There are those who will be influenced by evidence presented from abstract morality and religion. To such I shall first address myself. There are others who care nothing for ethical considerations, and who arrogate to themselves a right to decide as to the morality of taking or destroying the life of an unborn child. For these, also, I have an unanswerable argument--their own self-interest--an appeal to which will usually arrest the most hardened adept in other crime, much more these intelligent and otherwise innocent women, who have mostly erred through ignorance and a misapprehension of their own physical condition, and their own physical dangers, their own physical welfare. Physicians have now arrived at the unanimous opinion, that the fœtus in utero is _alive_ from the very moment of conception. "To extinguish the first spark of life is a crime of the same nature, both against our Maker and society, as to destroy an infant, a child, or a man."[6] More than two hundred years ago the same idea was as vigorously as quaintly expressed: "It is a thing deserving all hate and detestation that a man in his very originall, whiles he is framed, whiles he is enlived, should be put to death under the very hands and in the shop of nature."[7] The law, whose judgments are arrived at so deliberately, and usually so safely, has come to the same conclusion, and though in some of its decisions it has lost sight of this fundamental truth, it has averred, in most pithy and emphatic language, that "quick with child, is having conceived."[8] By that higher than human law, which, though scoffed at by many a tongue, is yet acknowledged by every conscience, "the wilful killing of a human being, at any stage of its existence, is murder."[9]