"By this compromise it was agreed to consider the foetus as endowed with life only from the date of the maternal sensation called 'quickening'. Abortions forced after 'quickening' were branded as serious crimes, but all so caused before this period were suffered to pass unnoticed. Henceforth 'quick' became a word of evil omen. It is true the canon law subsequently disregarded this compromise, declared the foetus alive from conception, and condemned its destruction at any period of utero gestation as a great and wicked crime.
The Christian Church, to its eternal honor be it said, has ever advocated and enforced the principle of the inviolability of foetal life. But the mischief could not be undone. A doctrine, only a degree less heartless than its pagan predecessor, took a firm hold on society. How effectually it influences the opinion and practice of our own time, how completely it has permeated all, but more particularly the higher, ranks of contemporary society, needs not to be insisted upon here.
Among those who are competent to pronounce on this question of 'quickening' there is, however, but one opinion, and to it your committee ask the undivided attention of the community. The foetus is alive from conception, and all intentional killing oj it is murder. The world is free to discuss the transcendental problem concerning the stage of development at which the foetus becomes endowed with a soul.
If there never were such an existence as a soul, if men perished utterly when they died, laws against murder would still hold good, because laws against murder were enforced, not for the soul's sake, but to preserve the peace and even the existence of society".
What is the significance of this sinister word "quickening", which has for so many centuries been the cause of millions of deaths, and which has persisted in our statutes, so that our laws have made it the basis of a distinction between the degrees of guilt of criminal abortion? The deductions from the word have been entirely erroneous and immoral.
Quickening occurs at that time in the life of the foetus when the mother's perception first enables her to detect life in her womb by its active movements; then its throes of life unmistakably arrest her consciousness and render her reasonably certain that she is with child. The movements of the child are due to a reflex action of its nervous system, whereby it assumes positions favorable for its growth, and these motions occur long before the time when there is any possibility of their being perceived by the parent as may occasionally be seen in the muscular actions of embryos of abortions occurring before the natural time of "quickening".
The foetus, in the earlier months of pregnancy, is very small in proportion to the size of the cavity which it occupies, and, floating in a large membranous sac filled with amniotic fluid, it may freely swim or move about without imparting the slightest sensation to its mother. Later on, as it increases in size, it more completely fills the uterine cavity, and is able, as it were, to get a "purchase" on one side of its confined space while it kicks against the other.
These motions are at first slight, and Montgomery has compared the sensation which they impart to the mother "to the tremulous motion of a little bird held in the hand"; others describe it as a "fluttering" or "pulsating" sensation; later on the motions become so violent that bystanders can see the effect by the marked kicking within the mother's womb, and she sometimes cries out in pain and alarm at their intensity.
"The pregnant woman receives a great many hints as the signs and symptoms accumulate and corroborate each other that a live and growing foetus is developing in her uterus, but she now waits for a decided kick before she will believe that the foetus is alive. This kick is awaited anxiously by the woman as well as the law to announce that the child is sufficiently formed for its destruction to constitute even a misdemeanor.
"It must kick very decidedly and unmistakably for several months before its killing constitutes a felony, and, as one judge has held, should it be knocked on the head with a hammer or strangled with a garter after its head is born, but before it is wholly delivered and separate from its mother, it is not sufficiently alive in the eye of the law for its killing to constitute murder".