ABSTRACT
Gardner believed men should control both gestation and parturition. Similarly, copulation and conception should be dictated by men according to their social purposes. If they copulated when either of their vital powers were at a low ebb, a husband and wife would produce feeble offspring.
If we could trace back the history of these puny children, the “runts” as they are unkindly styled in families, the scrofulous, weakly, exsanguine, nervous, prematurely old, early dying children, to the time of their conception, we should find that the great majority of them, dated their initial origin to a day of languor—and disturbance of either body or mind, or both; at times when the prospect of failure was imminent, when harassed by previous habits, disagreement with a partner, defalcation with a clerk, an illness which confined one in the midst of a busy season at home, when the oldest son or the loved daughter had done something wrong, compromised themselves or their family: when some family misunderstanding existed, when the master of the house had come home much later than usual, and a “little worse” for his evening’s entertainment, and twenty years more or less afterward, you complain of certain strange idiosyncrasies in your child, and say “there were no such tendencies in your family.”
