and good for the benefit of their unborn children. Young wives will enter upon the pains and burdens of motherhood with a high sense of the importance and sacredness of being a mother.
The importance and sacredness of being a mother will also be given the utmost social consideration, The community can educate the child, but the individual mother must bring it forth. The community can supervise the child's development, but the individual mother must furnish its natural nourishment during the first year of its life. Therefore a rationally organized society will enable every mother to bear and nurse her children in physical well-being and material security. The bearing and nursing of a child will be valued as a service to society, second in importance to none. When a woman is about to become a mother, other considerations will be set aside. If her socially productive labor, her particular trade or profession, is not heavy or in any way injurious, she may be permitted to continue at it until shortly before the birth of her child, for work in itself is not detrimental to motherhood. Many women who are physically active during pregnancy bring forth more vigorous children, and remain healthier themselves, than those who pamper and enfeeble themselves by treating their natural condition like a disease. But any work that could possibly be harmful to either mother or child would instantly be interrupted. From the time a baby is born until the time it is ready to thrive on other food than mother's milk, the mother will have to be excused from socially productive labor. She will have to be given leave of absence from her trade or profession to perform the equally necessary task of motherhood. But this leave of absence, this temporary interruption of her life's work, must not reduce the mother to a state of dependence or economic insecurity. A society that values motherhood as an important social service will remunerate this service accordingly, and will, by a system of motherhood pensions, maintain the woman's economic independence.
So the application of knowledge and humane principles by a civilized society, collectively owning the means of
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