forty per cent. are acquitted (Eugene Bausset, L’Avortement Criminel, These de Paris, 1907).  The professional abortionist is, however, usually sent to prison.

In Germany, also, abortion appears to have greatly increased during recent years, and the yearly number of cases of criminal abortion brought into the courts was, in 1903, more than double as many as in 1885. (See, also, Elisabeth Zanzinger, Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd.  II, Heft 5; and Sexual-Probleme, Jan., 1908, p. 23.)

In view of these facts it is not surprising that the induction of abortion has been permitted and even encouraged in many civilizations.  Its unqualified condemnation is only found in Christendom, and is due to theoretical notions.  In Turkey, under ordinary circumstances, there is no punishment for abortion.  In the classic civilization of Greece and Rome, likewise, abortion was permitted though with certain qualifications and conditions.  Plato admitted the mother’s right to decide on abortion but said that the question should be settled as early as possible in pregnancy.  Aristotle, who approved of abortion, was of the same opinion.  Zeno and the Stoics regarded the foetus as the fruit of the womb, the soul being acquired at birth; this was in accordance with Roman law which decreed that the foetus only became a human being at birth.[438] Among the Romans abortion became very common, but, in accordance with the patriarchal basis of early Roman institutions, it was the father, not the mother, who had the right to exercise it.  Christianity introduced a new circle of ideas based on the importance of the soul, on its immortality, and the necessity of baptism as a method of salvation from the results of inherited sin.  We already see this new attitude in St. Augustine who, discussing whether embryos that died in the womb will rise at the resurrection, says “I make bold neither to affirm nor to deny, although I fail to see why, if they are not excluded from the number of the dead, they should not attain to the resurrection of the dead."[439] The criminality of abortion was, however, speedily established, and the early Christian Emperors, in agreement with the Church, edicted many fantastic and extreme penalties against abortion.  This tendency continued under ecclesiastical influence, unrestrained, until the humanitarian movement of the eighteenth century, when Beccaria, Voltaire, Rousseau and other great reformers succeeded in turning the tide of public opinion against the barbarity of the laws, and the penalty of death for abortion was finally abolished.[440]