The child is told about the doctor bringing him in a bag--or a stork flying in through the window--or the accidental finding under the gooseberry bush.
All children delight in fairy tales, but instinctively they know very well the difference between a fairy tale which is recounted to them as a story in answer to their mood of "make-believe" and a fiction which is putting them off when they are seeking the truth.
If the mother who feels herself too ignorant or too self-conscious to answer the truth to the child's questions takes him on her knee and deliberately tells him in a "make-believe" mood a fairy tale, the child will then not feel that the mother has lied. _He will feel, however, that he must ask some one else for the truth._
But most mothers give the answer containing the fiction of the gooseberry bush, or whatever it may be, in a manner indicating that that is what the child must believe, and the child receives the information as a serious answer to his serious question. It is then a lie, and a pernicious lie.
Racial knowledge, instinct, whatever you like to call it, is subtler and stronger in baby minds than we dulled grown-ups are inclined to think. The youngest child has a half-consciousness that what its mother said in answer to this question was not true.
Nurse, or auntie, a friend's governess, or any one else who seems wise and powerful, is asked the same question when mother is not there, and the chances are that if mother had given the stork version auntie gives the gooseberry bush or some other fiction which she particularly favours.
The baby ponders intermittently, inconsequently, perhaps at long intervals, perhaps after years, but ultimately it realizes that its mother lied to it.
In this way infinite injury has been done to the whole human stock, and more particularly women have suffered from the dishonesty and the inherent incapacity of our society to be frank and truthful about the most profound and the most terrible aspects of sex, namely, its diseases. A wife or a mother has the right to be told the truth.
Women, and particularly mothers, have been outrageously wronged by the deliberate lies and untruthful atmosphere about the greater problems of sex in which the learned have enshrouded them: but mothers have themselves given the first bent to the little sprouting twig of that tree of knowledge, and they have bent it _away_ from the sunlight of truth and clean and happy understanding.