Some would seek to maintain that the soul does not enter the foetus until this "quickening" has been felt by the mother, and these are the kind of people who would argue as to how many angels could balance themselves on the point of a needle.
The soul, being an unsubstantial entity, is, of course, incapable of demonstration, but if we have faith to believe that mortal man has such a gift, we cannot in reason assume the task of defining when it has entered into the body.
We do know that the responsibility of giving birth to life is equally as great as the taking of life, and that if the foetus were left to fulfil its normal destiny it would have the chance to round out a useful career; and it is not for us to say whether it shall be destroyed any more than if it were a few stages further advanced in life.
The mass of people of course never see human beings except during their air breathing existence, and they look upon illustrations of the early embryo as being hideously ugly and repulsive, not stopping to realize that each one of us has passed through similar stages, and that, after all, the gradations are hardly more marked than those occurring between infancy and senility.
Friends who knew us as children pass us by unrecognized when we have added years to our bodies, and graded changes are the rule throughout the cycle of life. Under the microscope the early embryo is just as beautiful, so physiologists think, and shows as much, or even more, vitality in its young tissues than when it has reached the maturer stages of development.
It is a misconception to assume that the spark of life in the embryo is precarious and easily quenched. On the contrary it seems that the younger it is the more tenacious is it of life.
Even such crude biologists as butchers and fishmongers have daily evidence that some fishes, e.g., shad, will live for upward of thirty six hours after being removed from their element, and it is well known that turtles will live for more than a day with their heads cut off; so also will snakes and some others of the cold blooded animals reptiles and amphibians.
In our early development we pass through forms very similar to those of these animals, and the writer has repeatedly seen evidences of life in foetuses, born before they could respire, for some considerable time after their expulsion.
Thus, for instance, in one foetus, born during an accidental abortion between the third and fourth month, life was observed in a most striking manner.
After the mother had given birth to it in the hospital, the nurse placed it in a jar of water, where it remained immersed for more than two hours.
Not realizing that there was life in it, it was pinned to a board for the purposes of dissection in order to study the foetal circulation. Upon laying open its thorax and abdomen the operators were astonished to see violent respiratory efforts, through the lungs were incapable of expansion at this early date.
It being recognized that the foetus was at a non viable age, and that it was insensitive to pain, the dissection continued, until finally the pericardium was laid open and the beautiful physiological demonstration of a beating human heart was afforded.
The auricles and ventricles were then laid open, showing the mechanism of the action of the valves of the heart, and even then the contractions did not cease for almost two hours.
At the risk of the reader misunderstanding how one could make such a dissection on a human being, it is, nevertheless, here mentioned as a valuable example of the wonderful pertinacity of life, a point of the utmost importance.