It is beside the mark to say that a bad father is worse than no father, or that accident may take the father even from happily circumstanced homes.  This is true.  But a woman does not deliberately choose a bad father for her children, or choose that he shall be taken away from them by death.  It is the deliberate infliction beforehand of this great loss upon a child that seems to me the very negation of that motherhood in whose name this “right” is enforced.  And for what purpose is a child to be brought into the world under conditions so imperfect?  To “fulfil the nature” of its mother; to complete her experience; to meet her need.  Is there any mockery of motherhood more complete than this sacrifice of the child to the mother?  Why, our physical nature itself is less selfish!  When a woman conceives, her child receives first all the nourishment it needs; whatever it does not demand, the mother has.  A woman herself undernourished can, if the process has not gone too far, bear a well-nourished and a healthy child, because she has given all to that child.  It is the epitome of motherhood!  And now it is affirmed that a woman, to satisfy her own need, has a right to bring into the world a child on whom she—­its mother—­has deliberately inflicted a grave disadvantage.  I do not speak of such lesser disadvantages as may be involved in illegitimacy.  I trust the time is at hand when we shall cease to brand any child as “illegitimate” or despise one for another’s defect.  But though children are never illegitimate, parents may be so; and none more than the woman who sacrifices her child to herself.

For this disadvantage is not a mere cruelty of society which may be “civilized” away; it is inherent in the case.  A child should have a father and a mother and a home.

It is no defence to say that the unmarried mother proposes to give her child a better home than many a child of married parents has.  If her concern is for the child, there are, alas! only too many waifs already in the world to whom such a home, though imperfect, would be a paradise to what it has.  Real motherhood could and often does rescue such children with joy.  That so few children are adopted in a world of women clamouring for motherhood proves the essential selfishness of the claim.  It is not the child—­it is herself—­that the woman who demands motherhood as a “right” is concerned with.  What an irony!  For to satisfy herself first is the negation of motherhood.

We have heard much of late years—­and rightly—­of the exploitation of women by men.  Let us not celebrate our growing enfranchisement by becoming ourselves the exploiters; and that, not of men, but of babes.

IV

THE TRUE BASIS OF MORALITY