This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

53

the other, you destroy but one life, and hazard nothing beyond it—that is, in this world. Come, Reverend sir, I will as soon help you do the one as the other—suppose we try it? Certainly you can as well persuade me of my 'Christian duty' in the one case as in the other. It does not alter the ease that physicians can be found ready to undertake your 'little affair.' Any physician who would undertake it is a monster and a scoundrel, and would murder you and your entire family as readily, 'for a consideration,' provided the chances of detection were equal. By the Almighty God who rules in the Heaven, I conjure you do not this thing! nay, do not even contemplate it!

"Now, let us take the lower view, and regard the question as one of expediency merely. There is no medicine known to the profession which possesses the specific property of inducing miscarriage; many will do it in some cases, but only secondarily; that is, in proportion as they shatter the constitution, ruin the health, and produce a state of the system which renders it incompetent, through debility, to sustain pregnancy. Medicines, then, are out of the question if a man loves his wife, and values her health or her happiness. There remains the mechanical method, in which various instruments are used, according to the taste of the operator. All of these are more or less dangerous in themselves, and none of them can avert the dangers incidental to abortion. These are numerous, and to one who knows them, frightful. I will enumerate a few:

"First, flooding. She may flood to death before your very eyes, and many cases do happen altogether beyond the control of the most skillful practitioners.

"Second, inflammations. Escaping the dangers of flooding, inflammation may attack the womb, or its appendages, or the surrounding organs, and she may die in horrid delirium.