CRIMINAL ABORTION
"Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural".
Hamlet, Act. i., Sc. 5.
ILLEGITIMACY, or the alternative of Criminal Abortion, is the goal to which the path of lust inevitably leads.
To be deprived of the endearing love of a parent, to be born out of wedlock, a bastard, is the most unfair legacy which can be bequeathed to a child; while abortion ia nothing but "murder most foul", a secret killing with premeditated malice a proof that the "wages of sin is death".
The generation of new individuals, the perpetuation of the species is of course the result throughout all the animate world when the male and female reproductive elements of like species are brought together under favorable conditions; and when a woman, in whom Nature lives and upon whom life depends, plants the seeds of a thorn tree, she shall surely in the plucking of the fruit be pricked till she bleeds, and it will then be too late to repent her of having harbored the seed from which such fruit grows. The unpitying consequences which follow upon the perverted abuse of Nature are visited by a dreadful reckoning, not so much on the man, who plays a trifling part in reproduction, as upon the mother and the babe.
Illegitimate sexual pleasure is in no sense a trivial offence ; for in no possible way can sexual congress be indulged in outside of wedlock without the participants either committing the most immoral and despicable acts, or else assuming the responsibilities of parentage.
Bad in the beginning, the crime of venery is often rendered worse by the shedding of blood; and any sophist who defends the slaughtering of the innocent child, at any period of its existence, is held in the deepest contempt by every member of repute in the medical profession, and by every one who is not so dull as to be deceived by impotent conclusions. One must abhorrently spurn such a sacrifice if he will but make the effort to inform himself in regard to the wonderful truths of embryonic development which the following pages attempt to explain clearly.
Man is not like the tree, which after the growth of hundreds of years at last falls as a mere log; but, as we believe, his physical nature is inseparably correlated with the moral, so that he hopes to ascend to a higher and a nobler life, coming nearer and nearer to the throne of the Creator; and while he is yet a dumb and unseen embryo, undergoing a secret growth, he is by degrees being shaped and perfected for the hopes of the loftiest estate of any created thing of which we have knowledge.
That this hope should be blighted, and that the precarious life of the defenceless human being should be snapped off by a violent expulsion from its natural place of lodgment, is an outrage which disappointed Nature punishes by calamities to the mother, both physical and moral, of the most threatening kind. We rightly insist that our bodies are temples of the living God; but must we not fear that a blighted foetus is but a ruin of a few columns whose evolution has been ruthlessly cursed by the transgressions of its parents?
If the murderous, fatal hour come to it untimely, there is registered in heaven a crime of the same magnitude as if its death were brought about after its birth.
When some of us as children asked our nurses whence we came and how we got here, they told us that "we dropped down from the clouds".
That seemed wonderfully beautiful to rest content in the belief that we had been gently deposited on this earth from some bower in the deep blue vault of heaven! But when those of us who were so privileged came to the time when we began the study of biology, including comparative anatomy, botany and zoology, along with human anatomy and embryology, then our souls burned within us at the new wonders of life; and we have ever since continued to wonder at and to admire the provisions of Nature for the propagation of the species.