4. HUSBAND, WHEN MATERNITY is imposed on your wife without her consent, and contrary to her appeal, how will her mind necessarily be affected towards her child? It was conceived in dread and in bitterness of spirit. Every stage of its foetal development is watched with feeling of settled repugnance. In every step of its ante-natal progress the child meets only with grief and indignation in the mother. She would crush out its life, if she could. She loathed its conception; she loathed it in every stage of its ante-natal development. Instead of fixing her mind on devising ways and means for the healthful and happy organization and {260} development of her child before it is born, and for its postnatal comfort and support, her soul may be intent on its destruction, and her thoughts devise plans to kill it. In this, how often is she aided by others! There are those, and they are called men and women, whose profession is to devise ways to kill children before they are born. Those who do this would not hesitate (but for the consequences) to kill them after they are born, for the state of mind that would justify and instigate _ante-natal_ child-murder would justify and instigate _post-natal_ child-murder. Yet, public sentiment consigns the murderer of post-natal children to the dungeon or the gallows, while the murderers of ante-natal children are often allowed to pass in society as honest and honorable men and women. 5. THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXTRACT from a letter written by one who has proudly and nobly filled the station of a wife and mother, and whose children and grandchildren surround her and crown her life with tenderest love and respect: "It has often been a matter of wonder to me that men should, so heedlessly, and so injuriously to themselves, their wives and children, and their homes, demand at once, as soon as they get legal possession of their wives, the gratification of a passion, which, when indulged merely for the sake of the gratification of the moment, must end in the destruction of all that is beautiful, noble and divine in man or woman. I have often felt that I would give the world for a friendship with man that should show no impurity in its bearing, and for a conjugal relation that would, at all times, heartily and practically recognize the right of the wife to decide for herself when she should enter into the relation that leads to maternity."