In the three preceding letters, I have endeavored to present to you the crime of an undesigned and undesired Maternity, especially in its bearing on the mother and the child. I have shown how it wrongs the mother by crushing out of her heart her love and respect for her husband, and converting them into a settled feeling of bitterness and contempt: and also by filling her with feelings of murderous hostility towards her child, and driving her to deeds which her soul abhors,—thus destroying her self-respect, and making her to seem like a loathsome and degraded object in her own estimation. I have shown, also, how it wrongs the child, by depriving it of a mother’s loving sympathy, by forcing it into an existence that is detested by father and mother, by stamping on it, before birth, disease and crime, and tendencies to all that is evil, and thus subjecting it to the detestation of its fellow-beings, in its future manhood or womanhood. The father perpetrates the deepest crime against the child, by committing its ante-natal education to the hands of one to whom its very existence is her abhorrence and loathing. What greater crime could a husband and father commit against his wife and child? None; no, _none_! In this letter, I will give you the experience of a husband and wife, as given by themselves, and by a mutual friend, who is also a wife and a mother. I extract from their letters with few omissions. See, in the experience of this wife and mother, the deep, unutterable anguish, and the deeper woe of conscious degradation, to which woman, in her mistaken notions of conjugal duty, her fear of losing a husband’s love and confidence, and her horror of an undesired maternity, will subject herself. Read over her experience, as detailed by her friend and herself, and then say if any crime man can commit, can surpass that which husbands and fathers often do to their wives and children, merely for the momentary gratification of their sensual passions: “Some fifteen years ago, a man of culture, and engaged in public life, was united in marriage with an intimate friend of mine. With pride and confidence, he selected her from a large and admiring circle of friends, as one embodying his ideal of womanly excellence. My friend was thought a fortunate girl (only seventeen), and many thought him quite as fortunate. They were much in society, and she began to enjoy life intensely. “She was too much a woman not to desire offspring some time, but she felt unprepared to have maternity forced upon her youth and inexperience. It came at a time when her husband’s calling led him much from home, to mix in the society she so much enjoyed, and which she felt was contributing to make her what she so much desired to be,—her husband’s fitting and equal companion. It was not without a severe struggle she resigned these advantages and checked her aspirations. However, she submitted, though she keenly felt the sacrifice.