The Greatest Crime of Criminal Law
Das grösste Verbrechen des Strafgesetzes - "the greatest crime of criminal law" - was a name, given by a German scholar, to a section existing until now in almost every jurisdiction, which put heavy penalties on terminating a pregnancy.

Those penalties are applied to both the mother and those helping her terminate a pregnancy. At the same time, most criminologists say that this law has no impact, that the number of artificial miscarriages is increasing in huge amounts.

Life has always been stronger than legal codes and sanctions; so it is with modern life in its different conditions. Therefore - everyone says almost with one voice - this section is a dead letter; circumstances in which this law is used are starkly uncommon compared to the

mounting number of cases in which the crime is committed. Therefore - one could say - this section is neutral: if it exists only on paper, but is not applied, it can be treated as an innocuous form of moral protest against reprehensible customs.

Unfortunately, this is not the case; this section; while it does not have capacity to help, has immese capacity to hurt. It is applied almost exclusively in cases when the mother dies; there it rages on and judges; but, if you looked closer, you could see that this section is

most of the time the cause of death. Because this section, unable to stop the termination of pregnancy there, where the imperative of life, more powerful than all codices, takes away from the mother any skilful help

and forces her to throw herself into the hands of shameful - and here it is shame-full - botchery. If you added up all the cases of death of young women, cases of severe and lasting conditions, which come about as a result of the currently and soullessly upheld state of affairs

, maybe those, who construct their laws from the quiet of their comfortable studies, would quake. If you were to add in other, indirectly resulting from this law cases: suicides, infanticides and other calamities

, maybe then we would understand, why this section was rightly called "the biggest crime of the criminal code"

- Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, Women's Hell, 1929

https://pastebin.com/nZa6qMLu 
Here, if you want the complete text of it.

This is not the entire essay and I will continue on translating it, but this is a good introduction to it.