"The children came rapidly, one after another, and there happened what happens in our society with children and doctors.

Yes, children, maternal love, it is a painful thing.

Children, to a woman of our society, are not a joy, a pride, nor a fulfilment of her vocation, but a cause of fear, anxiety, and interminable suffering, torture.

Women say it, they think it, and they feel it too.

Children to them are really a torture, not because they do not wish to give birth to them, nurse them, and care for them (women with a strong maternal instinct--and such was my wife--are ready to do that), but because the children may fall sick and die.