After a child is, no one has a right to tamper with its existence…. [When people] talk about children having a right to be born…. I mean that no one has a right to jeopardize a life which has already begun ever so brief an existence…. My meaning shuts at once and forever the door of abortion….

Abortion, intentionally accomplished, is criminal in the first degree, and should be regarded as murder. Yet women have been taught to look lightly on this offence, and to consider it perfectly justifiable up to the period of quickening. “The embryo has no life before that period,” they will say in justification of the act. I have even heard a woman, who acknowledged to several successful abortions, accomplished by her own hands upon herself, say, “Why, there is no harm in it, any more than in drowning a blind kitten. It is nothing better than a kitten, before it is born.” I was a young girl myself when I heard this, and I accepted the statement as a true one. Nor did I dream of questioning it, until, in later years, I became thoroughly acquainted with sexual physiology, and comprehended the wonderful economy of nature in the generation and development of the human germ.

The act of abortion which I had hitherto regarded as a trivial thing, at once became in my eyes the grossest misdemeanor—nay, the most aggravated crime. Being guided by this experience, I judge that this offence is perpetrated by women who are totally ignorant of the laws of their being. Consequently, the surest preventative against this crime will be a thorough teaching to women, even before marriage, of the physiology, hygiene, duties and obligations of maternity….

From the moment of conception, the embryo is a living thing, leading a distinct, separate existence from the mother, though closely bound to her…. From almost the earliest stage, the form of the future being is indicated, and it has separate heart-beats, distinctly perceptible through the intervening tissues of the mother’s body, which cover it. It is a human being to all intents and purposes. The period called quickening is a merely fictitious period, which does not indicate the first motion of the embryo. These first motions are not usually detected… until they have acquired considerable force.

Nature has put this little creature—this small man or woman, as yet all undeveloped—in a place of seeming security, and has placed every guard around it to keep it safely until the hour shall come when it is fully prepared to make a complete change in its mode of existence. If by intent or accident it is disturbed before that period, the whole of nature’s plans are thwarted, and nothing is in readiness…. Natural parturation may have its perils, but unnatural parturation slays its hundreds where that slays one. Yet young married women consider [induced] miscarriage a trifling affair!

….It is a sin against nature…. And it is a crime in the fullest extent of the term, because it is murder ….
But no; I must not be too hard upon all these unwomanly women. Their ignorance must be held responsible for their sins. And men must share the responsibility too….

I have already said that knowledge among women will do much towards decreasing this crime. Do not be content to tell women it is wrong, and then stop there. Women are impatient of being treated like children, or like unreasoning beings; nor do they like to be dictated to. Tell them the how and the why of the whole matter, and they will discover the wrong themselves, and feel the full force of it, far more than they ever can by taking it merely on the say-so of men.

Then the laws which are already upon our statute books should be strictly enforced…. And husbands and seducers should be made to share the punishment as accessories to the crime….
Not only ever maker, advertiser and seller of patent medicines, warranted to “remove female obstructions,” should be subjected to prosecution and punishment, but every publisher who prints an advertisement of this sort should be held equally guilty. Community will not be injured in the least by the suppression of these advertisements; for physicians of every shade of practice will sustain me in declaring that they do harm and harm only to women…. [T]heir real intent is for the procurement of abortion, and so everybody knows.