"The left hand figure at the top shows that the women who work up to the time of confinement fall ill during their pregnancy twice as often, and have six or seven times as many miscarriages and premature births and 1.28 times as many cases of death in child-bed, as those who stop work for a more or less extended period previous to their delivery."
"The frequency of illness after childbirth is in both categories of women almost the same; but the duration of the illness beyond the period for which the legal subvention provides (13, 26, or 34 weeks respectively) is much greater in the case of the obligatory members who do not spare themselves before their delivery."
"Left hand figure at the bottom--the researches were made by Roger and Thiraux in a maternity home. A comparison is made between the women who entered the home only at the beginning of childbirth and those who entered during the last month of pregnancy or sooner. Premature birth occurs in nearly one-third of the cases among the former, but among the latter only one-eighth.
"Right hand figure at the bottom--dealing with the same material as the left hand figure below compares the weight at birth of the first, second and later born. The average weight of the former is 300 g. and that of the latter 341 g. higher with mothers who cease work two or three months before delivery, than with those who worked up to the last. Possibly this expresses in the main the different duration of pregnancy. The importance of the birth weight of a child for its further development is not to be underrated."
"The top figure on the right shows that the importance of the adverse influence of female labour on the race, shown in the above figures, is growing, because there is an increase of employment amongst married women. Simon's figures show that the manufacturing industries, which in 1907 employed by themselves two million female hands, the number of married women has increased by almost 200,000 during the last twelve years. In agriculture, in which four and a half million females find their main occupation, the share of the married women is much greater still."
"The increase of married female labour being intimately connected with the development of our economic life, which cannot be deliberately influenced, the demand for a Motherhood Insurance for all female labourers of any kind, and for the extension of the legal time of stoppage of work before childbirth to at least four weeks, follows as a practical result of the facts stated above."