7. FOOLISH DREAD OF CHILDREN.--What is more deplorable and pitiable than an old couple childless. Young people dislike the care and confinement of children and prefer society and social entertainments and thereby do great injustice and injury to their health and fit themselves in later years to visit infirmities and diseases upon their children. The vigilant and rigid measures which have to be resorted to in order to prevent conception for a period of years unfits many a wife for the production of healthy children. {242} 8. HAVING CHILDREN under proper circumstances never ruins the health and happiness of any woman. In fact, womanhood is incomplete without them. She may have a dozen or more, and still have better health than before marriage. It is having them too close together, and when she is not in a fit state, that her health gives way. Sometimes the mother is diseased; the outlet from the womb, as a result of laceration by a previous child-birth, is frequently enlarged, thus allowing conception to take place very readily, and hence she has children in rapid succession. Besides the wrong to the mother in having children in such rapid succession, it is a great injustice to the babe in the womb and the one at the breast that they should follow each other so quickly that one is conceived while the other is nursing. One takes the vitality of the other; neither has sufficient nourishment, and both are started in life stunted and incomplete. 9. "THE DESIRABILITY AND PRACTICABILITY of limiting offspring," says Dr. Stockham, "are the subject of frequent inquiry. Fewer and better children are desired by right-minded parents. Many men and women, wise in other things of the world, permit generation as a chance result of copulation, without thought of physical or mental conditions to be transmitted to the child. Coition, the one important act of all others, carrying with it the most vital results, is usually committed for selfish gratification. Many a drunkard owes his life-long appetite for alcohol to the fact that the inception of his life could be traced to a night of dissipation on the part of his father. Physical degeneracy and mental derangements are too often caused by the parents producing offspring while laboring under great mental strain or bodily fatigue. Drunkenness and licentiousness are frequently the heritage of posterity. Future generations demand that such results be averted by better pre-natal influences. The world is groaning under the curse of chance parenthood. It is due to posterity that procreation be brought under the control of reason and conscience.