Many of the visitors at the hospital treated the baby, which lay in a little bundle in a private room, as if it were uncanny. Dr. Haiselden alone treated it like a human being. He looked into the little twisted face and patted its cheeks.
"It would be a moral wrong to let it live. It seems to me that a city which allows a Blackhand outrage a week, a thousand abortions a day, and an automobile accident every round of the clock is hardly in a position to criticize a man who holds that death is preferable to life to a defective."
Dr. John B. Murphy, former president of the American Medical Association, and physicians and professional men generally, took sides with Dr. Haiselden. But his critics were just as numerous.
Dr. Rosalie M. Ladova commented:
"A life is a life and I wish Dr. Haiselden had stepped out and let someone else operate."
Should these children ever have been born? To the left is a cretin; beside her a type technically known as a Mongolian idiot; next comes a micro-cephalic, who is a burden to himself and to the institution in which he is confined; the last on the line is a water-brained (hydro-cephalic) girl for whom society has no use
Can Science Prevent Defectives?
The most serious question, however, is how to prevent just such monstrosities as the unhappy Bollinger infant and to this end Dr. E. J. Werber, and independently Professor F. E. Chichester of the Zoological Department of Rutgers College, New Brunswick, New Jersey, have directed their experiments and discoveries.
Before the eggs are made fertile and begin to form the unborn baby, colt, puppy, or other animal, these investigations proved it to be possible to induce such changes in the eggs or early embryos by inoculation into the blood stream of the mother the poison of diabetes, of kidney diseases, of typhoid fever, and other poisons and waste materials, so that deformed offspring would be developed and born. With two substances, butyric acid and acetone, chemicals that are produced in the blood of those who have sugar disease and sugar
