In rare cases it may be that she is ignorant of the true character of the act, but this can hardly be so in this enlightened age. The fear of childbed cannot be given as a valid excuse, for all doctors agree that an abortion is more dangerous than a full time delivery. The abortion is "a labor in miniature, at least so far as it relates to the expelling organ and to the expelled product; but not in miniature in regard to the duration of the process and the attendant suffering". Ambrose Jardien" reports that in thirty four cases of criminal abortion, where their history was known, twenty two were followed as a consequence by death. Tardieu, the great French medico legal authority, states that in one hundred and sixteen cases of this class death occurred in sixty.
Joseph Taber Johnson, M.D., says:
"It is an every day occurrence for ladies to consult busy gynaecologists in our large cities in regard to symptoms which, upon inquiry, are found to date back to an unfortunate abortion. It would be quite within the limits of truth were I to state that two thirds of the work of the gynaecologists of this age finds its chief cause in the evils discussed by Dr. Goodell and our essayists this evening. It is a sad commentary upon the Christian civilization of the age, but the experience of honest workers in this department of our science would, I believe, corroborate the truth of this saddening statement".
Tardieu gives as causes of death embolism, syncope from excessive pain, and moral shock resulting from a consciousness of guilt; and to this may be added hemorrhage and septicaemia.
Some married women give as excuses the "demands of society", or say that they are going to take "a trip to Europe and cannot put it off", or that they shrink from the disfigurement of childbirth, or that they are too fond of indolence and luxury, or that "they have not the means to support and educate a larger family". Could they not share what they have with the poor, innocent babe, even though it has come as an unbidden guest?
To a woman with children who would ask us to perform an abortion on her, we would say:
"Madam, let us kill one of the children already born, if you cannot support any more; it will be far safer to your health to allow the babe in your womb to go to full time and be delivered naturally, and the crime will be precisely the same." Such a statement usually drives your meaning straight home.
The Glories of Maternity. In the beginning, when all was inorganic and chaotic, what a crime it would have been if some evil power should have annihilated the first living cell, a mere mass of primordial protoplasm which had been endowed by the Creator with the principle called Life! From that vivified protoplasmic cell, touched by the Creator's hand, have come all the phenomena of life, the totality of existence; all the plants and creatures of the air, earth, and water; all the thousands of millions of men and women, placed here to work out a civilization which normally points upward to love, and hope, and happiness, and home, and heaven. As Henry Drummond has pointed out, the Mother represents "the last and most elaborately wrought pinnacle of the temple of Nature", crowning the animal kingdom. The highest class of animals, the Mammalia, or those that bear teats and suckle their young, have taken their name from them, and the mother is the type of the highest expression of Nature.
"Is it too much to say that the one motive of organic Nature was to make mothers? It is at least certain that this was the chief thing she did. Ask the zoologist what, judging from science alone, Nature aspired to from the first; he could but answer Mammalia mothers. In as real a sense as a factory is meant to turn out locomotives or clocks, the machinery of Nature is designed in the last resort to turn out mothers. You will find mothers in lower nature at every stage of imperfection; you will see attempts being made to get at better types; you find old ideas abandoned and higher models coming to the front. And when you get to the top you find the last great act was but to present to the world a physiologically perfect type. It is a fact which no human mother can regard without awe, which no man can realize without a new reverence for woman and a new belief in the higher meaning of Nature, that the goal of the whole plant and animal kingdoms seems to have been the creation of a family, which the very naturalist has had to call Mammalia".