when, after Sir Francis Galton had read papers on the question, the meeting heard the opinions of numerous sociologists, economists, biologists, and well-known thinkers in various lands, who were present, or who had sent communications.  Some twenty-one expressed more or less unqualified approval, and only three or four had objections to offer, mostly on matters of detail (Sociological Papers, published by the Sociological Society, vol. ii, 1905).

If we ask by what channels this impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is expressing itself in practical life, we shall scarcely fail to find that there are at least two such channels:  (1) the growing sense of sexual responsibility among women as well as men, and (2) the conquest of procreative control which has been achieved in recent years, by the general adoption of methods for the prevention of conception.

It has already been necessary in a previous chapter to discuss the far-reaching significance of woman’s personal responsibility as an element in the modification of the sexual life of modern communities.  Here it need only be pointed out that the autonomous authority of a woman over her own person, in the sexual sphere, involves on her part a consent to the act of procreation which must be deliberate.  We are apt to think that this is a new and almost revolutionary demand; it is, however, undoubtedly a natural, ancient, and recognized privilege of women that they should not be mothers without their own consent.  Even in the Islamic world of the Arabian Nights, we find that high praise is accorded to the “virtue and courage” of the woman who, having been ravished in her sleep, exposed, and abandoned on the highway, the infant that was the fruit of this involuntary union, “not wishing,” she said, “to take the responsibility before Allah of a child that had been born without my consent."[427] The approval with which this story is narrated clearly shows that to the public of Islam it seemed entirely just and humane that a woman should not have a child, except by her own deliberate will.  We have been accustomed to say in later days that the State needs children, and that it is the business and the duty of women to supply them.  But the State has no more right than the individual to ravish a woman against her will.  We are beginning to realize that if the State wants children it must make it agreeable to women to produce them, as under natural and equitable conditions it cannot fail to be.  “The women will solve the question of mankind,” said Ibsen in one of his rare and pregnant private utterances, “and they will do it as mothers.”  But it is unthinkable that any question should ever be solved by a helpless, unwilling, and involuntary act which has not even attained to the dignity of animal joy.