The mortality statistics of the United States Census Bureau show that a little more than 42 per cent. of the infants who died in the registration area in 1911 did not last throughout the first month of extrauterine life, and of these babies almost seven-tenths died of prenatal and delivery abnormalities. In 1912, in the registration area, which then took in 63.2 per cent. of our population, the total death-rate of infants under a year old was 9035, and of these 3905 died of puerperal infection. In the entire country a very conservative estimate of the annual number of deaths of infants from puerperal sepsis is 5000; and about 15,000 women die here yearly from this etiology alone. Of course most of these deaths are caused by unclean midwives and quacks, but a large number of them are brought about by incontinent husbands. Invalidism from puerperal sepsis happens many times 15,000. Moreover, one-third of all the blindness in the world is caused by septic infection of the eyes at birth and virtually all this septic infection of the eyes is carried in by diseased husbands, although not necessarily by coitus during gestation. Coition during pregnancy is unnatural because it necessarily fails of the end of coition, which is procreation. Curiously, too, all the lower animals instinctively appear to avoid this act during pregnancy. Men should be told that marriage has restraints as well as celibacy. Women are reminded of the law of the debitum, but not of the occasions when they are even obliged to deny it. If a man cannot keep continent in the presence of his pregnant wife, let him live in another part of the house. Regard for the woman is lacking in many ways. Young girls often marry without having the faintest notion of sexual life, and they are panic-stricken when assaulted. I have known two who were frightened into insanity. Priests should tell young married men that they are human beings, not animals; that they should act like rational beings when they are first married; and that after the wife has become pregnant the husband should not be the cause of abortion in the first three months, nor of puerperal sepsis in the last three months. Priestley,[88] in 2325 pregnancies, found one abortion in every four pregnancies; Guillemot and Devilliers in France, Hirst in Philadelphia, and others report the same proportion. These are natural, not criminal, abortions. If, then, in normal pregnancies about one child in five is lost before birth, husbands should be taught a continence which would to some degree avert this calamity. Superfetation has occurred by coition during pregnancy, and this results commonly in abortion and the death of both fetuses. [88] _Pathology of Intrauterine Death._ London, 1887.