To fulfil this second law, nature has placed on every normal healthy man and woman the sacred duty of reproducing their kind.  Reproduction as a physiological process promotes, both directly and indirectly, the health, happiness and longevity of healthy men and women.

Statistics confirm the popular opinion “that the length of life, to the enjoyment of which a married person may look forward, is greater than that of the unmarried, both male and female at the same age.”—­(Coghlan).

It is a familiar observation that the mothers of large families of ten and even twice that number are not less healthy nor shorter lived because of the children they have borne.  Pregnancy is a stimulus to vitality.  Because another life has to be supported, all the vital powers are invigorated and rise to the occasion—­the circulation increases, the heart enlarges in response to the extra work, and the assimilative powers of the body are greatly accelerated.  During lactation also, the same extra vital work done is a stimulus to a physiological activity which is favourable to health and longevity.  The expectancy of life in women is greater than in men all through life, the difference during the child-bearing period of life being about 2.2 years in favour of women.

Statistics and physicians from their observation agree in this, that the bearing of children by normal women, so far from being injurious to health, is as healthful, stimulating, and invigorating a function as the blooming of a flower, or the shedding of fruit, and a mother is no worse for the experience of maternity than is the plant or the tree for the fruit it bears.

The supreme law of society is the law of race-preservation, and the infraction of this law is a social crime.  One’s duty to society is a higher duty than to one’s-self, but the lower duty comes first in our present stage of racial evolution.  Instinct prompts to the one, reason—­a higher and later, but less respected, faculty—­prompts to the other.

But it can be shown that from an egoistic standpoint my duty to the State in this regard is my highest duty to myself.

The parental sacrifice necessary in rearing the normal number of children is infinitesimal compared with the parental advantage.

Parental love is a passion as well as an instinct in normal men and women, and the full play of this passion in its natural state is productive of the greatest happiness.

Vice may restrain, replace, or smother it, but nothing else can damage or adulterate this powerful passion in the human heart.

Low level selfishness, love of low level luxury, diseased imaginings, and unreasonable dreads and fears, are some of the forms of vice that smother this noble passion.

The pursuit of happiness and the higher forms of selfishness would naturally point to parentage.

The ectasy of parental love, the sweet response from little ones that rises as the fragrance of lovely flowers, self-realization in the comfort and joy of family life, the parental pride in the contemplation of effulgent youth, the sympathetic partnership in success, the repose of old age surrounded by filial manhood and womanhood, all go to make a surplus of pleasure over pain, that no other way of life can possibly supply.