slight. The only sure way of escape from this imminent danger is by
the exclusive love of one man and one woman. Moreover, these diseases
are, in their effects, transmissible from husband to wife and from
wife to children. Many women's diseases, a large part of their sterility,
of miscarriages and infant deaths, a large proportion of the paralysis,
insanity, and blindness in the world, are due to the sins of a husband
or parent. Thus the penalty for a single misstep may be very grim;
and the worst of it is that it must often be shared by the innocent.
[Footnote: See Prince Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage. W. L.
Howard, Plain Facts on Sex Hygiene.]

(2) For a girl the danger of disease is not all. There is the
additional danger of pregnancy, which means, and must mean, for her
not only pain and risk of life, but lasting shame and disgrace. Even
paid prostitutes, who are willing to employ dangerous methods to prevent
conception, and soon become nearly sterile through disease or
overindulgence, often have to resort to illegal operations, at the
risk of their lives, and not infrequently come to childbirth. The virgin
who gives herself to her lover under the spell of his ardent wooing
is very much more likely to conceive. It cannot be too bluntly stated
that the barest contact may suffice for conception; for a momentary
intimacy two lives, or three, have often been ruined.

(3) The reason why society cannot afford to be lenient with
illegitimacy is that there is no proper provision for rearing children
born out of wedlock. The woman and the child usually need the financial
support of the man; they always need his love and care. If the man
marries the girl he has wronged, there is not only the disgrace still
attaching to her (and rightly to him, still more), but the fact of
a hasty and unintended and probably more or less unhappy marriage.