A perusal of the reports on infant mortality in widely varying industrial centers of the United States, published during the past decade by the Children’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor, forces us to a realization of the immediate need of detailed statistics concerning the practice and results of uncontrolled breeding.  Some such effort as this has been made by the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics in Great Britain.  The Children’s Bureau reports only incidentally present this impressive evidence.  They fail to coordinate it.  While there is always the danger of drawing giant conclusions from pigmy premises, here is overwhelming evidence concerning irresponsible parenthood that is ignored by governmental and social agencies.

I have chosen a small number of typical cases from these reports.  Though drawn from widely varying sources, they all emphasize the greatest crime of modern civilization—­that of permitting motherhood to be left to blind chance, and to be mainly a function of the most abysmally ignorant and irresponsible classes of the community.

Here is a fairly typical case from Johnstown, Pennsylvania.  A woman of thirty-eight years had undergone thirteen pregnancies in seventeen years.  Of eleven live births and two premature stillbirths, only two children were alive at the time of the government agent’s visit.  The second to eighth, the eleventh and the thirteenth had died of bowel trouble, at ages ranging from three weeks to four months.  The only cause of these deaths the mother could give was that “food did not agree with them.”  She confessed quite frankly that she believed in feeding babies, and gave them everything anybody told her to give them.  She began to give them at the age of one month, bread, potatoes, egg, crackers, etc.  For the last baby that died, this mother had bought a goat and gave its milk to the baby; the goat got sick, but the mother continued to give her baby its milk until the goat went dry.  Moreover, she directed the feeding of her daughter’s baby until it died at the age of three months.  “On account of the many children she had had, the neighbors consider her an authority on baby care.”

Lest this case be considered too tragically ridiculous to be accepted as typical, the reader may verify it with an almost interminable list of similar cases.(1) Parental irresponsibility is significantly illustrated in another case: 

A mother who had four live births and two stillbirths in twelve years lost all of her babies during their first year.  She was so anxious that at least one child should live that she consulted a physician concerning the care of the last one.  “Upon his advice,” to quote the government report, “she gave up her twenty boarders immediately after the child’s birth, and devoted all her time to it.  Thinks she did not stop her hard work soon enough; says she has always worked too hard, keeping boarders in this country, and cutting wood