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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
How do you know it wants to be protected? Besides, when it really needs protection, society seldom comes to its aid. Who punishes society for letting countless children die of malnutrition, lack of medical aid, bad hygienic conditions and other preventable causes? Society officiously takes embryonic lives under its protection, so that it can kill them wholesale when they have become human beings. Governments commit murder en masse, in various ways. War is the most glaring example. Is it not sheer impudence for such Governments to send individuals to the gallows for a crime" which pales into utter insignificance when compared with the crimes committed by themselves?
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If abortion is a crime, the social system that compels its commission is responsible for it. No mother would ever destroy her child, unless she is absolutely compelled to do so. The compulsion results from the convention which makes motherhood dependent on wedlock. Motherhood is a gift of nature. Marriage is a man-made institution. The consummation of a natural impulse is branded as immoral, if it does not take place within the limits of a man made institution which does not make room for all. Under no condition, motherhood can be immoral. On what moral ground can a widow be deprived of the natural right to motherhood? Nor is there any reason to brand the unmarried mother with the stigma
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