The unwelcome child

by Henry Clarke Wright

What, then, so important to you, as a true knowledge and just appreciation of your relations as a husband and father? As a husband and father, you can do more to elevate and perfect the human type, and to save yourself, than you can in any other relation: political, ecclesiastical, commercial and social relations are insignificant, in comparison. I know you live but to glorify the nature you bear, and to enjoy that glorified nature forever. Such being with you the chief end of existence, I ask you to weigh, with candor and earnestness, the following observations on the Ante-Natal Education and History of Man. I have long been accustomed to consider human beings in connection with three states, and to think, speak and write on the comparative influence of these states on their character and destiny:

1. The state preceding birth, which I am accustomed to call the Ante-Natal state.

2. The state between birth and death, or the embodied state.

3. The state after death, or the disembodied state. The two last, the Post-Natal spheres or states.

Religion, government, education, commerce, agriculture, mechanics, literature, the press, the convention,—these hitherto, have confined attention, almost exclusively, to human life in its post-natal spheres, embodied or disembodied. They take up human beings, after they are born, and seek to do for them what they may to promote their welfare; and much of the doing consists in trying to undo what had been done for them in the ante-natal state. To a great extent, in promoting the education of children, this state has been ignored, as having no connection with the character and destiny in the post-natal spheres.

Come, my friend, go with me back to that which Church and State have overlooked, and view human beings between conception and birth. The period is brief; but is it not important? Is it powerless? Are no influences exerted and no events transpiring there, of sufficient moment to render them worthy attention, in considering the history and estimating the character of the individual man or woman, or of states and nations?

Many years since, the conviction was settled in my mind, that that period, though so brief, and hidden from observation in the very holy of holies of the temple of life, has more to do in giving tone to our feelings, intensity, activity and character to our passions and appetites, direction to our thoughts and plans, and in moulding our character and shaping our destiny, in the post-natal spheres of our being, than all that is brought to bear on us after we are born. Our ante-natal history is the key to our post-natal life. There is not a man or woman who is not a living witness to the truth of this assertion.

I think it cannot be doubted, that much of the physical disease and suffering, and much of the idiocy, insanity, and mental and moral obliquity of our post-natal, embodied state, is the result of our ante-natal organization. Much, indeed, is done for us before the germs of our being leave the paternal organism. They must, to a greater or less extent, receive the impress of the father’s conditions of body and soul; and he will do a service to the world who shall show to fathers their responsibilities in this matter. But Maternity is the subject under consideration; and in discussing this, my concern with the germ is after the mother takes charge of it. The period between conception and birth is that to which I would call your attention.

From a long and critical observation of facts, and a persevering effort to trace the physical, intellectual, social and spiritual conditions and phenomena of the individual and social lives of children and adults, in the many thousands of families in which, for a longer or shorter time, I have been an inmate, I long ago came to the conclusion, that to their Ante-Natal Education, men and women are more beholden for their healthful or diseased physical conditions, sufferings or enjoyments, and for their mental and spiritual tendencies, their peculiarities of temper and disposition, their aptitudes to truth or falsehood, to justice or injustice, to love or hate, to peace or war, to temperance or drunkenness, to forgiveness or revenge, to sexual purity or impurity, to happiness or misery, than to all the influences that are brought to bear on them, after they are born, to whatever age they may attain. These tendencies, whether of body or soul, are mainly, if not entirely, organized as fixed facts of existence in the individual man or woman, in their ante-natal state. There is not a human being, there never was one, and never will be, whose whole life is not essentially, constantly, and in its minutest details instigated and directed, more or less, by gestational influences.

If this be so, where are we to look for the forming and controlling causes of human character and destiny, and of physical, mental, and spiritual idiosyncrasies? Where shall we go to find the true foundations of biography and history, and the controlling elements of all religions and governments? Where go to find the mainsprings of war, slavery, drunkenness, polygamy, licentiousness, and of all the sufferings, anguish and woes of marriage and domestic life, that arise from the abuse of the sexual element? Where go to find the cause of a repulsive and loathed maternity, and of the horrors to which it leads? Where, indeed, but to the germs of diseases, and the aptitudes to good or evil, that were organized into the bodies and souls of men and women, as fixed facts and elements of life, by influences that were brought to bear upon them, through the maternal organism, between the periods of conception and birth?