Page:A Treatise concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed.djvu/165

 then are those People doing who talk of Physick to prevent their being with Child? It is, in short, neither more or less than a stated, premeditated Murther; and let those that act so confider of it, and come off of the Charge of Murtherers, if they can.

I could illustrate this by several other Stories or Relations of Matters of Fact, bat I have not room to spare on that Head. A certain Lady of noted Fame, is, I hear, making her self more than ordinarily remarkable upon this very Principle, and assures the World, that she not only thinks it lawful to wish she should have no Children, but to use all possible Means to prevent it; nay, she declares, as I am told, that she not only thinks it no Injury to any Body; but that it is far from being a Crime to destroy the Birth or Embrio conceived within her, and that she has frequently done it.

she learnedly enlarges in her Discourse, (for she is open enough upon that Subject) and disputes upon the Question, Whether it is a Sin to kill any Thing which has not a Soul? And when she thinks she has conquered the Difficulty, and has proved that every Creature may be destroyed by Man, that has not in it a human Soul, she brings it down to the Case in hand: She says, that it is no Offence to or Man, to destroy a Cat, or Dog, or any other such Creature, tho' it be not for Food, and tho' it be done arbitrarily, without any provocation given or hurt done by the Creature, but even if it were in sport.

, I say, bringing it down to the present Affair of a Child conceived in a Womb, she begins a new Enquiry, which the learned Anatomists, and the most skilled in the Pro-