The unwelcome child

Dear Friend:

In the preceding letter, I have shown how, and to what extent, a maternity, undesigned by the father and undesired by the mother, affects the organization, character and destiny, of the child. I wish to pursue the question still further.

Life is before you,—a long and happy one, I trust. May it increase in goodness and usefulness as it does in years! Your power is great, and will be greater. Already the minds of thousands are deeply and permanently influenced by you. I know that Man, and not institutions or dogmas, is the object of your devotion; that the all-controlling, ever present sentiment of your life is, the supremacy of man over his incidents. I know that you reverence man, not his incidents. You feel, and in your life seek to embody the truth, that man is eternal, his institutions transient and ever-changing. Man is the great fact; his religious, social, governmental, ecclesiastical, literary, monetary and commercial surroundings are merely passing incidents of his existence, to be changed or cast away as suits his growth and convenience. Man is the substance, all else the shadow. The appendages will be laid aside, but man will live, deathless as God. You would never sacrifice man to his incidents; the head to the hat, or the body to the coat,—the enduring substance to the passing shadow.

You see and worship God in man, not in his incidents. In those relations which bear most directly and powerfully on the development, purity and nobility of your manhood, and on your character and destiny, you recognize the most perfect manifestation of the Divine presence and power. In them, the great thinking intellect and pulsating heart of the universe,—the God-element of Nature,—speak to you as in nothing else.

Of all your relations, which is most potent to develop your manhood, to unfold to yourself, and to all, the hidden wealth and depths of your being; to vitalize and call into manly activity all the powers of your physical and intellectual nature? Your soul promptly answers, “That of the HUSBAND and the FATHER.” No man who has lived in those relations can doubt the truth of your answer. God speaks to you through your wife and child, as through no other being of the past or present. Through those loved ones, He, as it were, renders himself visible, audible, tangible to you, and you meet him and talk with him face to face. They are his natural prophets and messiahs to you—the media through which the God-element of the universe flows into you, quickening and vitalizing, and arousing to energetic activity, all the powers of your manhood. Through them, an influence is thrown upon and around you, which silently, but surely, defines and shapes your plans of life, and quickens, expands, and ennobles your affections. In them, a Presence is ever before you, whose beauty and brightness illuminate your pathway, and which is ever beckoning you onward and upward, and breathing into your soul a desire and a daring to reach the sublimest height of purity and nobleness. In truth, you may say, in your wife and child are the hidings of God’s power, to form your character and shape your destiny.

What, then, so important to you, as a true knowledge and just appreciation of your relations as a husband and father? As a husband and father, you can do more to elevate and perfect the human type, and to save yourself, than you can in any other relation: political, ecclesiastical, commercial and social relations are insignificant, in comparison. I know you live but to glorify the nature you bear, and to enjoy that glorified nature forever. Such being with you the chief end of existence, I ask you to weigh, with candor and earnestness, the following observations on the Ante-Natal Education and History of Man. I have long been accustomed to consider human beings in connection with three states, and to think, speak and write on the comparative influence of these states on their character and destiny:

1. The state preceding birth, which I am accustomed to call the Ante-Natal state.

2. The state between birth and death, or the embodied state.

3. The state after death, or the disembodied state. The two last, the Post-Natal spheres or states.

Religion, government, education, commerce, agriculture, mechanics, literature, the press, the convention,—these hitherto, have confined attention, almost exclusively, to human life in its post-natal spheres, embodied or disembodied. They take up human beings, after they are born, and seek to do for them what they may to promote their welfare; and much of the doing consists in trying to undo what had been done for them in the ante-natal state. To a great extent, in promoting the education of children, this state has been ignored, as having no connection with the character and destiny in the post-natal spheres.

Come, my friend, go with me back to that which Church and State have overlooked, and view human beings between conception and birth. The period is brief; but is it not important? Is it powerless? Are no influences exerted and no events transpiring there, of sufficient moment to render them worthy attention, in considering the history and estimating the character of the individual man or woman, or of states and nations?

Many years since, the conviction was settled in my mind, that that period, though so brief, and hidden from observation in the very holy of holies of the temple of life, has more to do in giving tone to our feelings, intensity, activity and character to our passions and appetites, direction to our thoughts and plans, and in moulding our character and shaping our destiny, in the post-natal spheres of our being, than all that is brought to bear on us after we are born. Our ante-natal history is the key to our post-natal life. There is not a man or woman who is not a living witness to the truth of this assertion.

I think it cannot be doubted, that much of the physical disease and suffering, and much of the idiocy, insanity, and mental and moral obliquity of our post-natal, embodied state, is the result of our ante-natal organization. Much, indeed, is done for us before the germs of our being leave the paternal organism. They must, to a greater or less extent, receive the impress of the father’s conditions of body and soul; and he will do a service to the world who shall show to fathers their responsibilities in this matter. But Maternity is the subject under consideration; and in discussing this, my concern with the germ is after the mother takes charge of it. The period between conception and birth is that to which I would call your attention.

From a long and critical observation of facts, and a persevering effort to trace the physical, intellectual, social and spiritual conditions and phenomena of the individual and social lives of children and adults, in the many thousands of families in which, for a longer or shorter time, I have been an inmate, I long ago came to the conclusion, that to their Ante-Natal Education, men and women are more beholden for their healthful or diseased physical conditions, sufferings or enjoyments, and for their mental and spiritual tendencies, their peculiarities of temper and disposition, their aptitudes to truth or falsehood, to justice or injustice, to love or hate, to peace or war, to temperance or drunkenness, to forgiveness or revenge, to sexual purity or impurity, to happiness or misery, than to all the influences that are brought to bear on them, after they are born, to whatever age they may attain. These tendencies, whether of body or soul, are mainly, if not entirely, organized as fixed facts of existence in the individual man or woman, in their ante-natal state. There is not a human being, there never was one, and never will be, whose whole life is not essentially, constantly, and in its minutest details instigated and directed, more or less, by gestational influences.

If this be so, where are we to look for the forming and controlling causes of human character and destiny, and of physical, mental, and spiritual idiosyncrasies? Where shall we go to find the true foundations of biography and history, and the controlling elements of all religions and governments? Where go to find the mainsprings of war, slavery, drunkenness, polygamy, licentiousness, and of all the sufferings, anguish and woes of marriage and domestic life, that arise from the abuse of the sexual element? Where go to find the cause of a repulsive and loathed maternity, and of the horrors to which it leads? Where, indeed, but to the germs of diseases, and the aptitudes to good or evil, that were organized into the bodies and souls of men and women, as fixed facts and elements of life, by influences that were brought to bear upon them, through the maternal organism, between the periods of conception and birth?

This ante-natal education makes the man and woman, the Religion and Government, the Church and State, the social, educational, and commercial customs and institutions; and whoever attempts to write the biography of an individual, or the history of a Church or State, without reference to that education, and its controlling power over human character and destiny, fails to present the whole truth. He fails to trace effects to their causes, and must necessarily give a partial or perverted view of the phenomena of life.

“Maxima debetur pueris reverentia.” [The greatest reverence is due to childhood.] Thus sang the Roman poet Juvenal, two thousand years ago. Reverence childhood! If this be so important after the child is born, how much more reverence is due to ante-natal childhood? Be thy hands clean, thy robes spotless, thy looks, thy tones, thy mien, tender, sweet, loving, reverential, and thy heart filled and thrilled with pure worship, as thou enterest the temple of man’s ante-natal life! With these feelings, enter with me the very holy of holies of that temple, over which God spreads his wings of tenderest love and highest wisdom, as protecting cherubims and seraphims. Behold, there, the unconscious future man or woman, in a process of gestational organization and development, subjected to influences over which he or she has no control, and receiving a physical, intellectual, social and spiritual education that is to decide the character, for good or evil, for happiness or misery, in the great future that is opening before them.

See what a future is wrapped up in that unconscious embryo man or woman! It may be that the fates of states and empires are being inscribed, by some unseen power, on that body and soul. Already that unformed child may hold in its grasp the destinies of millions and of ages. But who is the educator? Who guides the pen that is inscribing peace or war, liberty or slavery, life or death, to those millions and those ages, and the scroll of destiny to states and kingdoms, to religions and governments on the soul of that unborn babe? The mother. Through her must come every element essential to constitute the body and soul of that child; and, as it passes through her system, it must receive the stamp of her physical, social and spiritual conditions.

Keep in mind the great fact, that the mental states of the mother, during gestation, must necessarily and permanently affect every particle of that substance which goes to make the organization and growth of her child, for good or evil. Whatever injuriously affects her thoughts and feelings, must permanently affect the physical, social, intellectual and moral aptitudes of her child.

Suppose that you have, undesignedly and without her consent, imposed maternity on your wife. On discovering the fact, it becomes most repulsive to her nature. She is not prepared to bear the cross and endure the crucifixion. Instantly, her soul is filled with murderous intent. She resolves to nip and crush the opening bud of life,—to procure abortion,—that is, to commit the deed of ante-natal child-murder. She does not feel that it is her child. She may regard it as yours, but she cannot acknowledge it as her own; and though it must receive its gestational development in her organism, she cannot tenderly and lovingly cherish and guard it, as bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh, and soul of her soul. It is so in fact, but not in her feelings. She asked not for it; her soul repels it as an intruder, thrust upon her without her consent, and in contempt, it may be, of her earnest remonstrance,—for thus it often is. The child, she feels, has no right to an existence at her expense, and who shall say it has? An uninvited and hated intruder is exhausting her vital energies, and robbing her of that which no earthly treasures can ever restore or recompense. Through her physical suffering and mental anguish, an unbidden and loathed guest is feeding and thriving on her heart’s blood. Desperation, and the bitterness of death, are in her heart. Murder fills her soul towards your unconscious and innocent babe.

Who is responsible? On whom rests the guilt? It is your work. You forced that heavy burden upon her, and compelled her to bear it. You thrust your child, as an intruder, into the sacred domain of her life, to derive existence through her organism and at her expense, knowing that she was not prepared to welcome it, and to bend the forces of her nature to its growth and support; and contrary, it may be, to her earnest entreaties that she might be spared this pain and anguish till she was ready joyfully to welcome them. But you heeded not her prayer; you assumed the right to decide for her when she was prepared to endure these trials, and under what circumstances she should be a mother. You must have your stated gratification; you have abused your manhood and your wife, till this indulgence, as you think, has become as essential a want of your life as your daily food,—as the drunkard feels that alcohol is as essential as air to his existence and happiness; and so you impose on her a maternity which her soul abhors. You horribly tax her vital energies, “without her consent.” Murder is in her heart towards the uninvited and hated intruder you have introduced into the sanctuary of her life.

That mother, whose heart is thus filled with murder towards your child, is its educator! Into her hands you committed its destiny; and in the very act of so doing, you aroused in her heart the spirit of murder against the unconscious, innocent being whom she is to nourish into life. In the very act of committing the germ of the new immortal to her, you destroyed in her the power to be its loving, nursing mother. You knew that she would not and could not love and reverence it, and do justice to it; that she would hate it, and kill it if she could. All this you knew, yet you forced the charge upon her!

Suppose your child were born; would you commit its education and destiny to one, who, as you knew, would cherish murder in her heart towards it, who would “get rid of it” (as the phrase is), i.e., kill it, if she could without injury to herself,—yes, and kill it although at the risk of death to herself, such being her dread and her loathing of the charge? You would, yourself, be the murderer, if you did. Should you commit the post-natal education and happiness of your child to such a woman, knowing her utter repugnance to the charge, and her determination to “get rid of it” if she could,—would you not be responsible for the consequences, whether she killed it, or whether she preserved it alive, only to infuse into it a deadly wrath and revenge towards you, and towards all of human kind? You would. You knew she loathed its existence when you thrust it upon her, and that she would destroy the young life if she could; and that, if it lived to grow up under the training of such a spirit, it must be at war, in heart and life, with all its surroundings, must be unloved and unloving, hated and hating, and an object of anxiety and dread to all with whom it might chance to be associated.

What else do you do, when you impose on your wife a maternity unasked and abhorred? You commit the development and education of your child, during the most important and susceptible period of its existence, to one who assures you she is not prepared for the charge, who entreats you to spare her, and who loathes the very thought of its existence. Every element of her womanly nature, for the time being, recoils from its presence in her system. She pleads that you would spare her this burden, at this time, and until her nature calls for it, and is prepared joyfully to meet the martyrdom maternity must bring to her. Heedless of her prayers, and, it may be, of threats of death to your child, you demand the surrender of her person to your passion. Maternity ensues. Murder enters her heart towards your child at the same time. She tries to “get rid of it,”—to murder it. She succeeds. The young life you had committed to her care is nipped in the bud, as you were assured it would be before you resigned it to her keeping. Where rests the responsibility? On you, primarily and mainly. You murdered your own child, not, indeed, with your own hands,—you drove another to do the desperate deed, and that other, your wife, who came to you with a loving and trusting heart, to save and to be saved; and you, to gratify your selfish passion, drove her to the commission of the crime of ante-natal child-murder,—a crime that must forever weigh upon her soul like a mountain of guilt and shame; a deed, after the doing of which, no true woman can ever, in this life, stand proud and stainless, in conscious innocence and dignity, before the tribunal of her womanhood. She has done a deed for which great Nature can find no excuse but ignorance; but which, even when done in ignorance, she regards as a violation of her just laws, and punishes as such, with appropriate penalties,—the loss of self-respect, and the consciousness of degradation.

Yet all this suffering, anguish, crime and conscious degradation, you, the husband, have forced upon her, solely for the momentary, and, under the circumstances, most unnatural, gratification of your sensual passion,—a passion which, when controlled by manly love and wisdom, and held in abeyance to the health, purity, and happiness of your wife and children, would bring only honor to their hearts and to your home, but which, when thus indulged without regard to the wishes and conditions of your wife, and merely for your personal pleasure, spreads crime, pollution, misery and death, all around.

How dare you, how dare any husband, commit the destiny of his child into the hands of one, who, as he knows, thus loathes the thought of its existence? How can you subject your child to the possibility of such a gestational organization and development; such an ante-natal education; or force upon your wife the suffering and anguish of a loathed and hated maternity, or the necessity of doing a deed from which the soul of every noble woman must shrink with sickening horror? You could not do this wrong to your wife and child, till your manhood was sunk in the mire of disgusting sensualism.

A loathed and hated maternity! A woman, a mother, shrinking with disgust and horror from the thought of giving existence to her child! A mother’s heart throbbing with murder toward the child over whose development and education it is presiding! Do you say this is strong language?—too strong? That it cannot be? Do you say a mother does not, cannot, hate and loathe her unborn babe? Why, then, does she kill it? Her spirit is known by its fruit. Is not her whole soul bent on its destruction, even at the risk of her own health and life?

“Abortion!” “Get rid of it!” Gentle terms, these; respectable, no doubt, as some count gentle and respectable; but used to cover a most foul, unnatural deed. Ante-natal child-murder alone can truly express the nature of the act. If no murderous hate is in the mother’s heart, why does she kill the child? If you saw a mother seeking to kill her child after it was born, knowing that she did it because its existence was hateful to her, and because she did not wish to bear the burden of its nursing and training, would you not conclude that her heart was filled with murder towards it? So when a woman is willing to imperil her own life, to outrage every womanly element of her being, and forfeit the conscious innocence and respect of her own soul, to inflict death upon her unborn child, you may be sure that a deep and terrible loathing and hatred are in her heart towards the new and expanding life which the husband for mere sensual gratification, has thrust upon her.

What means the wide-spreading disposition among men and women to procure and to palliate the murder of children before they are born? One thing is surely indicated by it, namely, the increasing sensualism of men, and their determination to gratify it without regard to consequences to their wives and children. It is a swift witness against their purity and nobleness, and shows an utter recklessness in the pursuit of sensual pleasure. It also opens the frightful depths to which woman can fall and has fallen. How many women of New England have on their souls, at this hour, the ineffaceable stain of ante-natal child-murder? How many bear in their physical organism the incurable results of this crime? How many families are now suffering from it? Go ask the men and women doctors, who, for gold, perpetrate this crime, and who shamelessly advertise their infamy. Tens of thousands of wives and mothers are to be seen, all over the country, at once the perpetrators and victims of this cruel and disgusting act; all, all to administer to the sensualism of men, who are called husbands! Husbands! the guilt is mainly yours; and the damnation is just. Beneath your foul wrong to their nature, your wives sink, and you must go down with them.

Ponder the following extract from a private letter, containing the experience of a wife and mother, in regard to enforced and hated maternity and ante-natal child-murder. The letter is of recent date; the writer and her family are known to me personally:

“Before we married, I informed him [the husband] of my dread of having children. I told him I was not yet prepared to meet the sufferings and responsibilities of maternity. He entered into an arrangement to prevent it, for a specified time. This agreement was disregarded. After the legal form was over, and he felt that he could now indulge his passion without loss of reputation, and under legal and religious sanctions, he insisted on the surrender of my person to his will. He violated his promise at the beginning of our united life. That fatal bridal night! it has left a cloud on my soul and on my home, that can never pass away on earth. I can never forget it. It sealed the doom of our union, as it does of thousands.

“He was in feeble health; so was I; and both of us mentally depressed. But the sickly germ was implanted, and conception took place. We were poor and destitute, having made no preparations for a home for ourselves and child. I was a stricken woman. In September, 1838, we came to ——, and settled in a new country. In the March following, my child, developed under a heart throbbing with dread and anguish at the thought of its existence, was born. After three months’ struggle, I became reconciled to my, at first, unwelcome child. But the impress of my impatience and hostility to its existence, previous to its birth, was on my child, never to be effaced; and to this hour, that child is the victim of an undesired maternity.

“In one year, I found I was again about to be a mother. I was in a state of frightful despair. My first-born was sickly and very troublesome (how could it be otherwise?), needing constant care and nursing. My husband chopped wood for our support. Of the injustice of bringing children into the world to such poverty and misery, I was then as sensible as now. I was in despair. I felt that death would be preferable to maternity under such circumstances. A desire and determination to get rid of my child entered into my heart. I consulted a lady friend, and by her persuasion and assistance, killed it. Within less than a year, maternity was again imposed upon me, with no better prospect for doing justice to my child. It was a most painful conviction to me; I felt that I could not have another child at that time. All seemed dark as death. I had begged and prayed to be spared this trial again, till I was prepared to accept it joyfully; but my husband insisted on his gratification, without regard to my wishes and conditions.

“I consulted a physician, and told him of my unhappy state of mind, and my aversion to having another child, for the present. He was ready with his logic, his medicines and instruments, and told me how to destroy it. After experimenting on myself three months, I was successful. I killed my child about five months after conception.

“A few months after this, maternity was again forced upon me, to my grief and anguish. I determined, again, on the child’s destruction; but my courage failed as I came to the practical deed. My health and life were in jeopardy; for my living child’s sake, I wished to live. I made up my mind to do the best I could for my unborn babe, whose existence seemed so unnatural and repulsive. I knew its young life would be deeply and lastingly affected by my mental and physical conditions. I became, in a measure, reconciled to my dark fate, and was as resigned and happy as I could be under the circumstances. I had just such a child as I had every reason to expect. I could do no justice to it. How could I?

“Soon after the birth of my child, my husband insisted on his accustomed indulgence. Without any wish of my own, maternity was again forced upon me. I dared not attempt to get rid of the child, abortion seemed so cruel, so inhuman, unnatural, and repulsive. I resolved again, for my child’s sake, to do the best I could for it. Though I could not joyfully welcome, I resolved quietly to endure, its existence.

“After the birth of this child, I felt that I could have no more to share our poverty and to suffer the wrongs and trials of an unwelcome existence. I felt that I had rather die at once, and thus end my life and my power to be a mother together. My husband cast the entire care of the family on me. I had scarcely one hour to devote to my children. My husband still insisted on his gratification. I was the veriest slave alive. Life had lost its charms. The grave seemed my only refuge, and Death my only friend.

“In this state, known as it was to my husband, he thrust maternity upon me twice. I employed a doctor to kill my child, and in the destruction of it, in what should have been the vigor of my life, ended my power to be a mother. I was shorn of the brightest jewel of my Womanhood. I suffered, as woman alone can suffer, not only in body, but in bitter remorse and anguish of soul.

“All this I passed through, under the terrible, withering consciousness, that it was all done and suffered solely that the passion of my husband might have a momentary indulgence. Yet such had been my false religious and social education, that, in submitting my person to his passion, I did it with the honest conviction that, in marriage, my body became the property of my husband. He said so; all women to whom I applied for counsel, said it was my duty to submit, that husbands expected it, had a right to it, and must have this indulgence, whenever they were excited, or suffer; and that in this way alone could wives retain the love of their husbands. I had no alternative but silent, suffering submission to his passion, and then procure abortion, or leave him, and thus resign my children to the tender mercies of one with whom I could not live myself. Abortion was most repulsive to every feeling of my nature. It seemed degrading, and, at times, rendered me an object of loathing to myself.

“When my first-born was three months old, I had a desperate struggle for my personal liberty. My husband insisted on his right to subject my person to his passion, before my babe was two months old. I saw his conduct then in all its degrading and loathsome injustice. I pleaded, with tears and anguish, for my own and my child’s sake, to be spared; and had it not been for my helpless child, I should then have ended the struggle by bolting my legal bonds. For its sake, I submitted to that outrage, and to my own conscious degradation. For its sake, I concluded to take my chance in the world with other wives and mothers, who, as they assured me, and as I then knew, were all around me, subjected to like outrages, and driven to the degrading practice of abortion.

“But, even then, I saw and argued the justice of my personal rights in regard to Maternity, and the relation that leads to it, as strongly as you do now. I saw it all as clearly as you do. I was then, amid all the degrading influence that crushed me, true and just in my womanly intuitions. I insisted on my right to say when and under what circumstances I would accept of him the office of Maternity, and become the mother of his child. I insisted that it was for me to say when and how often I should subject myself to the liability of becoming a mother. But he became angry with me; claimed ownership over me; insisted that I, as a wife, was to submit to my husband, ‘in all things;’ threatened to leave me and my children, and declared I was not fit to be a wife. Fearing some fatal consequence to my child or to myself, being alone, destitute, and far from helpful friends, in the far West, and fearing that my little one would be left to want, I stifled all expressions of my honest convictions, and ever after kept my aversion and painful struggles in my own bosom.

“In every respect, so far as passional relations between myself and husband are concerned, I have ever felt myself to be a miserable and abject woman. I now see and feel it most deeply and painfully. If I was with a child in my arms, I was in constant dread of all personal contact with my husband, lest I should have a new maternity thrust upon me, and be obliged to wean one child before its time, to give place to another. In my misery, I have often cried out, ‘O God! is there no way out of this loathsome bondage?’

“It was not want of kindly feelings towards my husband that induced this state of mind, for I could and did endure every privation and want without an unkind feeling or word, and even cheerfully, for his sake. But every feeling of my soul did then, does now, and ever must, protest against the cruel and loathsome injustice of husbands towards their wives, manifested in imposing on them a maternity uncalled for by their own nature and most repulsive to it, and whose sufferings and responsibilities they are unprepared and unwilling to meet.

“Strong language!”—“Too strong and sweeping epithets!” Can you, as a man, a husband and a father, read the above extract, and feel or say that my language is too strong? The above is the experience of a living wife and mother, nearly verbatim as written by herself. It is a simple, unvarnished, affecting story, but bearing on its face the stamp of truth, and the evidence of a sense of conscious injustice inflicted by the husband, and of a degradation self-inflicted, solely to escape what seemed to her a greater evil. Can such “loathsome injustice,” on the part of husbands and fathers, towards their wives and unborn children, be reprobated in too strong terms?

Husbands! it is your licentiousness that drives your wives to a deed so abhorrent to their every wifely, womanly and maternal instinct; a deed which ruins the health of their bodies, prostitutes their souls, and makes marriage, maternity, and womanhood itself, degrading and loathsome. No terms can sufficiently characterize the cruelty, meanness, and disgusting selfishness and injustice of your conduct, when you impose on them a maternity so detested as to drive them to the desperation of killing their unborn children, and often themselves.

Is it a wonder that wives seek to justify themselves in resorting to ante-natal child-murder? I do not wonder at it. The wonder is, that a woman should live one hour, as a wife, with one who imposes on her a repulsive maternity, thus doing to her, and her child, the greatest possible wrong; or who can, for one moment, subject her to the liability of becoming a mother, when her own nature repels the office. One such maternity, imposed after the husband knows that his wife shrinks from it, should lead every woman to “bolt the legal bond” that binds her to such a man. If she does not, but submits to the injustice, she wrongs her child, her husband, and her own soul. The same plea may be offered in extenuation of ante-natal child-murder, under circumstances of enforced, repulsive maternity, that is offered in justification of Margaret Garner, the fugitive-slave mother, who cut the throat of one child and threw another into the river, to save them from the savage clutch of licensed kidnappers.

Ante-natal child-murder,—a mother killing her unborn babe to save it from a worse doom! It is a fearful alternative; one whose results to the soul of the mother are no less deadly than to the forming body of her child. It prostitutes, crucifies, murders, whatever is pure, lovely, wifely, motherly and womanly in her soul; and, for the time being, as it were, blots from it the superscription and image of God. She murders her unborn babe, and often herself, to save herself and child from what she considers a more loathsome and repulsive doom. Who can harshly and coarsely condemn her? She feels that death to herself and babe, at her own hands, is far preferable, and less criminal, than a loathed maternity, and the birth of an unwelcome and hated child. To save herself and child from slavery, the slave mother cuts its throat, and then her own. The wife, to save herself and child from what she regards as a no less horrible doom, imposed by the husband, destroys her unborn child, and brings death to her own soul, if not to her body.

O man! where is thy manhood, that thou canst inflict this wrong on the woman, who, with an all-trusting love, lays herself in thy bosom, reposing fearless confidence in thy manly love and power to shelter her from harm? Husband! where is thy love, thy justice, thy tenderness, thy manliness, thy conscience, thy God, that thou canst impose these sufferings and responsibilities on thy wife, despite her tears and entreaties to be spared till she is ready joyfully to welcome them for thy sake and her own? Fathers! where is your reverence for your offspring, your tender regard for the claims of your unborn children, and your respect for all that qualifies you to be fathers and your wives mothers, that you beget children to ante-natal murder, or to the, if possible, more terrible doom of an existence undesired, and abhorrent to the mothers that bore them?

Husbands! listen to the voice of God, speaking to you through your wives, and, in the name of those most dear to your hearts, and, most essential to the happiness and glory of your life and your homes, give heed to their protests against an undesigned and repulsive maternity!