It would give a woman reason to think she might marry a man
whose heredity was most objectionable, and yet, by prenatal culture,
save her children from paying the inevitable penalty of this weak
heritage. The world has long shuddered over the future of the girl who
marries a man to reform him; but think what it means to the future of
the race if a superior girl, armed with correspondence school lessons in
prenatal culture, marries a man to reform his children!
Those who practice this doctrine are doomed to disillusion. The time
they spend on prenatal culture is not cultivating the child; it is
merely perpetuating a fallacy. Not only is their time thus spent
wasted, but worse, for they might have employed it in ways that really
would have benefited the child--in open-air exercise, for instance.
To recapitulate, the facts are:
(1) That there is, before birth, no connection between mother and child,
by which impressions on the mother's mind or body could be transmitted
to the child's mind or body.
(2) That in most cases the marks or defects whose origin is attributed
to maternal impression, must necessarily have been complete long before
the incident occurred which the mother, after the child's birth,
ascribes as the cause.
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