The unwelcome child

Would you secure for yourself, your wife and your children, a pure and happy home? Of one thing, then, you must never lose sight. You now regard your wife as fitted to be your companion, intellectually and socially, as well as affectionally. Be sure that no effort is wanting, on your part, to keep her so. If her intellect becomes stunted, and she be deprived of the means and opportunities for improvement, while you enjoy every opportunity to cultivate and enlarge your intellectual powers, how can she possibly feel herself fitted to be your equal companion?

Let me ask you carefully to read over the “Appeal of the Wife to the Husband,” in the last letter. Mark well what she says on this subject; how she feels, as she finds herself losing all power to sympathize in the intellectual aspirations and pursuits of her husband. She, intellectually, was sinking, while he was rising; was growing poorer, while he was growing richer; and he took little pains to impart to her his increasing intellectual wealth. All opportunities for intellectual growth were precluded by the anxieties of maternity, which he, without a thought for her intellectual welfare, was constantly imposing upon her. Never impose this function upon your wife, at the expense of her intellectual growth. No wife can ever be made intellectually poorer by maternity, and the cares of a mother, when that relation is joyfully welcomed, and those cares are shared by the husband. But how can a wife’s intellect ever be expanded with new and noble thoughts, when the physical sufferings and mental anguish of a frequent and an undesired maternity are ever present?

Stay at home with the mother of your children, except when necessary avocations call you away. Share with her the cares, the anxieties and joys, of the nursery. There cultivate your intellectual powers together by reading, and by conversation,—especially, on all subjects pertaining to parentage and the ante-natal, as well as the post-natal, development, education and life of your children. How anxious will every true and loving husband and father be, to unite with his wife and the mother of his children, in the nursery, to impart and to receive all possible light in regard to these matters!

Neither should you ever impose maternity on your wife at the expense of her social nature. Never go abroad to enjoy and develop your own social nature, and leave her at home alone in the nursery, preparing to give birth and a worthy reception to your child, or to spend her weary hours in solitude, in anxious watchings over your children, and in longings for your presence and your sympathy. Stay with her, and share with her all the joys and all the sorrows, all the sweet rest and all the weary labors, of a maternity imposed by you, and of developing into noble men or women the offspring of your mutual love.

But how crushed, intellectually and socially, must that wife become, on whom an ignorant, a thoughtless, or a brutal husband, is ever imposing a maternity from which her soul recoils! Her intellect becomes dwarfed and her social nature dead. How can it be otherwise, especially when driven to the deed of ante-natal murder, to escape the horror of giving birth to children accursed by the mother that bore them? Hope becomes extinct, and the light of her soul goes out in utter darkness!

The following letter must speak for itself. It is nearly a verbatim extract from a letter, the original of which is now before me. No man, especially no husband, can read it, and not feel quickened in all that is truly manly, noble and God-like. Of this woman, as to her style and her sentiments, every true man will feel that to be true which the people said of the teachings of Jesus—“He speaks as one having authority.” May her words of power find a response in the heart of every husband and wife, and of every man and woman!

“The subject of an undesigned and undesired maternity,—how it affects the mother towards the child, towards the function of Maternity itself,—these are matters, on which, as a wife and a mother, and a friend of Human Progress, my mind has been deeply exercised since they were first presented to me. The delicate and hallowed beauty with which you invest maternity, and the relation that leads to it, renders it easy for me to impart to you my views on these subjects, while I feel instinctively repelled from any approach to them with most other persons, both men and women.

“The thoughts I have do not flow from my own experience. I have never given birth to a child not earnestly desired. Yet, being a woman and a mother, it seems to me no difficult matter to judge correctly as to what must necessarily be the emotions and effects produced by such a maternity.

“But I must express my earnest conviction, that any woman, any wife, who permits herself to be made the instrument of bringing into life a new existence, unwelcome to her own soul, must, in some degree, be wanting in that self-respect which is an inseparable accompaniment of, nay, an essential element in, true nobility of character. That woman must feel degraded before her own soul, who, for any cause, in or out of legal marriage, suffers herself to be made the means of such an outrage upon her innocent and helpless babe. Better, a thousand times, that she leave her legal husband at once and forever, than allow soul and body to be thus prostituted, and herself to be made accessory to a deed so unnatural and unjust as that of giving birth to a child whose existence is repudiated and loathed by her own heart.

“Public opinion, based on his superior physical strength and (hitherto) superior intellectual development, has accorded to man the dignity of lordship. Looking over the face of the earth, he says, ‘See all things for my use, even woman.’ And as the Bible, in many of its teachings, as these are explained, sanctions this arrogance, declaring that the ‘man was not made for the woman, but the woman for the man,’ she herself, the just authority of Nature being educated out of her, and the arbitrary authority of man educated into her, believes it her duty to yield implicit obedience to all the demands of the man to whom she has declared allegiance at the altar;—the altar, truly; for there she is frequently offered a propitiation to satisfy the demands of man’s unholy passion; and from henceforth this being, created with reason, conscience and intuitions of her own, and for her own guidance, believes it her highest duty to sacrifice all these to the authority and the licensed sensualism of the husband, for whose pleasure she was created, and to ‘obey even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord.’

“This much may be said to account for the fact that so many women, otherwise excellent and amiable, lend themselves to the commission of this great crime; a crime against themselves, against their children, against their husbands, against our great humanity. And while thus prostituting their persons according to law (made for this very end, and solely by those who prostitute them), they deceive themselves into the stupid belief that they are leading pure and virtuous lives, and look with scorn and contempt upon the poor sister who commits the same unnatural and revolting deed in an unlawful and less reputable manner.

“Human decrees and enactments can never alter or reverse human obligations. What is wrong without a license or commission from human government, is wrong with such a license. If an undesigned and undesired maternity be a dark and damning sin against the child, the mother, and humanity, against God, without the sanction of the Church, the State, and public opinion, it is a sin of an equally dark and damning character with such sanction. In every case where the act that leads to maternity would be a sin, a foul and monstrous crime, and the shame and infamy of one or both parents, without the sanction of human laws, it would be the same with such sanction, and in a legalized union. Those women, therefore, who for any cause, allow an undesired maternity to be imposed on them by men holding the legal relation of husbands, and permit themselves to be made the means of giving existence to children whom they do not want, in legal marriage, ought to be, and one day will be, regarded in the same light as those are who become mothers outside of wedlock. If it be wrong for a woman to become a mother, without the consent of Church and State and society, it is wrong for her to become a mother with such consent. If right with such consent, it is right without it. Whatever it is right to do with a civil, ecclesiastical or social license, it is right to do without it.

“If woman’s life be made a curse by the constant endurance of suffering, consequent upon a too-frequent maternity, the religious woman often endeavors to stifle the outcries and accusations of reason and intuition by the absurd plea that she ‘must have all the children whom it is God’s will to send.’ Occasionally, one is found weak enough, and wickedly fond enough, to say, as Miss Bremer, with contemptible silliness, makes one of her amiable characters in ‘The Home’ say, ‘that though she had such a large and rapidly increasing family, and her husband’s means of providing for it were somewhat limited, yet he never grumbled, and was always ready to welcome each new child as it came!’ Grumble, indeed! A husband ‘grumbling’ that his wife has conceived! A father ‘grumbling’ at the birth of a child! ‘Always ready to welcome each new child as it came!’—and this said by a wife of her husband, as the strongest testimony to his manliness and justice as a husband and father, and as the highest reason why she should love and honor him! What man so base, so ignoble, so fallen, and so deserving a dungeon or the gallows, as he who imparts the germ of a new life to his wife, to gratify his passion, and then ‘grumbles’ because a child is born, and thrusts it from him? Man can give no greater proof of the utter degradation and ruin of his moral nature. Yet not to grumble at a maternity of his own imposing, and not to repel and cast off the babe for whose undesired existence he is responsible, is Miss Bremer’s highest conception of manhood!

“But a false religious education is not the only reason why woman weakly and unrighteously yields herself to the base and brutal passion of her husband; for a passion, though all pure and ennobling when its demands are just and naturally answered, becomes most base and brutalizing to men and women, when indulged at the expense of the child, and contrary to the wishes of the wife and mother. As society is now constituted, she is his dependant. The laws make her subservient to his will, while she continues a wife, and all-pervading custom has, in great measure, deprived her of the dignity which an independent ability to engage in business for herself, outside the domestic circle, would confer.

“‘Can do is easily carried about,’ is a pithy old Scottish proverb; and this same ‘Can do’ is a good and sturdy staff of self-support, when a woman finds that the man on whom she fondly leaned would become to her, not a tower of strength and a refuge from the storm, but the oppressor to crush both soul and body, and make of her very Womanhood an unworthy thing. Let woman respect herself. She will gain nothing by submitting to wrong and outrage. No wife ever gained or perpetuated the love and respect of a husband, deserving the name, by yielding to his passion, merely to please him.

“It is the popular, but foolish and unthinking belief, that children owe great obligations to their parents for bringing them into life; but is not the contrary the fact, that parents are under the strongest possible obligations to their children to render that being good, wise, and happy, which they themselves have forced upon their child? Assuming this as self-evident, then is it clear that such existence should not be the result of blind, unthinking passion, but of careful, wise and loving design.

“The act in which the child originates is performed, often, solely for the momentary gratification of one or both parents. No thought for the welfare, the physical, mental and spiritual organization and tendencies of the child that may ensue, is entertained. No careful and anxious forethought for the character and destiny of the child is exercised, but the gratification of mere animal passion is the sole object sought. The child comes into being undesigned by the father and undesired by the mother,—the offspring of reckless, selfish, sensual lust, and not of tender, self-forgetting, noble love. How grievous the wrong done by the father to the mother, and by the mother to herself, and by both to the child who is thus thrust into the world by violence! What hope can exist for such a child? The felon’s doom was written on his soul before he was born. His parents consigned him to the dungeon or the gallows ere he drew the breath of life.

“The woman who, in youth, is flattered and caressed for the charms of her person, the sweetness of her temper, and the goodness of her heart, when married to a man who thus regards her as but the instrument of his pleasure, soon loses the charms for which she was caressed, and, while the husband is in his prime, she enters upon a premature old age; her physical strength exhausted by the almost constant suffering and agony attendant upon giving existence to those poor, unwelcome ones,—her beauty faded, her temper soured, her whole soul embittered by a consciousness of her hard lot, and her mental nature stunted in its growth,—for what leisure has she to attend to the wants of her own spirit, while her energies are taxed to the utmost with the care of her living children, who are solely dependent on her, and she preparing to add another to the number? How can she fill the treasure-house of her own soul with ‘things new and old,’ under all these adverse circumstances, and while the present physical wants of her little ones are constantly clamoring, ‘Give! give!’ Does not reason, does not justice, demand for woman that she have full opportunity for the development of her own Womanhood, soul, body, and spirit? Has not she, as an individual child of God and member of the human family, a right to this? Does not the well-being of such children as she may righteously bring into existence loudly call for a full and practical recognition, on the part of every husband and every man, of her right to decide for herself when, how often, and under what circumstances, she shall assume the office of Maternity, or be subjected to the relation that may issue in maternity? Does not the happiness, the best interest of the husband, require it? Does not Humanity itself demand it?

“And how must that woman, in whose soul the theory of passive obedience has not wholly eradicated nature, regard the husband who causes her thus to curse ‘the day wherein she was born’ a woman? In her inmost soul, she must look upon him as the half-enlightened slave looks upon his master, and bitterly reproach him for victimizing her to his own base passion, and for his own short-lived gratification, irrespective of the woful consequences to her whom he has sworn to cherish, honor and protect. And justly does she thus regard him. No wife can love and honor such a husband. He is to her what the executioner is to the victim, or the slaveholder to his crushed and outraged slaves. She cannot but loathe him.

“Can love do any injury to its object? Must not the wife become alienated from the husband, who, instead of cherishing her health and beauty, and seeking her happiness, subjects her to the loss of all these, and instead of honoring, basely enslaves her to his own infamous passion?—who, instead of protecting from evil, exposes her to sickness, sorrow and death, not in accordance with her own free will, her own glad choice, in pursuit of an object worthy and great enough to inspire hope, courage and strength to meet the coming suffering, and the attainment of which shall amply compensate, and cause her ‘to remember no more the anguish, for joy’ that a new life is given unto her, but simply and solely that his own mean, selfish, animal nature may find present satisfaction? Deserves such a man the blessings of a home of love and harmony, the devotion of wife and little ones? Alas! no; he has planted only curses, and ‘whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’

“Must not such a wife, too, regard the creative function in both herself and husband with loathing and abhorrence? And did not the power of refusing this unwelcome maternity reside within herself, who could blame her for reproaching even the great Creator for so endowing her with a capacity for unremunerative suffering? And what must be the atmosphere of that house (I will not dignify it by the sacred name of home), where the wife and mother regards her own nature as degraded,—her husband the tyrant who degrades, and her children the fruits of this degradation? Is that house a fit nursery for the germs of a noble Humanity? Do not plants there take root which cumber the earth, and, in their turn, fill it anew with those briers and thorns of human kind, which render its habitations places of cursing and bitterness?

“Alas for the poor child of such a parentage! Receiving his very being by a base act of the father, nourished until birth underneath the heart of the mother, whose whole nature protests against its existence, feeding upon her bitterness, hatred, and sense of humiliation, the gall and wormwood of her soul infused into its young being, coming at last into the world destitute of the inheritance of love,—the inheritance justly his own,—where shall be the resting-place of that child’s soul? Around what can it lovingly cling? Even its own mother regards it as an unwelcome intruder; in whose loving bosom shall it be tenderly nurtured?

“Perhaps the mother who bore him used her best endeavor to cut short his earthly existence ere he saw the light; and, failing in this, when ushered into the world, grudges him the care and sustenance necessary to sustain that existence. Or if, as is more frequently the fact, with the actual presence of the helpless innocent in her bosom, somewhat of the mother’s heart awakens into life, it is not that rich, overflowing life of love which pours the wealth and fulness of her own being into his. She cares for him as the animal cares for its young in its utter helplessness; and then the weary woman, with many other children about her, and preparing for a new maternity, thrusts him from her as soon as possible, and the little yearling must ‘tak the stirk’s sta’ (the stall of the yearling calf). What can the poor, unwelcome child become? How small are his chances for a virtuous life! If he thinks God has so created him, well may he plead with poor Burns—

‘Can a bitter fountain send forth sweet water?’ ‘Where shall I get them?’ was the reply of a criminal to Jonathan Edwards, who told him he must have better thoughts.

“Alas for poor Humanity! ‘Let there be light,’ that man may know that the relation that leads to maternity can only be ennobled when its object is the creation of a new and glorious life; that his passional nature can only derive dignity and beauty from the control of love and reason; that otherwise, it is of the earth, earthy, and debases him below the level of the brute. ‘Let there be light,’ that woman, in whose soul resides the power, may say to this overwhelming flood of evil, ‘Here shall thy proud waves be stayed!’ The errors of a false religious education, bad laws, and bad customs, have, hitherto, formed some extenuation for this weak subserviency; but this ignorance has been tolerated full long, and now the great cry of God and Humanity goes forth calling for repentance,—that ‘a new heavens and a new earth may be created, wherein shall dwell righteousness.’”

Man has a heart, and that heart can be reached by the loving and earnest appeal of a true woman. Words, such as those contained in the above extract, will never be uttered in vain. They are the true oracles of Nature’s God, as revealed in the soul of the wife and the mother. Let the father hearken to the mother as she pleads, in behalf of her children, that they may not be cursed with an unwelcome existence. Let the husband listen to the prayer of his wife, that she may be spared a maternity whose responsibilities she is not prepared joyfully to assume. Humanity utters her indignant protest against man, when, to gratify his sensual passion, he perpetrates the greatest possible outrage against woman, as a wife and mother, and as a woman, by subjecting her to the necessity of cursing her child with an abhorred existence, or of killing it before it is born. Protestations of love and devotion must ever seem insulting and disgusting to a true woman, from a man who would thus recklessly inflict upon herself and her child this foul wrong. In vain does such a man prate of his regard for the purity and honor of woman, of his reverence for marriage and parentage, and of his desire for the elevation of our common humanity; his life, in the sacred privacy of home, is an insult to his wife, an outrage upon the mother of his children, an act of living injustice and cruelty to his offspring, and a crime of deepest infamy against all that is true, pure and noble in human nature.

Man will not always be thus heedless of the health and happiness of his wife; he will not always be thus unjust and inhuman to his innocent and unconscious children, by making them objects of dread, of loathing and cursing, to the very heart under whose pulsations they receive their ante-natal development. He will subject his manhood to the health and happiness of his wife and children; and in doing so, will receive the richest reward earth can bestow,—the perfect trust of a devoted wife, and the loving respect of a healthy, happy and joyous offspring.