“In an unwelcome maternity, I have _sometimes_ felt a deep repugnance to the passion of my husband,—a sense of deep suffering and anguish through it; but I have usually been so encircled by love as to make me forget this, or rather, shun such thoughts as sinful. But since my husband and I have come to a truer knowledge of parentage, I have come to ‘love, honor and cherish’ those functions which I had before only feared and obeyed. I think this is not the feeling that married women usually have towards the physical manhood of their husbands. I never heard a woman admit that her thoughts rested on the physical nature of her husband with loving respect and womanly pride: but I have heard, not unfrequently, expressions of disgust instead. “I have known many instances in which the fathers of children, unintentionally and unwillingly conceived, became so repulsive to the mother, during gestation, that they would be made seriously ill by coming in contact with them, in any way; though ordinarily they would be agreeable and congenial. “I have heard many women say they would gladly strangle their children, born of undesired maternity, at birth, could they do so with safety to themselves. I believe, judging from a long and intimate acquaintance with many mothers, and from much conversation with them on this subject, that there are many children whose existence is undesigned by their fathers and undesired by their mothers. Yet among those heterogeneous and unnatural combinations called marriages, there is enough love to produce some tolerable specimens of humanity; and when there is any thing remarkable in development, there will be found physiological and psychological conditions sufficient to produce it. “No words can express the helplessness, the sense of personal desecration, the despair, which sinks into the heart of woman when forced to submit to maternity under adverse circumstances, and when her own soul rejects it. It is no matter of wonder that abortions are purposely procured; it is to me a matter of wonder that a single child, undesignedly begotten and reluctantly conceived, is ever suffered to mature in the organism of the mother. Her whole nature repels it. How can she regard its ante-natal development but with sorrow and shrinking? “Sensitive as woman ever is at such periods, she rarely meets with any special consideration; indeed, that very situation is too often made the occasion for increased passional indulgence on the part of the husband, or of neglect and contempt. Woman must have had, doubtless has, a very large amount of what you call the God-element in her nature, to enable her to do as well as she does in the function of Maternity, under such debasing and depressing influences.