What a Young Husband Ought to Know

by Sylvanus Stall

It is natural that parents should long for children, and it is only proper that those who are barren should seek by all judicious and proper means to secure fruitfulness. But we are sorry to say that there is a widely prevalent and unnatural desire upon the part of many wives, and sometimes of their husbands also, to evade conception. This desire oftentimes leads these unnatural parents to seek the destruction of unborn human life. If the testimony of medical authority upon this subject is to be believed, this mania for child-murder is verily the "terror that walketh in darkness and the destruction that wasteth at noonday."

It is the duty of parents to protect the lives of their children, and the mother who desires or even consents to the murder of the infant in the cradle where God has placed it preparatory to its birth is as truly a murderer as when she strangles or stabs or poisons her infant in the cradle in which she has placed it after it is born. That the law recognizes the gravity of this crime is manifest by the fact that in nearly all the States of the Union this crime is regarded as murder, and punished accordingly. In some States, if the mother is proven guilty, the penalty is death, and in nearly all the States all who participate, have knowledge of, or assist, directly or indirectly, in producing such a result, are punished with imprisonment ranging from five to twenty years.

It has been supposed by some that where the beginnings of life are destroyed before the period of quickening, no crime is committed. This is a great mistake. From the moment that the spermatozoön penetrates the ovum and unites with it, life is present, and the destruction of that life is murder. The proposition is a very simple one. The only condition upon which the ovum may remain in the womb is by possessing life. As soon as it becomes dead it is rejected and cast out. If impregnated, while life continues in it, during its period of development, if nature is not interfered with, it is retained and nourished because it has life. The facts are simple enough: the germ is either dead or alive. If dead, nature casts it out; if alive, nature retains it. If nature retains it, and it is destroyed or removed by artificial means, the person or persons who produce such a result are guilty of murder.

There is no middle ground in this matter. Dr. H. S. Pomeroy, in his excellent book entitled "Ethics of Marriage," aptly says: "She who obtains a miscarriage at the earlier months of pregnancy feels comparatively virtuous because she draws the line at 'quickening.' This is moral jugglery and ethical hair-splitting; what evidence is there of soul at five months which may not be found at four? True, the unborn child of the latter age does not appear to move its legs and arms, while the other usually does. Is the spirit situated in the extremities, or is the movement of a muscle evidence of a soul? Considered from the low plane of physical life only, what reason is there for the distinction? There has been life from the first; there is no independent life until birth. It is reasonable to suppose that the Creator, who has been steadily at work for four months and fifteen days on one of the most delicate and complicated pieces in his whole laboratory, and has made no mistake thus far—the work being absolutely perfect as far as carried—considers it of little or no consequence to-day, but of the utmost importance and value when it shall have been in his hands a few hours longer!"

Dr. Napheys, in "Physical Life of Woman," says: "From the moment of conception a new life commences; a new individual exists; another child is added to the family. The mother who deliberately sets about to destroy this life, either by want of care, or by taking drugs, or using instruments, commits as great a crime, is just as guilty, as if she strangled her newborn infant, or as if she snatched from her own breast her six months darling and dashed out its brains against the wall. The blood is upon her head, and as surely as there is a God and a judgment that blood will be required of her. The crime she commits is murder, child-murder—the slaughter of a speechless, helpless being, whom it is her duty, beyond all things else, to cherish and preserve."

There is no division of opinion upon this subject. The world may hold up its hands in holy horror at the crime of Herod, but his crime is being perpetrated to-day in thousands of homes by "the slaughter of the innocents" at the hands of their own mothers. Dr. Pomeroy says: "We meet in our practice women who would hesitate to harm a fly, but who admit to having destroyed a half dozen or more of their unborn children, speaking of it as they would of the drowning of superfluous kittens." How are these thoughtless mother-murderesses to confront the souls of their unborn children on the day of Judgment? What of the declaration of Scripture, "Ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him"? While this passage of Scripture does not say that even a murderer may not be saved, yet it does say that one who commits murder is unsaved, and that salvation is not possible to him or her until they have sincerely repented.

The results of abortion are not only future and spiritual, but they are present, and affect serious temporal and physical results. Dr. Napheys says: "If they have no feeling for the fruit of their womb, if maternal sentiment is so calloused in their breasts, let them know that such produced abortions are the constant cause of violent and dangerous womb diseases, and frequently of early death; that they bring on mental weakness and often insanity; that they are the most certain means to destroy domestic happiness which can be adopted. Better, far better, bear a child every year for twenty years than to resort to such a wicked and injurious step; better to die, if need be, in the pangs of childbirth than to live with such a weight of sin on the conscience."

There can be no question but that many women are rendered incurable invalids by the violence which they do to nature by interrupting its work, destroying the growing life, and causing its expulsion in an unnatural way. Dr. Pomeroy aptly says: "Go into the orchard where there are ripe apples and others but half grown; try to pluck one of the latter; you pull, but it does not come; you twist this way and that way, and finally you secure a bruised apple with a torn and mutilated stem, and you leave behind a branch which bears unmistakable evidence of a violent and unnatural act. Turn now to the apples that are fully ripe; you put out your hand to take one, and as you touch it it falls gently and willingly into your open palm. If you now examine the stem and the branch from which it came you find no marks of violence; on the contrary, both will clearly show that nature had prepared for the separation.

"The two great dangers of childbearing are hemorrhage and fever; the first is caused directly and the second often indirectly by one and the same thing—the failure of the torn blood-vessel to close properly at the time of separation between mother and child. By the time the fruit is fully ripe Nature has so well arranged for this matter that the danger is small, but at an earlier period it is very considerable."

This attempt upon the part of parents to interfere with the order of nature has not only its terrible physical results for those who seek its perpetration, but it heaps upon the helpless unborn child terrible consequences from which it is powerless to escape. The attempt to destroy life is oftentimes a double failure. In spite of their murderous efforts, children are oftentimes born to such parents under circumstances which entail the most terrible and lifelong penalties. Children that might have been lovable in temper, companionable in disposition, healthy and happy, are born nervous, fretful and ill-tempered; and, because they were unwanted before they were born, the mother inflicts upon them a disposition which causes her ever after to wish they never had been born.