“No words can express the helplessness, the sense of personal desecration, the despair, which sinks into the heart of woman when forced to submit to maternity under adverse circumstances, and when her own soul rejects it. It is no matter of wonder that abortions are purposely procured; it is to me a matter of wonder that a single child, undesignedly begotten and reluctantly conceived, is ever suffered to mature in the organism of the mother. Her whole nature repels it. How can she regard its ante-natal development but with sorrow and shrinking?
“Sensitive as woman ever is at such periods, she rarely meets with any special consideration; indeed, that very situation is too often made the occasion for increased passional indulgence on the part of the husband, or of neglect and contempt. Woman must have had, doubtless has, a very large amount of what you call the God-element in her nature, to enable her to do as well as she does in the function of Maternity, under such debasing and depressing influences.
“The strength and energy of body and mind which were required properly to develop and give birth to one child, have been often taxed to conceive and develop six or eight, or perhaps ten or twelve. Would it not be well to study economy in the function of Parentage, as well as in some other departments of domestic life?
“There are few, very few, wives and mothers who could not reveal a sad, dark picture in their own experience, in their relations to their husbands and their children. Maternity, and the relation in which it originates, are thrust upon them by their husbands, often without regard to their spiritual or physical conditions, and often in contempt of their earnest and urgent entreaties. No joy comes to their hearts at the conception and birth of their children, except that which arises from the consciousness that they have survived the sufferings wantonly and selfishly inflicted on them.
“There are facts enough illustrating the dire effects of an undesigned and an undesired maternity to move the whole earth to sorrow and repentance, if woman, as a wife and mother, dared give utterance to the wrongs inflicted upon her and her children. The living illustrations of woman’s wrongs, inflicted on her in the holy of holies of her home, by those who had promised to ‘love, cherish and protect’ her, do now fill the earth. To the influences bearing on the unborn babe, in consequence of the disregard, by the husband, of the conditions and wishes of the wife in reference to maternity, and the intercourse that leads to it, must we go to learn the causes of much of the wrong and suffering of this world.”
When woman’s rights in regard to Maternity, and to the relation that leads to it, are truly understood and appreciated by man, then, and not before, can marriage become what it was designed to be,—a diadem of beauty, a crown of glory, to the husband and wife, and “the power of God and the wisdom of God” unto salvation to the generations of the future. Husbands! if you would secure the loving respect of your wives, you must reverently regard their protest against an undesired Maternity.
H. C. W.
LETTER III.
THE CRIME AGAINST THE CHILD.
Dear Friend:
In my last, I showed, at some length, the crime of an undesired maternity against the mother; how it affects her mind towards the father of her child; how it tends to destroy all love and respect for him, instead of increasing them; how it destroys her self-respect, strips her of the conscious pride and dignity of a loved and loving wife, and reduces her to the feeling and condition of a degraded, self-condemned victim of legalized sensualism. She feels polluted, degraded, outraged; and that, too, through the very function of her nature, which should have filled and thrilled her soul with conscious pride and happiness.