Pinard, who has discussed the right to control the foetal life (Annales de Gynecologie, vols. lii and liii, 1899 and 1900), inspired by his enthusiastic propaganda for the salvation of infant life, is led to the unwarranted conclusion that no one has the rights of life and death over the foetus; “the infant’s right to his life is an imprescriptible and sacred right, which no power can take from him.”  There is a mistake here, unless Pinard deliberately desires to place himself, like Tolstoy, in opposition to current civilized morality.  So far from the infant having any “imprescriptible right to life,” even the adult has, in human societies, no such inalienable right, and very much less the foetus, which is not strictly a human being at all.  We assume the right of terminating the lives of those individuals whose anti-social conduct makes them dangerous, and, in war, we deliberately terminate, amid general applause and enthusiasm, the lives of men who have been specially selected for this purpose on account of their physical and general efficiency.  It would be absurdly inconsistent to say that we have no rights over the lives of creatures that have, as yet, no part in human society at all, and are not so much as born.  We are here in presence of a vestige of ancient theological dogma, and there can be little doubt that, on the theoretical side at all events, the “imprescriptible right” of the embryo will go the same way as the “imprescriptible right” of the spermatozoeon.  Both rights are indeed “imprescriptible.”

Of recent years a new, and, it must be admitted, somewhat unexpected, aspect of this question of abortion has been revealed.  Hitherto it has been a question entirely in the hands of men, first, following the Roman traditions, in the hands of Christian ecclesiastics, and later, in those of the professional castes.  Yet the question is in reality very largely, and indeed mainly, a woman’s question, and now, more especially in Germany, it has been actively taken up by women.  The Graefin Gisela Streitberg occupies the pioneering place in this movement with her book Das Recht zur Beiseitigung Keimenden Lebens, and was speedily followed, from 1897 onwards, by a number of distinguished women who occupy a prominent place in the German woman’s movement, among others Helene Stoecker, Oda Olberg, Elisabeth Zanzinger, Camilla Jellinek.  All these writers insist that the foetus is not yet an independent human being, and that every woman, by virtue of the right over her own body, is entitled to decide whether it shall become an independent human being.  At the Woman’s Congress held in the autumn of 1905, a resolution was passed demanding that abortion should only be punishable when effected by another person against the wish of the pregnant women herself.[441] The acceptance of this resolution by a representative assembly is interesting proof of the interest now taken by women in the question, and of the strenuous attitude they are tending to assume.