If it is murder to kill a child outside the womb, and mere therapeutics to kill it inside the womb, then it is murder to shoot a man on the street, and mere good marksmanship to shoot him to death inside his house, especially if he is an undesirable citizen. All reputable physicians deem a fetus in a normal pregnancy so good that they will not dream of destroying this fetus. They absolutely refuse to effect an abortion to get rid of a fetus which may disgrace an unmarried woman and her family, and they are perfectly right in this refusal. They talk and write with genuine indignation of race suicide. The only reason they have for the refusal to do what they call criminal abortion is that the disgrace or inconvenience of the woman is not commensurate with the destruction of a human life. They observe the natural human instinctive repugnance to murder in this special speech and writing, and then go home and get their obstetrical bags and complacently murder the first baby they find in the womb of a married matron who has a disturbed stomach or kidneys. They show here the fine intellectual acumen and reasoning ability of a chronic lunatic. The first fact in the social order is that justice, law, order, should prevail, no matter what the cost. It might be better that the fetus should die than that the mother should die, though that is not always true. It is not better that an unbaptized fetus should die than that a mother in the state of grace should die. But these are irrelevant considerations. It is never better that the fetus should be killed than that the mother should die. That is a very different matter.
The Mignonette case in 1884, tried in England by Lord Coleridge, is a good example of evaluation of lives as in therapeutic abortion, which came to grief. A ship called the Mignonette foundered 1600 miles from the Cape of Good Hope, and three of its crew, with a boy, were for a long time at sea in an open boat without provisions. When they were almost starved the boy lay on the bottom of the boat, asleep or half conscious from weakness. Two of the men plotted to kill the boy for therapeutic purposes; they needed his flesh to save their own lives. They killed the poor lad just as the therapeutic abortionist kills a fetus. They got his uncooked flesh for four days. Later Lord Coleridge got them and he sentenced both of them to death. Another Lord will get the therapeutic abortionists.
What, then, is the physician to do who meets a case that imperatively calls for therapeutic abortion according to the common medical practice? He can do nothing. The law may seem hard in certain circumstances to those who cannot see beyond the physical; yet that fact does not abrogate the law, which is one of essential morality.
May the physician call in a physician who, he knows, will not scruple to perform the therapeutic abortion on an unviable fetus? If he does, he is as much a murderer as if he did the deed himself. He may not so much as suggest the name of some one who will do the deed. He simply tells the family he can do nothing. If they insist on the abortion he withdraws from the case.
In this connection it is necessary to mention again the question of viability. Langstein reported[90] a study of the growth and nutrition of 250 prematurely born infants, and he found a confirmation of what was already known, that a weight of 1000 grammes (21⁄5 pounds) and a full body length of 34 centimetres (133⁄5 inches) are the lowest limits for viability under proper circumstances. A fetus 1000 grammes in weight and 34 centimetres in length has completed the sixth solar or calendar month, or the sixth and a half lunar month—it is beginning its seventh month, not ending it, yet it is viable under proper conditions.
The child at term, on a rough average, is from 48 to 52 centimetres (19 to 201⁄2 inches) in length, and it weighs from about 63⁄5 to 71⁄2 pounds. It is impossible, however, to obtain the sizes and weights of infants in utero with scientific accuracy, because the date of conception cannot be determined with absolute certainty, and infants in utero vary as they do after birth. A full-term infant sometimes may weigh only 31⁄2 pounds when the mother is diseased, and at times an eight-months fetus will weigh as much as 8 pounds.
As was said in Chapter III, a fetus of six completed calendar or solar months (not lunar—the duration of gestation is often reckoned in lunar months by obstetricians) is viable provided it is cared for by competent physicians in a hospital. Otherwise it is not viable, except in a strictly technical sense; it will not live more than a few days or weeks.
A full seven-months infant may be reared with proper feeding and skilled care; a six-months infant may be reared (with difficulty) in a hospital with skilled care. If it is certain that the removal of a six-months fetus will here and now save the life of a mother (a very difficult matter to judge by the best diagnosticians), this removal may be done, provided the infant is delivered in circumstances where skilled care, incubator, and proper food are obtainable; otherwise the removal is not justifiable.
The Council of Lerida, in Catalonia, in the year 524, decreed that abortionists of any kind must do penance all their lives, and if they are clerics they are to be suspended perpetually from all ecclesiastical ministration.
The Council of Worms, under Hadrian II., in the year 868,[91] also judged women who procure abortion as certainly guilty of murder.