Foeticide has been chronicled from the earliest times, and casts a shadow over our land to day; it is no new crime, but has been practised among all nations with the sole exception of the Jews. The statutes of Moses registered no laws in relation to this crime, except the sweeping law of the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not hill". Jewish women have ever considered it an honor to bear large families to their husbands, and this is one reason why the Jews have spread over the earth and prospered in spite of the most violent opposition.
This remarkable people, who have a history which is the "standing astonishment of the world", can never rise to preeminence among the nations until the curse under which they labor is removed; nor can they be annihilated, because they live under a blessing the propitious influence of their kind of ancient civilization being in no small measure due to a strict adherence to the Mosaic laws governing their sexual hygiene and relationships. However, the writer has been told by Jewish doctors that the crime is beginning to spread among the Americanized Jewesses, but only among that class who have put aside all religion.
Among the Mohammedans the practice is very prevalent, for, although it is contrary to the laws of Mohammed, it is considered less wicked than to give birth to an illegitimate child.
In China, Japan, India and Africa this practice has been, and still is, fearfully prevalent. These benighted peoples, with their teeming and redundant populations and overtaxed food supply, place very little value on human life. It is related that during the last century vehicles went regularly round the streets of Pekin every day to collect the bodies of infants, martyrs of infanticide; if a Chinese sailor fall overboard, he is allowed to perish without any effort to save him; in India thousands upon thousands of infants, mostly females, were thrown into the sacred Ganges to be devoured by the crocodiles; in Madagascar, New Granada and Greenland, if the mother dies during or after confinement, the living child is buried with her; and in Africa the wives and female infants are frequently buried alive with the head of the lamily. With such ideas of the value of human life, is it to be wondered at that abortion is fearfully prevalent? In Polynesia and among the Indians of our own continent the crime is common.
Plato advocated the procuring of abortion in the "Republic"; Aristotle taught that no child should be permitted to be born alive whose mother was more than forty or whose father was more than fifty years of age". The Athenian mother placed her new born child at the feet of its father, who decided upon its lot, though the semblance of legality was usually followed by calling in five neighbors as a sort of court. Deformed children, girls, and those of the inferior classes were thus frequently condemned to death.
The teachings of the ancient Greek and Eoman philosophers resulted so disastrously that it became necessary to denounce the practice, and this was vehemently done by Ovid, Seneca, and by Juvenal. In one "satire", after praising the exemplary patience with which the matrons of the lower classes bore the pains of labor and the fatigues of nursing, he upbraids the ladies of fashion with their unwillingness to submit to these duties. "You'll scarce hear tell", says Juvenal, "of a lying in among ladies of quality, such is the power of art, such the force of medicines prepared by the midwife to cause barrenness and abortion".
"Sed jacet aurato vix ulla puerpera lecto.
Tantum artes hujus, tantum medicamina possunt,
Quse steriles facit, atque homines in ventre necandos Conducit".
Borne was filled with abortionists, the crime prevailing, as in our own day, chiefly among the so called upper classes of society, and infanticide continued to prevail in Eome until the epoch of Ulpian (inA.D. 205), who repressed it with severe penalties. Throughout these several nations in the different centuries many millions of lives have been sacrificed, some of which, no doubt, would have been of priceless value to the world. The recorded experience of those times, while shocking us, leads us to consider the advance which we have made in the same direction.