“It makes my soul sick, even to a loathing of Humanity, to think of this unnatural deed, and its foul cause. Alas! men and women do not worship their own natures. ‘Let us eat and drink,’ they cry, ‘for to-morrow we die!’—‘Let us sacrifice the _human_ to appease the _brute_.’ “Does not the crime of murder consist mainly in the fact, that every soul born on this planet has an inherent right to all the development it can receive in this, its birthplace, and when deprived of corporeal existence, is robbed of this right? If this be true then ante-natal murder of the same nature and character as post-natal murder. Yet for the one crime the criminal is accounted, by our judges, and by the sentiment of the public, to be worthy of death; whereas, these same judges, and this same public, incite to the commission of the other, by subjecting woman to an abhorred maternity. “Where is the wrong? In the _man_, first of all. He it is who subjects the woman to this abhorred maternity, and for his own sensual gratification. For him there is no apology, save the miserable one that passion overcome love and reason, the animal triumphs over the man, the sensual over the spiritual. “In the mind of the woman who allows herself to become thus basely subservient to her husband’s will, how loathsome is the memory of those progenitors who bequeath to the man a nature so mean, selfish, tyrannical and animal, and to the woman a nature so tamely, so ignobly subservient and unresisting! Where is the remedy? In the awakening of woman to this great evil. Woman must assert and maintain her rights in regard to maternity, ere any rational hope can be entertained for the future. I cannot believe that man would become the fierce, selfish tyrant he now is, if properly appealed to before his heart becomes hardened by indulgence,—that he who, in the general transactions of life, is just and honorable, would become the selfish despot at home, if the woman who is his wife fully respected her nature as woman, and her individual sacredness.