A motive that will control this desire must be a strong one; such a motive is not necessarily bad.

It may be good or evil.
There can be no essential ethical difference between constant continence, prior to marriage, and intermittent continence subsequent to marriage, both practices having a similar motive.
If post nuptial restraint with a view to limiting offspring is wrong, restraint from marriage with the same motive is wrong.
If delayed marriage in the interest of the individual and the State is right, marriage with intermittent restraint is in the same interest, and can as easily be defended.
The ethics of prevention by restraint must be judged by its consequences.

If unrestrained procreation will place children in a home where the food and comfort are adequate to their healthful support and development, then procreation is good,--good for the individual, society, and the State.
If the conditions necessary to this healthful support and development, can by individual or State effort be provided for all children born, it is the duty of the individual and of the State to make that effort.
All persons of fair education and good intelligence know what those conditions are, and if they procreate regardless of their absence, that procreation is an evil, and prevention by restraint is the contrary virtue.
It is not suggested, however, that all those who prevent, without or within the marriage bond, do so from this worthy motive, nor is it suggested that all those who prevent are not extravagant in their demand for luxurious conditions for themselves and for their children.
Many require not merely the conditions necessary to the healthful development of each and every child they may bear, but they demand that child-bearing shall not entail hardships nor the prospect of hardships, shall not involve the surrender of any comfort or luxury, nor the prospect of any such surrender.
Whatever doubt may exist in the minds of moralists and philanthropists as to the ethics of prevention in the face of poverty, there can be no doubt that prevention by those able to bear and educate healthy offspring, without hardship, is a pernicious vice degrading to the individual, and a crime against society and the State.
Aristotle called this vice "oliganthropy." Amongst the ancients it was associated with self-indulgence, luxury, and ease.

It was the result of self-indulgence, but it was the cause of mental and moral anaemia, and racial decay.
So far in this chapter prevention has been dealt with only in so far as it is brought about by ante-nuptial and post-nuptial restraint.
Artificial checks were first brought prominently before the notice of the British Public under the garb of social virtue, about the year 1877 by Mrs.Annie Besant and Mr.Charles Bradlaugh.
These checks to conception, though they are very largely used, can hardly be defended on physiological grounds.

Every interference with a natural process must be attended, to some extent at least, with physical injury.