The Coconino sun., 1916-03-10
BETTER BABIES ANU WHAT
 MANKIND OWES POSIERlTY
(By Dr. Thos. P. Manning)

you today. feel very keenly my in ability to properly treat this great and vital subject: Better Babies"
 Babies are the most valuable pro- duct in any country; we have all once been babies, and the babies of today will be the mothers and fathers of the next generation Right from the cradles are coming the men and women who are to shape the course and advancement of humanity gene ration hence and then to transmit 1t on to posterity. In the light of the complicated duties of today, we have come to realize that vitality alone cannot raise race to the highest level of existence. To this must be added intelligence and morality. The intelligence controls and utilizes the force of life and morality guides them in the direction of progress and the up-building of the race.
 Hence we have reached stage of development when the world does not need more babies, but higher type of baby-those of sound bodies, gen jus and virtue, who have the capabili- ty of development into noble men and exalted women, instead of brats who must travel to maturity on crutches or in physical and mental splints, in capable of helping humanity upwards. But by their feeble-mindedness acting as brakes on the wheels of progress, for the life of today we need refined babies; pure and clean from embryo, parentally illuminated with health, vigor and efficiency, Out of this re- quirement of the race arises the neces- sity for the superintendent of the birth as well as the development of children. Our obligations to the future demands that the good be good, and clean at the planting, as much as to prune the growth.
 The innocent baby has nothing to say about it's coming into the world; that is something into which it is thust involuntarily. It does not even select it's own parents, who brought it, unsolicited, into existence, and the parents who infict life, as some do, handicapped by disease and doomed to misery are morally under obligation to repair the wrong and make good the injury thoughtlessly or wantonly inflicted. The child has the right to be well-born physically and mentally and it is society's duty to secure that right. To do this we must have a virile fatherhood and a chaste and beautiful motherhood; no man has a right to use his life as he pleases when he expects to become the father of children, since what one makes of himself before and though father hood is transmitted and becomes an eternal heritage of the race.
 We cannot expect good babies with out the proper regard to the fitness of the parents who have to bring them into this world and rear them The breeding of human beings is left to blind chance-in utter disregard of the laws of heredity and worse, even yet, we have wars in which we send the best man to battle to be killed or diseased, and leave the deformed and physically unsound at home to pro pogate the future generation.
 The child is not only entitled to be born of sound body and mind, free from disease, and to the full develop ment of all their faculties, but also of good parents, and especially sound well-developed mother; it is necessary that the mother be all right to give birth to a healthy offspring but something more is involved in mother. hood than that of breeder of young -she has the shaping of the child's intellectual training during the most formative period of life; she, more that the father, through heredity ant otherwise, transforms herself into thu little one and decides not only tht kind of man or woman it shall be, bu also the kind of offspring it, in turn shall transmit to posterity. In viev of the far-reaching power of mater nity, intelligence would dictate tha sane society should aim to exal women so as to secure the best pos sible mothers for the race. We arr coming to realize that mothers owe higher duty to their offspring thai that of mere nurse; subject mothe with Impoverished blood never will pro duce a race of the highest best an, well-balanced children. Women wh
 often marry to get home thus sup planting economic motives in place o
 love are in esxual bondage for tn
 man for cnhoiofauca and erhiac