After a long journey in a cab or street car or train, she reaches home, in bad condition indeed, but continues about her usual duties as unconcernedly as possible, lest she excite suspicion. Within a few hours "labor pains" come on, and she takes to her bed with the excuse of having cramps in the bowels or perhaps painful menstruation. After a few hours, or perhaps a couple of days, "something" passes, and if it is a formed foetus she hides it and either burns it or throws it down the sewer. Portions of the placenta and chorion are sure to remain firmly fixed to the walls of the uterus, but she is ignorant of that.
After the severe pains have subsided she gets up and resumes her ordinary duties, flattering herself, or perhaps telling a confidential friend, that everything is now all right. For two or three days things continue to go fairly well and she begins to laugh at the doctor who had pleaded with her and had frightened her with the dangers which menaced her.
But now her plight becomes worse and she is compelled to take to her bed with alarming symptoms; a reputable physician is called and the confession made. He finds her to be in a critical condition, with a fever ranging between 104' to 105' Fahrenheit; the tissues of the ovum which were retained have become infected, the hemorrhagic discharge is extremely offensive and putrid, and she shows the symptoms of peritonitis and general blood poisoning, which conditions may directly destroy her life, or result in serious and permanent pelvic disease.
In many instances such patients are compelled to submit to severe mutilating operations whereby the abdomen must be cut open for the purpose of evacuating collections of pus from the pelvic tissues, and for the removal of suppurating Fallopian tubes and ovaries. Such are of course rendered sterile, and others apply for relief so late that there is little chance of saving their lives.
"Convalescence is generally prolonged from these causes; and the patient has many weeks, and perhaps months, if not years, of invalidism in which to regret the errors of an ill spent hour. Our free dispensaries and charity hospitals afford innumerable examples of broken constitutions and ruined lives which have had their sad beginning in an improperly treated abortion. Frequenters of our gynaecological clinics often state that the displacements or inflammations of the uterus from which they suffer date back to abortions occurring three, five, or ten years previously. Many of the cases now operated on for otherwise incurable pus tubes or chronic inflammatory disease of the ovaries date all their troubles back to a neglected abortion.
These sufferings are not all confined to the charity patients in the lower waits of life. They are as common as is the custom of abortion itself. No one rank in society appropriates them all. The experience of gynaecologists the world over will confirm the statement that a majority of the patients that we are called upon to treat in our offices or in the fine residences of their fair owners are the outcome of abortions or of the preventive measures against conception".
Many a woman, on the other hand, feels fairly well soon after an abortion, except that she is pale and bloodless and easily fatigued. Probably however, within a few weeks she will be compelled to apply for relief to a physician, who will find upon examination, serious pelvic trouble; there will probably be a copious leucorrhoeal discharge, the uterus will be enlarged, soft and tender, and often misplaced and bound down in abnormal position by dense cicatricial bands of connective tissue; the ovaries and Fallopian tubes will probably be exquisitely tender and perhaps disorganized into pus sacs; inflammation of the bladder is a common complication, and the septic infection not infrequently damages the kidneys. These pitiless consequences follow upon what she perhaps thought a trivial amorousness, and the bad beginning is followed by a miserable ending.