Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/92

76 priest or Justice of the peace to increase the race. The pregnant woman should under all conditions be "sacred," should stand under the protection and receive the sympathy of the entire community which she is about to increase with an at all events innocent member. Instead of that, it is made out a crime that she has found opportunity, without the aid ‘of the justice of the peace or the priest, to present the community with a new member, and the hatred and persecution of ignorance is incited against the unfortunate one, as if the intention actually were to make a suicide or an infanticide of her. Recently a poor woman hanged herself in Switzerland because she believed herself pregnant and her neighbors shared this belief and made her the target of their respectable vituperations and "moral" persecutions. When the suicide was examined, her pregnancy proved to have been only imagined! She died as a victim of nature-disdaining vulgarity, and her murderers were the pious, moralizing clergy. The corpses of unfortunate women which you take from the water, the remains of murdered children which you find in sewers, the bodies-of despairing mothers whom you drag to the gallows — these are the witnesses of your pious humanity that builds prisons instead of lying-in hospitals, and that would have hell make foundling-houses superfluous. In Paris foundlings are taken care of as "enfants de la patrie;" in New York, for