ABSTRACT
The pernicious results of improvident procreation are especially clear from the point of view of racial hygiene and of eugenics. To the duty of the voluntary limitation of procreation, a duty imposed by the sentiment of responsibility, corresponds the right to the voluntary limitation of procreation as the complement to the right of free development of one's own personality. The moral right to the voluntary limitation of offspring subsists, not merely as the outcome of physiological exigencies or of economic calculations, it subsists also as a matter of purely individual caprice. The infant that may arise out of the procreative act is not yet in possession of life, nor even of a spark of life. The type of the woman continually engaged in child-bearing is a primitive one, out of harmony with the needs and ideas of modern civilised life. An undue frequency of child-births has in addition unfortunate consequences for the conjugal happiness of the pair.
