“Strong language!”—“Too strong and sweeping epithets!” Can you, as a man, a husband and a father, read the above extract, and feel or say that my language is too strong? The above is the experience of a living wife and mother, nearly verbatim as written by herself. It is a simple, unvarnished, affecting story, but bearing on its face the stamp of truth, and the evidence of a sense of conscious injustice inflicted by the husband, and of a degradation self-inflicted, solely to escape what seemed to her a greater evil. Can such “loathsome injustice,” on the part of husbands and fathers, towards their wives and unborn children, be reprobated in too strong terms?
Husbands! it is your licentiousness that drives your wives to a deed so abhorrent to their every wifely, womanly and maternal instinct; a deed which ruins the health of their bodies, prostitutes their souls, and makes marriage, maternity, and womanhood itself, degrading and loathsome. No terms can sufficiently characterize the cruelty, meanness, and disgusting selfishness and injustice of your conduct, when you impose on them a maternity so detested as to drive them to the desperation of killing their unborn children, and often themselves.
Is it a wonder that wives seek to justify themselves in resorting to ante-natal child-murder? I do not wonder at it. The wonder is, that a woman should live one hour, as a wife, with one who imposes on her a repulsive maternity, thus doing to her, and her child, the greatest possible wrong; or who can, for one moment, subject her to the liability of becoming a mother, when her own nature repels the office. One such maternity, imposed after the husband knows that his wife shrinks from it, should lead every woman to “bolt the legal bond” that binds her to such a man. If she does not, but submits to the injustice, she wrongs her child, her husband, and her own soul. The same plea may be offered in extenuation of ante-natal child-murder, under circumstances of enforced, repulsive maternity, that is offered in justification of Margaret Garner, the fugitive-slave mother, who cut the throat of one child and threw another into the river, to save them from the savage clutch of licensed kidnappers.
Ante-natal child-murder,—a mother killing her unborn babe to save it from a worse doom! It is a fearful alternative; one whose results to the soul of the mother are no less deadly than to the forming body of her child. It prostitutes, crucifies, murders, whatever is pure, lovely, wifely, motherly and womanly in her soul; and, for the time being, as it were, blots from it the superscription and image of God. She murders her unborn babe, and often herself, to save herself and child from what she considers a more loathsome and repulsive doom. Who can harshly and coarsely condemn her? She feels that death to herself and babe, at her own hands, is far preferable, and less criminal, than a loathed maternity, and the birth of an unwelcome and hated child. To save herself and child from slavery, the slave mother cuts its throat, and then her own. The wife, to save herself and child from what she regards as a no less horrible doom, imposed by the husband, destroys her unborn child, and brings death to her own soul, if not to her body.
O man! where is thy manhood, that thou canst inflict this wrong on the woman, who, with an all-trusting love, lays herself in thy bosom, reposing fearless confidence in thy manly love and power to shelter her from harm? Husband! where is thy love, thy justice, thy tenderness, thy manliness, thy conscience, thy God, that thou canst impose these sufferings and responsibilities on thy wife, despite her tears and entreaties to be spared till she is ready joyfully to welcome them for thy sake and her own? Fathers! where is your reverence for your offspring, your tender regard for the claims of your unborn children, and your respect for all that qualifies you to be fathers and your wives mothers, that you beget children to ante-natal murder, or to the, if possible, more terrible doom of an existence undesired, and abhorrent to the mothers that bore them?
Husbands! listen to the voice of God, speaking to you through your wives, and, in the name of those most dear to your hearts, and, most essential to the happiness and glory of your life and your homes, give heed to their protests against an undesigned and repulsive maternity!
H. C. W.
LETTER V.
THE WIFE’S APPEAL—THE HUSBAND’S RESPONSE.
Dear Friend:
In the three preceding letters, I have endeavored to present to you the crime of an undesigned and undesired Maternity, especially in its bearing on the mother and the child. I have shown how it wrongs the mother by crushing out of her heart her love and respect for her husband, and converting them into a settled feeling of bitterness and contempt: and also by filling her with feelings of murderous hostility towards her child, and driving her to deeds which her soul abhors,—thus destroying her self-respect, and making her to seem like a loathsome and degraded object in her own estimation. I have shown, also, how it wrongs the child, by depriving it of a mother’s loving sympathy, by forcing it into an existence that is detested by father and mother, by stamping on it, before birth, disease and crime, and tendencies to all that is evil, and thus subjecting it to the detestation of its fellow-beings, in its future manhood or womanhood. The father perpetrates the deepest crime against the child, by committing its ante-natal education to the hands of one to whom its very existence is her abhorrence and loathing. What greater crime could a husband and father commit against his wife and child? None; no, none!