The Daily Alaska empire., 1930-12-26
By ALICE ALDEN


 NEW YORK, Dec. 26.-The city's ash-can and doorstep babies. What sadder legion is there on earth than that army of tiny little bundles of innocent humanity that provides such human interest stories for newspaper readers and such fran tic grief to the thousands of young, unmarried mothers, who each year offer up their tiny babies to the great god chance on the altar of a cold, unsheltered doorstep or ash-laden can.
 The world censors these moth- CTS, the world says that they should work and support their babes and very, very often the world refuses to employ these desperate young women. The world thinks that she should bear the stigma of the un- wed mother for the child's sake, but there are those who believe the mother and the babe should be succored and helped.
 One of these is Dr. Mary Hal ton, well known New York physi- clan whose work has brought her into contact with the unhappiness and misfortune that is ever part of a great city. And so Doctor Hal ton has started crusade to fight for the birthright of the illegiti- mate child. Doctor Halton knows that under existing laws, it is better for child to be abandon ed than fatherless. If abandoned, the child has a fighting chance of being found, adopted and given a name, but if his mother keeps him, it is most likely that the child will grow up with the shameful stigma of illegitimacy. And so Doctor Hal ton whilst hnot combining condi- tions, prefers to make them wide ly known in her effort to abolish the situation that forces the moth CT to abandon the babe that has cost her such tears and anguish. She is fighting therefore, to give such children a right to possess birth certificates that will help to make them equal and free.
 Each year there are issued in these United States at least 25,000 birth certificates listing the father as unknown" For a physician to put down the name of the man named by the mother as father of the child, is to lay himself open for libel action, no matter how indisputable the proof he may have. Doctor Halton and her committee have not yet decided what form the certificate will take, but believe that an entry can be made that will partially remove the stigma of father unknown" But the hu- mane physician has made this sug- gestion. "If man can disown his son, why cannot a son disoWn his father?" And she suggests that the phrase father disowned" should take it's place on the regis tration blank of such children.
 But there are others who be- lieve that in time the entry "fath- CT disowned" might in time be just as branding as "illegitimate."
 And then, another phase of the problem that is occupying Dr. Hal ten is the disturbing question Of the legal punishment for those des- perate young mothers who desert their young and who are classed with those parents who deliberate ly abandon children for whom 1t is too much trouble to care. It is thought that there should be a sharp distinction made between all cases of child abandonment and that a young mother who repents of her act and traces her child to a founding nursery should be sympathetically dealt with rather than indiscriminatingly punished fer having been unable to stifie the urge of mother love.
 There are of course kindly judg- es who probe the case before them