III.—What is the True Nature of an Intentional Abortion when not Requisite to Save the Life of the Mother.
III.—What is the True Nature of an Intentional Abortion when not Requisite to Save the Life of the Mother.
There are those who will be influenced by evidence presented from abstract morality and religion. To such I shall first address myself. There are others who care nothing for ethical considerations, and who arrogate to themselves a right to decide as to the morality of taking or destroying the life of an unborn child. For these, also, I have an unanswerable argument—their own self-interest—an appeal to which will usually arrest the most hardened adept in other crime, much more these intelligent and otherwise innocent women, who have mostly erred through ignorance and a misapprehension of their own physical condition, and their own physical dangers, their own physical welfare.
Physicians have now arrived at the unanimous opinion, that the fœtus in utero isalivefrom the very moment of conception.
"To extinguish the first spark of life is a crime of the same nature, both against our Maker and society, as to destroy an infant, a child, or a man."[6]
More than two hundred years ago the same idea was as vigorously as quaintly expressed: "It is a thing deserving all hate and detestation that a man in his very originall, whiles he is framed, whiles he is enlived, should be put to death under the very hands and in the shop of nature."[7]
The law, whose judgments are arrived at so deliberately, and usually so safely, has come to the same conclusion, and though in some of its decisions it has lost sight of this fundamental truth, it has averred, in most pithy and emphatic language, that "quick with child, is having conceived."[8]
By that higher than human law, which, though scoffed at by many a tongue, is yet acknowledged by every conscience, "the wilful killing of a human being, at any stage of its existence, is murder."[9]
Abortion or miscarriage is known by every woman to consist of the premature expulsion of the product of conception. It is not as well known, however, if the statements of patients are to be relied upon, that this product of conception is in reality endowed with vitality from the moment of conception itself. It is important, therefore, to decide in what the moment of conception consists. It has now been ascertained that every variety of animal life originates from an egg, even primarily those lowest forms in which occur the phenomena of so-called alternate generation; in each and every one of them, mammals or invertebrates, the origin is from as distinct an egg as is laid by bird, tortoise, or fish; the human species being no exception to this general rule. Before this egg has left the woman's ovary, before impregnation has been effected, it may perhaps be considered as a part and parcel of herself, but not afterwards. When it has reached the womb, that nest provided for the little one by kindly nature, it has assumed a separate and independent existence, though still dependent upon the mother for subsistence. For this end the embryo is again attached to its parent's person, temporarily only, although so intimately that it may become nourished from her blood, just as months afterwards it is from the milk her breasts afford. This is no fanciful analogy; its truth is proved by countless facts. In the kangaroo, for instance, the offspring is born into the world at an extremely early stage of development, "resembling an earthworm in its color and semi-transparent integument,"[10]and then is placed by the mother in an external, abdominal, or marsupial pouch, to portions of which corresponding, so far as function goes, at once to teats and to the uterine sinuses, these embryos cling by an almost vascular connection, until they are sufficiently advanced to bear detachment, or in reality to be born. The first impregnation of the egg, whether in man or in kangaroo, is the birth of the offspring to life; its emergence into the outside world for wholly separate existence is, for one as for the other, but an accident in time. It has been asserted by some authors, as by Meigs, that conception is only coincident with the attachment of the impregnated egg to the uterine cavity for its temporary abode therein, or, in exceptional cases, as in extra-uterine pregnancy so called, with its attachment to some other tissue of the mother; thereby attempting to establish a difference between impregnation and conception; a difference that is at once philosophically unfounded, and plainly disproved by all analogical evidence, as the fact, for instance, that in most fishes impregnation occurs entirely external to the body of the mother, from which the ova had previously, or during the process of copulation, permanently been discharged.
Many women suppose that the child is not alive till quickening has occurred, others that it is practically dead till it has breathed. As well one of these suppositions as the other; they are both of them erroneous.
Many women never quicken at all, though their children are born living; others quicken earlier or later than the usual standard of time; or, others again may, in their own persons, have noticed either or all of these peculiarities in different pregnancies. Quickening is in fact but a sensation, the perception of the first throes of life—but of a twofold occurrence, and this not merely the motion of the child, but often the sudden emergence of the womb upwards from its confinement in the low regions of the pelvis into the freer space of the abdomen. The motions of the child, which have been proved by Simpson, of Edinburgh, to be its involuntary efforts, through the reflex action of its nervous system, to retain itself in certain attitudes and positions essential to its security, its sustenance, and its proper development, are usually present for a period long prior to the possibility of their being perceived by the parent. They may very constantly be recognized by the physician in cases where no sensation is felt by the mother, and the fœtus has been seen to move when born, during miscarriage, at a very early period.
During the early months of pregnancy, while the fœtus is very small in proportion to the size of the cavity which contains it, sounds, produced by its movements, may be distinguished by the attentive ear applied to the abdomen of the mother, as gentle taps repeated at intervals, and continued uninterruptedly for a considerable time. These sounds may sometimes be heard several weeks before the usual period of the mother's becoming conscious of the motion of the child, and also earlier than the pulsations of the fœtal heart or the uterine souffle,[11]as the murmur of the circulation in the walls of that organ, or in the tissue of the after-birth, is technically termed. These motions must be allowed to prove life, and independent life. In what does this life really differ from that of the child five minutes in the world? Is not, then, forced abortion a crime? Moreover, instances have occurred where, the membranes having been accidentally ruptured, the child has breathed, and even cried, though yet unborn, as proved alike by the sounds within the mother, well authenticated by bystanders, and by auscultation of her abdomen, and by the fact that sometimes, when not born living, the lungs of the fœtus have been found fully expanded, a process which can be effected only by respiration, and of which the proofs are such as can be occasioned in no other way whatever.
In the majority of instances of forced abortion, the act is committed prior to the usual period of quickening. There are other women, who have confessed to me that they have destroyed their children long after they have felt them leap within their womb. There are others still, whom I have known to wilfully suffocate them during birth, or to prevent the air from reaching them under the bedclothes; and there are others, who have wilfully killed their wholly separated and breathing offspring, by strangling them or drowning them, or throwing them into a noisome vault. Wherein among all these criminals does there in reality exist any difference in guilt?
I would gladly arrive at, and avow any other conviction than that I have now presented, were it possible in the light of fact and of science, for I know it must carry grief and remorse to many an otherwise innocent bosom. The truth is, that our silence has rendered all of us accessory to the crime, and now that the time has come to strip down the veil, and apply the searching caustic or knife to this foul sore in the body politic, the physician needs courage as well as his patient, and may well overflow with regretful sympathy.
That there has existed a wide and sincere ignorance of the true character of the act, I have already allowed; it is a point to which I shall again refer. At present let us turn from the crime against the child, to the crime as against the mother's own life and health. I here refer more particularly to her own agency therein. Of the guilt of abortion when committed by another person than herself, and with reference both to the mother's life and that of the child, there can be no doubt, but it is to the woman's own agency in the act, as principal, or accessory by its solicitation or permission, that we have now to deal; not as to its abstract wrong alone, but as to its physical dangers, and therefore its utter folly.