It has been shown, by setting aside all accidental cases, those naturally occurring and those necessarily, and in the absence of reasonable evidence to the contrary, that all other abortions must be intentional, that they must be occasioned by the “malice aforethought” of the law. It has also been shown that in these cases, except it exist as an additional element, the malicious intention is not against the life or person of the mother, but that in every instance it is against the product of her womb. Hence, the whole question of the criminality of the offence turns on this one fact, the real nature of the fœtus in utero. If the fœtus be a lifeless excretion, however soon it might have received life, the offence is comparatively as _nothing_; if the fœtus be already, and from the very outset, a human being, alive, however early its stage of development, and existing independently of its mother, though drawing its sustenance from her, the offence becomes, in every stage of pregnancy, MURDER. “Every act of procuring abortion,” rules Judge King, of Philadelphia,[2] contrary to the usual interpretation of the law, “is murder, whether the person perpetrating such act intended to kill the woman, or merely feloniously to destroy the fruit of her womb.” Common sense, we have said, would lead us to the conclusion that the fœtus is from the very outset a living and distinct being. It is alike absurd to suppose identity of bodies and independence of life, or independence of bodies and identity of life; the mother and the child within her, in abstract existence, must be entirely identical from conception to birth, or entirely distinct. Allowing, then, as must be done, that the ovum does not originate in the uterus; that for a time, however slight, during its passage through the Fallopian tube, its connection with the mother is wholly broken; that its subsequent history is one merely of development, its attachment merely for nutrition and shelter, it is not rational to suppose that its total independence, thus once established, becomes again merged into total identity, however temporary; or that life, depending not on nine months’ growth, nor on birth, because confessedly existing long before the latter period,—since quickening at least, a time varying within wide limits,—dates from any other epoch than conception; while it is as irrational to think that the influence of the father, mental and moral as well as physical, so often and so plainly manifested, can be exercised by any possibility upon the child at any other moment than that original and only one of impregnation itself.