Augustine, De Civitate Dei, Bk. XXII, Ch. XIII.
The development of opinion and law concerning abortion has been traced by Eugène Bausset, L'Avortement Criminel, Thèse de Paris, 1907. For a summary of the practices of different peoples regarding abortion, see W. G. Sumner, Folkways, Ch. VIII.
Die Neue Generation, May, 1908, p. 192. It may be added that in England the attachment of any penalty at all to abortion, practiced in the early months of pregnancy (before "quickening" has taken place), is merely a modern innovation.
Even Balestrini, who is opposed to the punishment of abortion, is no advocate of it. "Whenever abortion becomes a social custom," he remarks (op. cit., p. 191), "it is the external manifestation of a people's decadence, and far too deeply rooted to be cured by the mere attempt to suppress the external manifestation."