Elisabeth Zanzinger ("Verbrechen gegen die Leibesfrucht,” Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd.  II, Heft 5, 1907) ably and energetically condemns the law which makes abortion a crime.  “A woman herself is the only legitimate possessor of her own body and her own health....  Just as it is a woman’s private right, and most intimate concern, to present her virginity as her best gift to the chosen of her heart, so it is certainly a pregnant woman’s own private concern if, for reasons which seem good to her, she decides to destroy the results of her action.”  A woman who destroys the embryo which might become a burden to the community, or is likely to be an inferior member of society, this writer urges, is doing a service to the community, which ought to reward her, perhaps by granting her special privileges as regards the upbringing of her other children.  Oda Olberg, in a thoughtful paper ("Ueber den Juristischen Schutz des Keimenden Lebens,” Die Neue Generation, June, 1908), endeavors to make clear all that is involved in the effort to protect the developing embryo against the organism that carries it, to protect a creature, that is, against itself and its own instincts.  She considers that most of the women who terminate their pregnancies artificially would only have produced undesirables, for the normal, healthy, robust woman has no desire to effect abortion.  “There are women who are psychically sterile, without being physically so, and who possess nothing of motherhood but the ability to bring forth.  These, when they abort, are simply correcting a failure of Nature.”  Some of them, she remarks, by going on to term, become guilty of the far worse offence of infanticide.  As for the women who desire abortion merely from motives of vanity, or convenience, Oda Olberg points out that the circles in which these motives rule are quite able to limit their children without having to resort to abortion.  She concludes that society must protect the young life in every way, by social hygiene, by laws for the protection of the workers, by spreading a new morality on the basis of the laws of heredity.  But we need no law to protect the young creature against its own mother, for a thousand natural forces are urging the mother to protect her own child, and we may be sure that she will not disobey these forces without very good reasons.  Camilla Jellinek, again (Die Strafrechtsreform, etc., Heidelberg, 1909), in a powerful and well-informed address before the Associated German Frauenvereine, at Breslau, argues in the same sense.

The lawyers very speedily came to the assistance of the women in this matter, the more readily, no doubt, since the traditions of the greatest and most influential body of law already pointed, on one side at all events, in the same direction.  It may, indeed, be claimed that it was from the side of law—­and in Italy, the classic land of legal reform—­that this new movement first begun.  In 1888, Balestrini published,