We very often have opportunity of seeing how unsatisfactory such a relationship becomes.

The artificial mother is deprived of a child she had begun to feel her own; the child's emotional relationships are upset, split and distorted; the real mother has the bitterness of feeling that for her child she is not the real mother.

Would it not have been much better for all if the State had encouraged the vast army of women it had trained for the position of mothering other women's children, to have, instead, children of their own?
The women who are incapable of mothering their own children could then be trained to refrain from bearing them.
Ellen Key (in her _Century of the Child_, and elsewhere) has advocated for all young women a year of compulsory "service," analogous to the compulsory military service imposed in most countries on young men.

During this period the girl would be trained in rational housekeeping, in the principles of hygiene, in the care of the sick, and especially in the care of infants and all that concerns the physical and psychic development of children.

The principle of this proposal has since been widely accepted.