A fair and just estimate of all the risks and dangers attendant upon the crime will do much toward stopping the prevalence of the custom more, perhaps, with some people than any of the other arguments.
The Withdrawal of Maternal and Paternal Protection from the Offspring. Many will doubtless be surprised at the statement that criminal abortion is practised much more
frequently by the married than by the unmarried woman. Here is a perversion of Nature indeed! Maternal sympathy and care and tenderness are withheld, and harm is plotted for the child by a mother who has failed in her duty.
The parents who have sworn to the obligations of wedlock, which has for its legitimate end the perpetuation of the species; or the parents who, by sexual intercourse, have consummated the recognized rites of marriage, plot for the danger and death of their child, while the lioness will bleed and fight for her cub to the death. The rough hand of the uncouth savage father becomes soft to his babe, and motherhood among all the higher animals means care, and tenderness, and self sacrifice, and love; but the sexual paresthesia and degeneration found in a social life which replaces ethics and religion and physiology with lust, has given to the world the most formidably perverted and sharp witted creatures known to zoologists.
Abortion, as previously mentioned, is usually brought on before the woman has recognized the active motions of the child in her womb; it is, therefore, most frequently done at some time before the end of the third month, before marked enlargement of the abdomen is noticed, and seldom after the end of the fourth month. On the other hand, it is not usually thought of until one or more menstrual periods have been missed; for the woman who has only passed one or two periods tries to persuade herself that the alarm is false, and cannot recognize any of the signs of pregnancy, except, perhaps, the "morning sickness".
The unmarried woman is not so familiar with the early signs of pregnancy as a woman who has had a child, and she is more apt to let the time slip by, hoping for a natural return of her courses, until one day she unmistakably feels the child to be alive within her, and then, after quickening, few mothers can be found who will not regard the destruction of the child as murder. The unmarried woman also hopes that her paramour may consent to marry her and save her from the awful disgrace, and that the fact of her lover being the father of her child may arouse his paternal instincts.
And, furthermore, the unmarried woman, if pregnant, has little opportunity of remaining in her room or lying by for a few days, as the married woman may do, but labors under the embarrassing necessity of doing everything in her power to avert suspicion. The single woman who contemplates an abortion usually makes the pretext of visiting friends in a distant city, whom she knows to be in accord with her. On account of the ignorance of unmarried girls, and by reason of the difficulties which beset them, it is believed by many physicians that fully seventy five to ninety per cent of the criminal abortions are committed by married women.
But who ever heard of the law convicting a married woman of this offence? Excuses for them are easy. And yet, if we were the judges, we should more readily pardon the despairing, seduced girl, the victim of treachery and deceit, whose mind is depressed and often actually deranged by her awful shame and sorrow, whose thoughts now turn to a mode of relief from which she would in her right senses recoil in horror and dismay, and whose physical and mental system is weak and prostrated a wretched girl whose lover has proved to be a devil, whose parents have disowned her, who stands ofttimes in her wild frenzy by the river, meditating death, fearing the social degradation to herself and the illegitimacy of her innocent child, which her natural instinct teaches her to love.
But if the fallen girl who is not insane has no justification for the crime, what pretext can the married woman give for the nullification of the miracle of motherhood?