The law should help unmarried parents to give adequate protection to their child—Repressive terrors drive men to desert girls made pregnant through their lust—The penalty for illegitimate parentage should not be paid by the child—At present the child does pay—Figures to show this—Illegitimate infant death-rate—Unmarried mother not able to give proper care to her child—Some mothers unfit to care for their children—Different types of unmarried mothers—Four cases—Where both parents working-class least harm usually results from birth of a love-child—Enlightened legislation in Scandinavia—The law in England and in France—Good legislation in Australia and New Zealand—Other countries—Five proposals for reforming our law.
“The British Empire has invested thousands of its best lives to purchase future immunity for civilisation. This investment is too great to be thrown away.”—Right Hon. D. LLOYD GEORGE.
One of the most pressing questions that we shall have to face in the near future is the attitude and practical action which, as a people, we are going to adopt towards the unmarried mother and her child. I have so far said almost nothing upon this problem of illegitimacy, though the whole difficult question is connected with, and is, in fact, closely dependent for its solution on, the conclusions we arrived at in the preceding chapter on Sexual Relationships outside of Marriage; we then realised the moral advantage that would result from an open avowal and the regulation of all sexual partnerships, with the fixing, as far as this is possible, of a standard of conduct to be expected and claimed from those who enter into them. I have left over this question of the child on purpose that we may give it special consideration. No other matter is of greater significance to my book on Motherhood than is this, and none is deeper in my own interest or, in my opinion, of more urgent importance.
It is really impossible to evade it much longer. There is obviously something ridiculous, at a time when the fateful importance of child-life is being forced more and more upon our attention, to repeat our conventional, unimaginative and inconsistent judgments.
We are learning new and sharp lessons. Terrific war losses are teaching governments to consider the necessity of preserving the new generation even to its last and meanest members. At last the movements to improve the condition of illegitimate children, for which many of us have for long struggled in vain, have received new impetus. What humanity has been powerless to do, the most ancient of all inhumanities—war—has suddenly accomplished.