Fashionable Murder

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 25, 1867

Fashionable Murder.

NOTHING but an imperative sense of duty could induce me to pen what I am about to write. Letters from different sections of the country, and from physicians too, are so urgent that I should write on this subject, that I may not choose. I have no fear but what I am about to write will be read; but I wish it might be solemnly pondered. I am about to speak,

and plainly too, of the practice of producing abortions. If any of my lady readers shall complain of a want of delicacy, I beg them to remember three facts; first, that the practice is fearfully common; second, that probably they are every week associating with those who are guilty of the practice; and third, that seventy-five per cent. of all the abortions produced are caused and effected by females. What then of delicacy?

It is well known that families of children, of this generation, in New England, do not average but three and a half each. I speak of our native population. With foreigners it is different, and the cause of the difference will soon be mentioned. By the advertisements of almost every paper, city and village, in the land, offering medicines to be effectual “from whatever causes” it is needed,—by the shameless and notorious great establishments fitted up and advertised as places where any woman may resort to effect the end desired; by the confessions of hundreds of women made to physicians, who have been injured by the process; and by the almost constant and unblushing applications made to the profession from “women in all classes of society, married and unmarried, rich and poor, otherwise good, bad or indifferent,” to aid them in the thing,—do we know of the “frequency of the crime.”

As a class, the medical profession have taken a noble stand. The desolations have become so fearful that, as the guardians of human life, they are compelled to do so; and society owes a debt of gratitude to Dr. H. R. Storer, of Boston, especially for his powerful arguments, lucid arrangement of facts, patient investigations and earnest and eloquent remonstrances. Among his writings on this subject, the little work entitled “Why Not?” is a “book for every woman,” and I wish every woman might carefully read it. But the medical profession cannot arrest the evil, and they tell me they need, and must have, the moral power of good people to aid them. Even now, as I have reason to fear, all the profession are not beyond the reach of personal appeal, nor an enormous fee, and I do wish that every such an one could see that a fee steeped in blood, and crimsoned with shame, cannot bring a blessing to his family.

I am sorry to learn from undoubted testimony, that the practice is far more common among Protestants than among Catholics—Dr. Storer says, “infinitely more frequent,” and this accounts, in part at least, for much larger families of the Irish Catholics. There is nothing in Protestantism that encourages or connives at it, but there is vast ignorance as to the guilt of the thing. But in the Catholic church, human life is guarded, at all stages, by the confessional, by a stern denunciation and by fearful excommunications. The rule in the Catholic church is unbending.

“Sedulam operam dent Sacerdotes, ut quantum poterunt, impediant illud scelus quo adhibitis chirurgicis instrumentis infans in utero interficiatur. Omnis foetus quocunque tempore gestationis editus baptizetur, vel absolute, si constet de vita; vel sub conditione, nisi evidenter pateat eum vita carere.”

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Boston says, eloquently and powerfully, “The very instant conception has taken place, there lies the vital germ of a man. True, it is hidden in the darkness of the womb, and it is helpless; but has sacred rights, founded on God’s law, and so much the more to be respected because it is helpless. It may be already a living man, for neither mothers nor physicians can tell when life is infused; they can only tell when its presence is manifested, and there is a wide difference between the two things. At any rate, it is from the first moment potentially and in radice a man, with a body and soul destined most surely, by the will of the Creator and by his law, to be developed into the fullness of human existence. No one can prevent that development without resisting and annulling one of the most sacred and important laws established by the Divine Author of the universe; and he is a criminal, a murderer, who deals an exterminating blow to the incipient man, and drives back into nothingness a being to whom God designed to give a living body and an immortal soul. From this it follows that the young woman, whose virtue has proved an insufficient guardian to her honor, when she seeks by abortion to save in the eyes of man the honor she has forfeited, incurs the additional and deeper guilt of murder in the eyes of God, the Judge of the living and the dead. Who can express what follows with regard to those women, who, finding themselves lawfully mothers, prefer to devastate with poison or with steel their wombs rather than bear the discomforts attached to the privilege of maternity, rather than forego the gaieties of a winter’s balls, parties and plays, or the pleasure of a summer’s trip and amusement.” To all this I say do minus.