Femina, A Work for Every Woman

by John A. Miller

The Academicians were of the opinion, that life was imparted to the fetus during the period in which the mother carried it in the womb, but they could not agree on the time when it began. Even the Roman Church, which, in the main, is right on this question, speaks of animate and inanimate fetuses. When it is remembered that there was no scientific physiology upon which the ancients based their opinions, it is not at all surprising that, in the light of modern research, they are shown to be all wrong.

There is no time during the child’s sojourn in the mother’s womb that life is less active than at another, and any opinion to the contrary is manifestly absurd and unscientific.

I appreciate the distinction between physical life, or vital activity, and spiritual life, but the one must necessarily be in the other.

A central fountain of physical force is consistent with scientific deductions, and physicists are inclined to admit such a source. Many of the phenomena of the material world are explained upon this hypothesis. The sun is supposed to be that central fountain of physical force which inspires activity in matter on this planet. Matter in itself is inert and motionless; the globe we inhabit has no energy in itself which could keep it in motion, but the forces playing on and around it impart to it its motive power.

The life of any complex organism, such as that of man, is in fact the aggregate of the vital activity of all its component parts, and each elementary part of the fabric has its own independent power of growth and development. If we contemplate the history of the life of a plant, we perceive that it grows from a germ or seed to a fabric, sometimes of gigantic size,—it multiplies its species, by the production of germs similar to that from which it originated. This it performs without feeling or thinking or any effort of its own. All the functions of which its life is composed are grouped together under the general designation of organic functions, or vegetative life.

In the building up of the animal structure we have precisely the same operations taking place, one minute cell added to the other, like the stone mason running up a brick wall, each brick representing a cell, until the structure is completed.

The question that we are particularly interested in is whether this “animal life” which stimulates the growth of the fetus from its first inception, can be any the less sacred at one time than at another?

There is a general impression among a large portion of the community that the fetus first becomes endowed with life at the period of quickening, which is between the fourth and fifth month of pregnancy. The time when the mother first feels the motion is considered the period when the child becomes animated, that is, when it receives its spiritual nature into union with its human nature.

The English law recognized the truth of this infamous doctrine, in varying the punishment of an attempt to procure abortion according to whether the woman be “quick with child or not,” and in delaying execution when a woman can be proved to be so, though the execution is made to proceed, if she be not “quick,” even if she be unquestionably pregnant. This was a most barbarous penal provision and hardly excusable in a savage nation, much less among a Christian people, because it is contrary to all fact, to all analogy, to reason, and at variance with biological science.

If the embryo or fetus is simply an animal growing in the mother’s womb, until the period of quickening or birth, it would not be a crime to procure an abortion, at any time, before these events take place. No sacrifice of a human life would be involved, so that the act would be simply a “misdemeanor” regulated by the degree of injury which the mother sustained as a result of the operation. This was the prevailing opinion for many centuries, until, in the year 692, the Roman Empire so amended its law that the procuring of an abortion at any time during the period of gestation was homicide, murder, to be punished with death.