fixed and hardened circle of her bone. But for some causes too remote for us at present to discover this was not so, and the essential fact faces us to-day that every infant born naturally must be born through this circle of bone. Moreover if the infant is a well-developed and healthy one, as the ordinary baby of a healthy and beautiful young couple should naturally and rightly be, that infant’s head is larger in diameter than the circle of bone through which it has to pass. Its tissues have, therefore, to be squeezed and pressed to mould their shape in order to allow its exit through the orifice, and this must be a slow process, and one which almost always entails great pressure and consequent agony to the mother. Dr. Mary Scharlieb says in _The Welfare of the Expectant Mother_:-- It is, however, scarcely possible that either the public or the profession realizes that one woman dies in child birth for every 250 children born alive. In addition to this we have to remember that the same accidents and diseases which kill the mothers and the babies inevitably cause a still heavier percentage of crippling and invaliding (p. 43). Twenty-five per cent. and more of the babies conceived and borne die before they reach normal birth. Often they find the journey through the bony archway into the outer world so difficult and arduous a task that they perish in the process of birth, although probably had they been born by Cesarean section, they would have survived and grown into healthy children. We do not consider what the infant itself in birth may be enduring. The infant is “unconscious,” that is to say it carries no memory of these earlier months in its conscious memory as it grows up, but the excessive moulding, particularly of its head, which often has to take place and sometimes takes weeks to right itself, must, one thinks, greatly disturb the little brain, and in my opinion may have a lifelong effect.