CHAPTER XIII
THE PRACTICE OF PROCURING ABORTION
Procuring abortion in the old days appears to have been limited to women of high rank who, for reasons of policy, were not allowed to have children. When it is remembered that every lady of rank who married into another tribe might bear children who, as vasu, would have a lien upon every kind of property belonging to their mother's tribe, it is not surprising that means were taken to limit the number of her offspring. In a polygamous society every wife had an interest in preventing her rivals from bearing sons who might dispute the succession with her own offspring, and the chief wife wielded an authority over the inferior wives that enabled her to carry her wishes into effect. Waterhouse mentions that professional abortionists were sent in the train of every lady who married out of the tribe, with instructions to procure the miscarriage of her mistress. The Rev. Walter Lawry, who visited Mbau in 1847, declares, on the authority of all the resident missionaries, that the practice was reduced to a system. But these motives did not operate with the common people, who were seldom in a position to pay the practitioner's fee, although, no doubt, dislike of the long abstinence enjoined during suckling and disinclination to bear children to a man they hated were motives strong enough to induce a few women in every class to rid themselves of their children. The abortionist's craft was then in the hands of a few professional experts, who made too good a thing of their trade to trust their secrets to any but their daughters who were to succeed to their practice.
All this is now changed. Both the motive and the means have spread far and wide. The secrets of the trade are common property, and the act is unskilfully attempted by the mother or older female relation of every pregnant woman who cares to take the risk of an operation. By a strange irony the rapid increase in the practice of abortion in recent years is to some extent the doing of the missionaries. With the decay of the custom of separating the sexes at night intrigues with unmarried women increased, and to fight this growing vice the missionaries visited the breach of the Seventh Commandment with expulsion from Church membership. The girls have come to prize highly their thurusinga (lit., entrance into daylight), as communion with the Wesleyan Church is called, and, when they find themselves pregnant, the dread of exposure, expulsion and disgrace drive them to the usual expedients for destroying the evidence of their frailty. Although by suppressing the usual feasts and presentations in the case of illegitimate births, and by refusing the sacrament of baptism to illegitimate children, the Mission authorities may have given some impetus to the practice of abortion, there can be little doubt that an illegitimate birth brought even more shame upon families of every rank but the lowest in heathen times than at present—unless the putative father was of high rank. There still exists enough of the stern customary law that punished incontinency to cast a social stigma upon the mother of an illegitimate child; there still survives enough of the ethical code that refused to regard the procurement of abortion as a criminal act to warrant women in choosing what is to them the lesser of two evils. Moreover, the tendency to the practice of abortion is cumulative. A girl induces miscarriage to escape the shame of her first pregnancy. To the natural tendency of women who have once miscarried to repeat the accident is added the temptation to undergo, for the second time, an operation that has already been successful. If Fijian women dislike the burden of tending children born in wedlock, much more do they shrink from maternity coupled with the disgrace of illegitimacy. The natives themselves quote instances of a number of minor
motives, such as the dread of the pains of childbirth, and the determination of a wife not to bear children to a man she hates or quarrels with—motives which have influenced women of every race from the beginning of time, and which will continue to do so until the end.
METHODS VEILED IN SECRECY
A high birth-rate is not incompatible with the extensive practice of abortion, where the proportion of stillbirth is also high, and the women are so careful to conceal their practices that it is highly probable that they conspire to represent to the native registrars as post-natal deaths miscarriages that have been caused artificially. The natives of Vanualevu are reputed to be the most adept in procuring abortion, and the three provinces included in that island show the abnormal stillbirth-rate of 10 per cent, of the total births, while their general birth-rate is the lowest in the colony. It must be remembered that, since procuring abortion is regarded as a criminal act, the practice is now concealed, not from any sense of shame, but from fear of criminal prosecution. The practice is veiled with so much secrecy that very few prosecutions have taken place.
The methods of the Fijians are, as in other countries, both toxic and mechanical. Certain herbs, called collectively wai ni yava (medicines for causing barrenness), are taken with the intention of preventing conception, but the belief in their efficacy is not general. Some midwives, however, say that, when taken by nursing mothers with the view of preventing a second conception, they result in the death of the child. Another midwife—one of the class to which the professional abortionists belong—assured us that miscarriage resulted more frequently from distress of mind at the discovery of pregnancy than from the drugs that were taken. The abortives vary with the district and the practitioner, but they are all the leaves, bark or root of herbs, chewed or grated, and infused in water, and there is no reason why some of them should not be as effective as the medicines employed for the purpose by civilized peoples, though the mode of preparation is naturally more crude, and the doses more nauseous and copious than the extracts known to modern pharmacy. The
"wise women" appear to know that drugs which irritate the bowel have an indirect effect upon the pelvic viscera. Andi Ama of Namata stated that old women caution young married women against drinking wai vuso (frothy drinks), meaning a certain class of native medicine made from the stems of climbing plants whose saps impart a frothy or soapy quality to the infusion, which are taken under various pretexts, but generally as cathartics. None of these drugs have yet been collected and subjected to examination or experiment, and if any reliance can be placed on the belief placed by old settlers in the efficacy of native remedies, it is possible that some of them will find an honourable place in the Pharmacopœia.