5.  SELF-DENIAL AND FORBEARANCE.—­If the husband respects his wife he will come to her relief by exercising self-denial and forbearance, but sometimes before the mother has recovered from the effects of bearing, nursing and rearing one child, ere she has regained proper tone and vigor of body and mind, she is unexpectedly overtaken, surprised by the manifestation of symptoms which again indicate pregnancy.  Children thus begotten cannot become hardy and long-lived.  But the love that parents may feel for their posterity, by the wishes for their success, by the hopes for their usefulness, by every consideration for their future well-being, let them exercise caution and forbearance until the wife becomes sufficiently healthy and enduring to bequeath her own rugged, vital stamina to the child she bears in love.

6.  A WRONG TO THE MOTHER AND CHILD.—­Sometimes the mother is diseased; the outlet from the womb, as a result of laceration by a previous child-birth, is frequently enlarged, thus allowing conception to take place very readily, and hence she has children in rapid succession.  Besides the wrong to the mother in having children in such rapid succession, it is a great injustice to the babe in the womb and the one at the breast that they should follow each other so quickly that one is conceived while the other is nursing.  One takes the vitality of the other; neither has sufficient nourishment, and both are started in life stunted and incomplete.

7.  FEEBLE AND DISEASED PARENTS.—­If the parties of a marriage are both feeble and so adapted to each other that their children are deformed, insane or idiots, then to beget offspring would be a flagrant wrong; if the mother’s health is in such a condition as to forbid the right of laying the burden of motherhood upon her, then medical aid may safely come to her relief.

8.  “THE DESIRABILITY AND PRACTICABILITY of limiting offspring,” says Dr. Stockham, are the subject of frequent inquiry.  Fewer and better children are desired by right-minded parents.  Many men and women, wise in other things of the world, permit generation as a chance result of copulation, without thought of physical or mental conditions to be transmitted to the child.  Coition, the one important act of all others, carrying with it the most vital results, is usually committed for selfish gratification.  Many a drunkard owes his lifelong appetite for alcohol to the fact that the inception of his life could be traced to a night of dissipation on the part of his father.  Physical degeneracy and mental derangements are too often caused by the parents producing offspring while laboring under great mental strain or bodily fatigue.  Drunkenness and licentiousness are frequently the heritage of posterity.  Future generations demand that such results be averted by better prenatal influences.  The world is groaning under the curse of chance parenthood.  It is due to posterity that procreation be brought under the control of reason and conscience.