New birth

“ While we are upon the subject we may as well make a few remarks upon the nature of this new birth of which Jesus speaks. As I have told you, and as you well know, there is a large class in Christendom who believe that this new birth consists of what they term a change of heart; if the heart undergoes a change they say the creature is born again. ”

“ Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born. ”

“ On the principles that will probably animate the predominant classes of the new time, it will be permissible, and I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned and achieved.
If birth were all the making of a civilized man, the men of the future, on the general principles we have imputed to them, would under no circumstances find the birth of a child, healthy in body and brain, more than the most venial of offences. But birth gives only the beginning, the raw material, of a civilized man. ”

“ Teacher and student should be familiar with the obstetrics of this Science. To attend properly the birth of the new child, or the divine idea, you should so detach mortal thought from its material conceptions, that the birth will be natural and safe. ”

“ Whoever has to give birth is sick; whoever has given birth, however, is unclean.
Ask women: one gives birth, not because it gives pleasure. The pain makes hens and poets cackle.
You creators, in you there is much uncleanliness. That is because you have had to be mothers.
A new child: oh, how much new filth has also come into the world! Go apart! He who has given birth shall wash his soul! ”

“ The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him. ”

“ wandering in Pagan lands.—I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S.T.C.
NEW YEAR'S EVE Every man hath two birth-days: two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. ”

“ If your nature prompts you to reveal yourself to her in the relation that leads to maternity control yourself, and be sternly true to yourself, to your wife, and your child that may ensue, until, by all other loving and endearing manifestations, you have created in her nature an earnest call for maternity. Then would she joyfully accept of you the germ of a new life, and, for the sake of her husband and her child, consecrate all the energies of her soul to its true development. ”

“ I mean especially on the physical side. What are our medical folk doing? There are lots of books on childbirth and the science of parturition, and the best methods of making the transition easy; but when it comes to the end of life and the event corresponding and complementary to birth, there is little except silence and dismay. ”

“ For the first few months of the individual's existence, sheltered as it is within the mother's body, there is no chance for any acquisition, except of certain abnormalities such as were alluded to above. What occurs during this prenatal period is natural development, not learning or any effect of experience. The traits displayed by the new-born child are, accordingly, native traits. ”

“ In what way for instance do we come to associate life within the womb with freedom from effort, difficulty or danger? In the majority of cases, not from conscious thinking on the subject; on the contrary, the connotation of safety and effortlessness would seem in some way to belong inherently to the idea of pre-natal existence from the very beginning, or at any rate to have become attached to it through a purely unconscious process of association. Again, how do we come into possession of the ideas of birth and pre-natal life themselves? ”

“ Young women of mature years should be made familiar with the physiological conditions which attend conception and maternity, and they need to know that from the [Pg 172] moment of conception life exists in the embryo, and that from the moment the spermatozoön enters and assimilates with the ovum a separate individual life is really begun, and that she is, at that very moment, the mother of this life within her as truly as when, in the later months, she feels the quickening within her, or after its birth experiences the joy of a mother who clasps her newborn infant in her arms. ”

“ But from the ontogenic record no chapter can be torn out: a fresh copy of the whole history, from alpha to omega, is written out every time an infant is conceived, and born, and grows to manhood. And somewhere on the way between the first cell of the embryo and maturity each one must repeat in his own life that wonderful transition into human intelligence. ”

“ The more complex the organism, the more highly organized the nervous system and the social life of a species, the longer the period of gestation, and the more prolonged the dependence of the new-born and the young on the parents. ”

“ Form a five-year-old child tome is only a step. From the new-born baby to the five-year-old child there is a terrible gap. From the embryo to the new-born baby there is an abyss. And from non-existence to the embryo there is not an abyss, but incomprehensibility. ”

“ We speak of nothing anterior to the time when our earth assumed the dignity of maternity, and brought forth its first and only child. We shall trace the development of that child which, though millions of years old, is still in dependence on its parent. We shall describe the influence of the parent over the child, and the not less remarkable reaction of the child upon the parent. We shall foreshadow the destiny which still awaits the mother and child when millions of years shall have elapsed. ”

“ Mundson. "It is the dream of us scientists realized. The human mother's body does nothing but nourish and protect her unborn child, a job which science can do better. And so, in New Eden, we take the young embryo and place it in the Leyden jar mother, where the Life Ray, electricity, and chemical food shortens the period of gestation to a few days." ”

“ What strange circumstance is this, that two children conceived at the same time, nay, at the same moment, under the same position of the stars, have different fates which bring them to different hours of birth, whilst two children, born of two different mothers, at the same moment of time, under one and the same position of the stars, cannot have different fates which shall conduct them by necessity to diverse manners of life and of death? Are they at conception as yet without destinies, because they can only have them if they be born? ”

“ The entire nature of the mother now centres upon the accomplishment of a special work—that of developing and bringing forth the new life begotten within. Great changes are to be wrought not only in the ovum, but the enlarging life and new necessities are to be met by corresponding changes in the womb itself. Not only is the minute speck of life which is laid within this human cradle to develop into a fully-organized human being, but the cradle is to enlarge with the growth of its occupant, and respond to the varying needs of the unfolding and developing body within. ”

“ My guess is that, a few years in the future, there will occur the most unique birth ever known to man—a birth in reverse. Some couple, somewhere—perhaps someone we know here in Allertown—will live through the experience of the daughter they never knew reentering the mother's womb and retracing her steps through the embryo stage to the moment of conception. ”

“ In regard to cases where children are marked before birth, he says: “The effect must be produced upon the maternal blood, and transmitted through it to the fœtus, since there is no nervous communication between the parent and offspring.”
On every hand, life is full of facts illustrative of the influence of the mental and physical conditions of the mother on the organic structure and constitutional tendencies of the body and soul of her unborn child. ”

“ From the moment of conception, during the months of gestation, at the time of childbirth and after, changes of great interest take place in the germ of human life and in the body of the mother. Her body is marvelously fitted for the reception and development of the ovum, the embryo and the fetus through the various stages of fertilization, germination, development, maturity, to the time of the eventual exit of the child into the outer world to begin its own independent life. ”

“ In no department of life is the specialisation of function among the numina more conspicuous than in connection with birth and childhood. Apart from the general protection of Iuno Lucina, the prominent divinity of childbirth, we can count in the records that have come down to us some twenty subordinate spirits, who from the moment of conception to the moment of birth watched, each in its own [45] particular sphere, over the mother and the unborn child. ”

“ Schoolboys administer law among themselves much as a tribal court does; babies sit like monkeys, with the soles of their little feet facing each other. Such resemblances led, [7] long before the age of Darwin, to the speculation that children in developing passed through stages similar to those the race had passed through; and the speculation has become an accepted doctrine since embryology has shown how each individual before birth passes in successive stages through the lower forms of life. ”

“ By rendering easily possible a selection in parentage and the choice of the right time and circumstances for conception it is, again, the chief key to the eugenic improvement of the race. There are many other benefits, as is now generally becoming clear, which will be derived from the rightly applied practice of birth-control. To many of us it is not the least of these that birth-control effects finally the complete liberation of the spiritual object of marriage. ”

“ As used in this section, the term "unborn children" or "unborn child" shall include all unborn child [sic] or children or the offspring of human beings from the moment of conception until birth at every stage of biological development. ”

“ To make the distinction, one ought to be familiar with an individual from birth, and to have some knowledge of the conditions to which he was exposed, in the period between conception and birth,—for of course a modification which takes place during that time is as truly an acquired character as one that takes place after parturition. ”

“ About two months before the baby is expected the mother takes the daughter to her home, where she remains until after the formal purification, which is forty days after the birth of a girl, and thirty should she be so fortunate as to give a man-child to the world. ”

“ A Wrong to the Mother and Child.—Sometimes the mother is diseased; the outlet from the womb, as a result of laceration by a previous child-birth, is frequently enlarged, thus allowing conception to take place very readily, and hence she has children in rapid succession. ”

“ By the intra-uterine form of reproduction the association of mother and offspring is set up in an organic way before the birth of the latter, and is continued and put on a social basis during the period of lactation and the early helpless years of the child. By continuing the helpless period of the young for a period of years, nature has made provision on the time side for a complex physical and mental type, impossible in types thrown at birth on their own resources. ”

“ Thus, the production of new forms, as shewn in the pages of the geological record, has never been anything more than a new stage of progress in gestation, an event as simply natural, and attended as little by any circumstances of a wonderful or startling kind, as the silent advance of an ordinary mother from one week to another of her pregnancy. ”

“ The first tablet of the series [145] of which an extract has just been given, begins with an enumeration of various animals to which a newly born infant bears a resemblance and which is expressed, similarly to what we found in the animal birth-omens, by the phrase that the woman gives birth to the animal in question. The series begins as follows:
If a woman gives birth, and the offspring cries in the womb, the land will encounter sickness. ”

“ Maternity, and the relation in which it originates, are thrust upon them by their husbands, often without regard to their spiritual or physical conditions, and often in contempt of their earnest and urgent entreaties. No joy comes to their heart at the conception and birth of their children, except that which arises from the consciousness that they have survived the sufferings wantonly and selfishly inflicted upon them. ”

“ Are the phantasies concerning birth in any way more vivid or frequent or of greater emotional intensity in those whose birth has been a process of difficulty and long duration than in those who have enjoyed an easy delivery? ”

“ From the time of conception until the birth of her child, the mother is carefully taken care of by our medical authorities. She must lead a quiet secluded life without any excitement and must take special treatments and foods so as to build up in herself and her unborn child good health and a balanced nervous system. ”

“ The native books on midwifery make an earnest business of teaching parents how they may know whence their new-born infants have come, and soberly state certain signs by which they may know whether their expected child is to be a son or daughter. ”

“ The fundamental principles of genius in reproduction are that, through the rightly directed wills of the father and mother, preceding and during antenatal life, the child's form or body, character of mind and purity of soul are formed and established. That in its plastic state, during antenatal life, like clay in the hands of the potter, it can be molded into absolutely any form of body and soul the parents may knowingly desire. ”

“ What becomes of children prematurely born? As the doctor has not yet arrived I may briefly reply that the souls of infants prematurely expelled from the matrix, are by appointed Spirits borne to a Realm in which are conditions specially adapted to their requirements and development, where, at the full period of gestation, they, in a sense are born into conscious existence. ”