Whatever can be accomplished in leading the pregnant woman to refrain from this unnatural crime must come from education and that alone; for no dread of future punishment in time or eternity seems more deterrent to her than the present disgrace.
While pleading for mercy and compassion for the disgraced woman and her bastard child the exact opposite of what prevails we cannot be too severe on the heartless miscreants who are permitted to ply their vile trade with comparative impunity, and we cannot find language strong enough to express our detestation for the laws which do not protect the child in utero until "quickening" has been acknowledged.
"There is not a household in the land or in the civilized world which is not more or less permeated by the influence and teaching of the noble science which we practise, and this ignorance of the law of life, or the fact of life, before quickening, could, if we were sufficiently alive to its importance, be utterly done away with and wiped off the face of the earth in a single year.
Otherwise good women would no longer boast of the number of foetuses they had gotten rid of, and they would no longer teach their sisters how they could accomplish the same 'innocent' feat.
When it is known and universally acknowledged that to extinguish the first spark of human life is a crime of the same nature, both against our Maker and society, as it is to destroy an infant, a child, or a man, then, and not until then, will abortion cease to be a common occurrence, and good men and women become ready to assume the responsibility of their own deliberate acts".
The attorney general of the State of Massachusetts reported the arrests and trials of thirty two abortionists during a period extending over eight years, and not one single conviction resulted.
Here in the capital of the nation a notorious abortionist was recently found guilty by a jury, and sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude for causing the death of the mother; he is now free and, it is thought, still imbrues his hands in blood with impunity.
The proper term for the destruction of the foetus at any stage of its existence is murder in the first degree, and the law should punish it as such.
Abortion induced before the time of viability of the fcetus i.e., before the sixth or seventh month necessarily contemplates its death, and even if it be done later it is safe to say that where it is done criminally and not therapeutically the child will be allowed to perish.
The arrests of abortionists are usually not for the crime intended by them, but for bungling work which constitutes a double murder, the mother as well as the child dying as a result of the operation.
The Abortionist. The abortionist fattens on the law which denominates the emptying of the womb of a pregnant woman merely a misdemeanor before "quickening" and a felony only thereafter.
Of course the sensation of "quickening" is denied and none can dispute it.
The crime is committed in the dark without witnesses, and the woman is under oath to maintain secrecy, which, being a party to the deed, she naturally does, with the occasional exceptions of death bed repentances.
Of course the abortionist, for his own selfish reasons, does not contemplate such a contingency as the death of the mother, it being to his interest that she shall survive; but as regards the fcetus the act is one of cool, deliberate, unrelenting murder, and the mother is a party to the crime.