The maternal instinct is as deep and as ineradicable in women as the instinct to plant the seed of his species is in man. They both subserve the same ends, the continuation of the race, and even if a woman’s childhood is sown with neurotic fears by unhappy parents--yes, even neurotic fears of childbirth--her desire to have children of her own will, in by far the majority of cases, survive relatively intact. Thank heavens this is so. For the bearing and rearing of children are the beautiful destiny toward which a woman’s whole body and personality point from earliest childhood on. If this profound goal cannot be achieved, the result is far too often a shriveling of the personality of the individual. Thank heavens this is so, too, for the good of the race. I thought one of my colleagues expressed the whole thing very neatly in a paper given to a private psychiatric group recently. “If the feminists had been able to injure the maternal instinct of nineteenth-century woman to the same degree that they injured her sexual instinct, the Western world would by now be well on its way to being depopulated.” No, the maternal instinct cannot be fundamentally affected by adverse circumstances. However, the proper handling of information about the maternal instinct by a mother is very important to the proper sexual development of her daughter. Misunderstandings about maternity and what it means can scare a young child badly--so badly, in fact, that fear of it can be a direct cause of later frigidity. Here’s why the maternal instinct can cause trouble to a young girl’s developing sexuality. Most women know this, even if they have never phrased it in this manner. To gratify the maternal instinct a woman has to put her very life right on the line. In a real sense she has to be willing to say, and to keep on saying: “I am willing and ready to die for the sake of or the safety of my child.” I’m not only speaking of the now very slim chance that she might die in childbirth, though I should like to point out that until very recently that possibility had to be faced by every mother-to-be. And the enormously high mortality rate in childbirth throughout history and in every civilization shows very clearly that women _were_ willing to face death to have their child. They have not changed. What I mean more directly, however, is the fact that the maternal instinct demands of the woman in every situation an ever-readiness to put her child before herself, before her safety, before her personal needs, before everything.