Miscellanies 2.18.93

For it is permitted to eat one's fill of kids and lambs, and perhaps there is some defense for the one who separates the young from its mother; but what reason does the exposure of a child have? For the one who did not wish to have children should not have married at all in the first place, rather than become a child-killer through lack of self-control in pleasure. Again, the good law forbids sacrificing the young and its mother on the same day. From this the Romans too, if a pregnant woman is condemned to death, do not allow her to undergo the punishment before she gives birth. Indeed the law plainly does not allow any animals that are pregnant to be slaughtered until they give birth, restraining from afar the recklessness of those who wrong human beings. So it extended fairness even to irrational animals, so that, having practiced on those of another kind, we might show an abundance of humanity toward those of our own kind.