“A physician in a neighboring city told me that it was very common, among the more fashionable and wealthy among whom he practised, for husbands, who wished to have their wives always ready for society, to bring them to him and offer large sums of money to induce him to procure abortion, and to prevent conception. Invariably, those who practise this outrage on themselves lose their health, become low-spirited, feel humbled and prostituted, and are made irritable, complaining, nervous invalids for life, and wholly incapacitated for the enjoyments of society. I know many who practise this foul crime. Those who do it generally lose their self-respect, become ashamed of their womanhood, and shrink away from society, conscious that they deserve to be shunned or pitied, by all that is pure and noble. O! why, why do husbands impose on their wives an alternative so horrible? Why do women ever submit to a relation that subjects them to the possibility of a maternity, whose sufferings they are not prepared to meet? They had better starve, better die! “Yet, in my ignorance, to please my husband, and to escape the agonies of an undesired maternity, have I allowed this most unnatural outrage to be perpetrated upon myself and my unborn children. I know the agony of soul, and the conscious shame and degradation woman feels, when, having allowed her husband to impose on her a maternity which her soul abhorred, she resorts to ante-natal murder to avoid giving birth to a child she does not want. I know no woman can practise this outrage on herself, or allow another to practise it upon her, without injury to body and soul. No woman, after doing this deed, can stand before her own soul, or before her fellow-beings, as she did before. “The unwelcome child!—maternity, abhorred by the mother and without design by the father!—you call this ‘THE CRIME OF EARTH!’ It is. Lay it open to the eyes of all, in its bearing on the purity and happiness of home, and on the character and destiny of the race. ‘_Let there be light!_’ In the name of God and humanity, and by all that is pure and lovely in man or woman, and by all that is sacred and dear in the relation of mother and child, ‘LET THERE BE LIGHT!’”