Abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright called abortion "murder" in 1860

By Siena Hoefling - Posted at Equal Protection for Posterity:

Published May 8, 2025

At the time he was fighting slavery, abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright set his moral sight on another evil: abortion. Or, as he preferred to call it, “ante-natal child murder.”

Wright even penned a book in 1860 called The Unwelcome Child.

He wrote:

“‘Abortion!’ ‘Get rid of it!’ Gentle terms, these; respectable, no doubt, as some count gentle and respectable; but used to cover a most foul, unnatural deed. Ante-natal child murder alone can truly express the nature of the act. If no murderous hate is in the mother’s heart, why does she kill the child?”

“In this, how often is she aided by others!” he lamented. “There are those, and they are called men and women, whose profession is to devise ways to kill children before they are born. Those who do this would not hesitate to kill them after they are born; for the state of mind that would justify and instigate ante-natal child-murder, would justify and instigate post-natal child-murder.”

“Yet,” he noted, “public sentiment consigns the murderer of post-natal children to the dungeon or the gallows; while the murderers of ante-natal children are often allowed to pass in society as honest and honorable men and women.”

Wright quoted the Roman poet Juvenal’s “Maxima debetur pueris reverentia,” meaning, the greatest reverence is due to childhood. “Reverence childhood! If this be so important after the child is born, how much more reverence is due to ante-natal childhood?”

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