With the present standard of health in civilized society one pregnancy out of every five results in accidental abortion, and ninety per cent of married women suffer such a mishap at least once during their child bearing life. So frequently does this accident occur unintentionally and regrettably that one must be exceedingly loth to impute wrong motives to a woman whenever he may have cause to believe that she has so suffered. But with every allowance for the great frequency of accidental abortion, it is well recognized, by those who are in a position to know, that the intentional and unnecessary destruction of the foetus represents a carnage of such vast proportions as to be almost beyond belief.
There is no darker page in history than the record of this sin, and probably at no period has the slaughter been greater than in our own times. The results to our own country and to the world at large have been disastrous to the last degree, and with the spread of atrocious advertising by abortionists, and the open display and sale of alleged abortifacient nostrums by the druggists, one cannot wonder at the fact that it is alarmingly on the increase.
The consultation rooms of physicians are in reality confessionals, wherein, trusting in the known inviolability of a doctor's confidence, the patients daily tell of their misdeeds, led to do so by the desire to aid in their bodily cure. Statistics never have been and never can be published showing the frequency of the crime, and our only evidence must be by confession, for the deed is done secretly; the mother of course seeks to hide her shame, and cannot be compelled by the law to testify against herself, and the abortionist takes good care to stop up the keyhole and the chinks of the door of his treatment room. It is only by the testimony of many hundreds of physicians that we can gain a fair idea of the frequency of the crime.
Countless thousands of abortions occur that are never returned as such to the Health Bureau. Many a death from abortion is reported as being due to heart failure, anaemia, syncope, inflammation of the bowels, peritonitis, pelvic abscess, kidney diseases, embolism, etc. It is a very difficult matter, in fact, to prove that an early abortion has occurred before the positive signs of pregnancy have been distinguished, e.g., the sounds of the foetal heart, "quickening", and "ballottement", or the actual feeling of the foetus within the womb by the physician.
We physicians, nevetheless, are constantly called upon to attend women who are aborting or who have aborted. We know criminal abortion to be prominent among the great vices of the day, and it has increased so rapidly in our day and generation that it has created surprise and alarm in the minds of all conscientious persons who are informed of the extent to which it is carried. A very great number of abortions occur which are purposely concealed even from the knowledge of physicians, but in most cases the women are eventually compelled to apply for surgical treatment, and to confess the origin of their ailments.
Prior to 1840 the testimony of American physicians is that criminal abortion was not practised very generally, and to but a slight extent by married women; but this verification has now all been changed.
The "Report of the Special Committee on Criminal Abortion" committee, Edward Cox, H. O. Hitchcock, S. S. French contains this startling passage:
"To so great an extent is this [abortion] now practised by American Protestant women that, by calculation of one of the committee, based upon correspondence with nearly one hundred physicians, there come to the knowledge of the profession seventeen abortions to every one hundred pregnancies; to these the committee believe may be added as many more that never come to the physician's knowledge, making thirty four per cent, or one third, of all cases ending in miscarriage; that in the United States the number is not less than one hundred thousand, and the number of women who die from its immediate effects not less than six thousand per annum".