ently given
with much sentimentality to justify the killing of the child. The child,
they say, has no social value, the mother is the idol of her husband,
the pride of the household, often an ornament to society, the mother of
living or possible children. Therefore, her life is more valuable than
that of the unborn child. But who is to be the judge of the value of
life? Were not Scipio Africanus, Manlius, was not Caesar, from whom the
very name of the operation, delivered by section from their mother's
womb? The operation was familiarly known to Shakespeare, who tells us:

'Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped.'

"There can never be a necessity for killing--except an unjust aggressor
and in self-defence--unless the killing can be justified by some
recognized excuse admitted by the law. In the case of the murdered
sailor-boy, there was not such an excuse, unless the killing was
justified by what has been called necessity. But, as stated above, there
never is an excuse for killing an innocent aggressor, and the temptation
to the act and its expediency is not what the law has ever called
necessity. Nor is this to be regretted; for if in this case the
temptation to murder and the expediency of the deed had been held by law
as absolute defence of the deed, there would have been no guilt in the
case. Happily this is not so. The plea of necessity once admitted might
be made the legal cloak for unbridled passions and atrocious crimes,
such as the producing of abortion, etc.

"As in the case of this young sailor, so in the killing of an unborn
child, no such excuse can be pleaded; the unborn child cannot be the
aggressor, no more so than the defenceless sailor-boy was.

"To preserve one's life is, generally speaking, a duty: but it may be
the plainest duty, the highest duty, to sacrifice one's life. War is
full of such instances in which it is not man's duty to live, but to
die. The Greek and Latin authors contain many examples in which the duty
of dying for others is laid down in most glowing and eloquent language.

"'_Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_,' says Horace. Such was heathen
ethics, and it is enough in a Christian country to teach that there is
not always an absolute and unqualified necessity to preserve one's life.

"Thus, as a parallel case, is the situation of a woman in a difficult
labor, when her life and that of her unborn child are in extreme danger.
In this instance, it is the mother'