t only the fit shall procreate,
will only be a matter of arrangement by experts.

One danger looms ahead however if the operative means of producing
artificial sterility are popularised.

Every surgeon of experience knows how readily large numbers of married
women encourage surgical treatment for ovarian and even uterine
complaints, if they become aware that such treatment is followed by
sterility. It is not at all an uncommon thing for women in all ranks of
life, to encourage, and even seek removal of the ovaries in order to
escape an increase in the family.

They become acquainted with persons who have submitted to this operation
for ovarian disease, and noting nothing but improvement in their health,
attended by sterility, their intense anxiety to enjoy immunity from
child-bearing makes them eager to submit to operation.

It would be distinctly immoral to sterilize healthy women, who become
possessed with the old Roman passion for a childless life, or who simply
wish to limit their families for any selfish or personal reason.

Any law which recognizes the induction of artificial sterility should
make operative interference with those fit to procreate a healthy stock
an offence.

Induced sterility should rank with induced abortion, and be a criminal
offence, except in certain cases which could be defined.

There is much evidence to suggest that artificial sterilization may
become as a great vice, as great a danger to the State as criminal
abortion.

Artificial abortion, as commonly performed, is a much more dangerous
operation than tubo-ligature. Of the two operations, any experienced
surgeon would readily declare that the latter is the simpler and the
safer; the one less likely to lead to unfavourable complications, and
the one, moreover, that would leave the subject of it with the better
"expectancy of life."

Anaesthetics and antiseptics have made this comparison possible and
true.

Any surgeon who performs tubo-ligature should be liable to prosecution,
unless he can justify his action according to the law relating to the
artificial sterility of the unfit.

While the law would eventually require to be obligatory, with regard to
the absolutely unfit, it would require to be permissive in all other
cases.

Many voluntarily abstain from marriage, because of a strong hereditary
tendency to certain diseases such as cancer and tubercle.

There must of necessity be many on the border-land between the fit a