"Of all the sins, physical and moral against man and God, I know of none so utterly to be condemned as the very common one of the destruction of the child while yet in the womb of the mother. So utterly repugnant is it that I can scarcely express the loathing with which I approach the subject. Murder!—murder in cold blood, without cause, of an unknown child; one's nearest relative; in fact, part of one's very being; actually having, not only one's own blood in its being, but that blood momentarily interchanging! Good God! Does it seem possible that such depravity can exist in a parent's breast—in a mother's heart!
"'Tis for no wrong that it has committed that its sweet life is so cruelly taken away. Its coming is no disgrace; its creation was not in sin, but—its mother 'don't want to be bothered with any more brats; can hardly take care of what she has got; is going to Europe in the spring.'
"We can forgive the poor deluded girl—seduced, betrayed, abandoned—who, in her wild frenzy, destroys the mute evidence of her guilt. We have only sympathy and sorrow for her. But for the married shirk who disregards her divinely-ordained duty, we have nothing but contempt, even if she be the lordly woman of fashion, clothed in purple and fine linen. If glittering gems adorn her person, within there is foulness and squalor."[30]
30 Gardner.
[Not a Modern Crime.]—Although this crime has attained remarkable proportions in modern times, it is not a new one by any means, as the following paragraph will suffice to show:—
"Infanticide and exposure were also the custom among the Romans, Medes, Canaanites, Babylonians, and other Eastern nations, with the exception of the Israelites and Egyptians. The Scandinavians killed their offspring from pure fantasy. The Norwegians, after having carefully swaddled their children, put some food into their mouths, placed them under the roots of trees or under the rocks to preserve them from ferocious beasts. Infanticide was also permitted among the Chinese, and we saw, during the last century, vehicles going round the streets of Pekin daily to collect the bodies of the dead infants. To-day there exist foundling hospitals to receive children abandoned by their parents. The same custom is also observed in Japan, in the isles of the Southern Ocean, at Otaheite, and among several savage nations of North America. It is related of the Jaggers of Guinea, that they devour their own children."[31]
31 Burdach.
The Greeks practiced infanticide systematically, their laws at one time requiring the destruction of crippled or weakly children. Among all the various nations, the general object of the crime seems to have been to avoid the trouble of rearing the children, or to avoid a surplus, objects not far different from those had in view by those who practice the same crimes at the present time.
The destruction of the child after the mother has felt its movements is termed infanticide; before that time it is commonly known as abortion. It is a modern notion that the child possesses no soul or individual life until the period of quickening, an error which we have already sufficiently exposed. The ancients, with just as much reason, contended that no distinct life was present until after birth. Hence it was that they could practice without scruple the crime of infanticide to prevent too great increase of population. "Plato and Aristotle were advocates of this practice, and these Stoics justified this monstrous practice by alleging that the child only acquired a soul at the moment when it ceased to have uterine life and commenced to respire. From hence it resulted that, the child not being animated, its destruction was no murder."
The prevalence of this crime will be indicated by the following observations from the most reliable sources:—