century Martin Luther wrote: "If a woman becomes weary or at last dead
from bearing, that matters not; let her only die from bearing, she is there
to do it;" and he doubtless gave expression, in a crude and somewhat brutal
form, to a conviction common to the bulk of his contemporaries, both male
and female.

Today, this condition has almost completely reversed itself.

The advance of science and the amelioration of the physical conditions of
life tend rapidly toward a diminution of human mortality. The infant
death-rate among the upper classes in modern civilisations has fallen by
more than one-half; while among poorer classes it is already, though
slowly, falling: the increased knowledge of the laws of sanitation has
made among all highly civilised peoples the depopulation by plague a thing
of the past, and the discoveries of the next twenty or thirty years will
probably do away for ever with the danger to man of zymotic disease.
Famines of the old desolating type have become an impossibility where rapid
means of transportation convey the superfluity of one land to supply the
lack of another; and war and deeds of violence, though still lingering
among us, have already become episodal in the lives of nations as of
individuals; while the vast advances in antiseptic surgery have caused even
the effects of wounds and dismemberments to become only very partially
fatal to human life. All these changes have tended to diminish human
mortality and protract human life; and they have today already made it
possible for a race not only to maintain its numbers, but even to increase
them, with a comparatively small expenditure of woman's vitality in the
passive labour of child-bearing.

But yet more seriously has the demand for woman's labour as child-bearer
been diminished by change in another direction.