How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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3°7 herself to her husband except in those circumstances where children are desired. The economic difficulties of our age militate against the large families of yesteryear. That children cannot be brought into this world at random by responsible parents goes without saying. The more oppressive the economic problem and the more complicated our civilization, the greater is the necessity for a volitional control of offspring. Civilized human beings have children when they desire them, not accidentally, as a result of wild and irresponsible sexual congress. But the very factors that make the limitation of offspring to children of choice desirable, make the sexual relation, as a means of social congress, re-vivification, and relaxation, more indispensable. Hence the importance of contraceptive knowledge to every adult human being. Ignorance of contraceptive methods is a potent cause of sexual unhappiness, love tragedies, and broken homes. Because this ignorance leads to psychic reservations and to psychic inhibitions, it spoils those very moments when men and women are capable of experiencing the most profound of human sympathies and the most encouraging of human experiences. In countries that depend on warriors for their power, any limitation in the number of children is not only a limitation of cannon-fodder but also a threat against the hierarchy of masculine prerogatives, and therefore taboo. But in a country that depends for its security on the happiness of its inhabitants and on international coopera¬ tion and peace, whose population is one of choice, con¬ ceived in love and nurtured in responsibility, the limita¬ tion of offspring by the conscious control of conception is as self-understood and self-explanatory as plague control and public hygiene. No individual, moreover, can expect any great happiness in his love life if his acts are likely at any time to cripple his economic situation, or oppress his mate or his community with intolerable burdens. The psycho¬ logical effects of being an unwanted child we have already described in our chapter on the growth of fear. The