Nature, if her expulsive efforts are but, in due time, and when requisite, gently and skilfully seconded by the hands alone, will do more, and with less pain than all the art of the instrumentarians, with their whole armory of deadly weapons. The original and best instrument, as well as the antientest, is the natural hand. As yet no human invention comes near it, much less excells it: and in that part it is that the women have incomparably and evidently the advantage over the men for the operations of midwifery, in which dexterity is ever so much more efficacious than downright strength.
And, indeed, let every requisite faculty for the assistence of lying-in women be well considered, and the resulting determination cannot but be, that in the common labors, where the men themselves are either simple by-standers or receivers of the child, or operate with the hand only, they are the very best of them, not comparable to a common midwife, and in those cases, in which they pretend the use of instruments necessary, hardly better than the worst one. So that, not less than justly speaking, they are not receivable, either as substitutes, or even as supplements to midwives.
The art of midwifery then, in its management by women, carries with it, in the recommendation of order, modesty, propriety, ease, diminution of pain and danger, all the marks of the providential care of Nature. It is imaged by the incubation of a brood-hen, assiduously watching over her charge, and tenderly hatching it with her genial heat. Whereas the function of this art, officiated by men, has ever something barbarously uncouth, indecent, mean, nauseous, shockingly unmanly and out of character: and, above all, of lame or imperfect in it. It strongly suggests the idea of the chicken-ovens in Egypt, kept by a particular set of people, who make a livelihood of the secret, which they, it seems, ingross of that curious art of hatching of eggs by a forced artificial heat: a practice, which, like the other refinements of dungbeds for the same purpose, or that of committing the rearing or education of the chickens to[[44]]“cocks, to capons, or to artificial wooden mothers,” may sound indeed vastly ingenious; but besides the numbers that perish the victims of those experiments, many of the productions of such methods of hatching are observed to be maimed, wanting a leg or a wing, or some way damaged or defective. The comparison breaks indeed in that, at least, the grown hens themselves escape damage, which is not often the case of mothers under those heteroclite beings the men-midwives; or, if they do escape, it is no thanks to those operators, but to the prevalence of Nature over their pragmatical intervention, so fit only to disturb, thwart, or oppose her effects, and in every sense to deprive the unhappy women that trust them of her common benefit.
But while superior considerations of humanity so justly intercede for the mothers, while I strenuously contend for the preference to be, without hesitation, due to the mother over the child, especially in that dreadful dilemma, where one must be sacrificed to the safety of the other; supposing such a dreadful alternative ever to exist, which I much doubt, or at least, not to exist so often as it is rashly taken for granted, and even then, where the effects do not always follow the resolution taken thereon, since, though the child is always certainly lost, the mother is far from always saved, when, by a judicious preventiveness in practice, neither of them might perhaps have been so much as in jeopardy; while, I say, I plead for the preferable attention to the mothers, I hope no mothers will think me the worse intentioned towards them, for giving the lives of their children the second place in my tender concern for the safety of both.
And surely never was a time, when children more required the intercession of humanity in their favor. Mothers can speak for themselves. But the poor infants, so often precluded, by violence, from the pity-moving faculty of their own cry, have nothing but the cry of Nature to plead for them. A cry, the listening to which is prevented by those vain imaginary terrors, inspired by designing Art in the service of Interest, through which Nature is seduced to act against herself, and deliver herself up to her greatest enemies.
In short, one would imagine, that all the rage of cruelty was unchained, and let loose against especially those tender innocents, born or unborn.
Among the poor, particularly as to those infants cast upon the public charity, a barbarously premature ablactation, under a pretext so easily foreknown to be as false as it is fatal, of bringing them up by hand for cheapness-sake, has destroyed incredible numbers.
Among the rich, or those able enough to pay for the learned murder of their offspring, how many of their children, even before they have well got hold of life, in this, literally speaking as to them, iron age, encounter their death or wounds, stuck in the brain by a crotchet, or crushed by a forceps, to say nothing of their being now and then ingeniously strangled in the noose of a fillet!
And those horrors proceed unchecked and unexploded, and in what a nation? a nation, that values herself upon the distinction of profound thinking: a nation that, besides that interest she has in common with all other well-governed nations, to protect and promote population, stands, be it said, in that true spirit of justice, which as much disdains to pay a fulsome compliment, as good sense ever will to receive it, moreover eminently distinguished above them all, for producing a race of natives, one would think could hardly be too numerous, since they are the most remarkable in the known world for courage, for personal beauty, and for many other liberal gifts of Nature, among which surely not the least is, that inborn spirit of liberty, to which they owe the honorable acquisition of so many additional advantages.
Can it then be too strongly recommended to the women especially, at least, to examine whether their notion of superior safety under the hands of a man, in their lying-in, bears upon the solid foundation of Nature, or merely on the treacherously weak one of a delusive opinion? an opinion that owes its existence to fears cruelly played upon, and turned to account by designing Interest. If those then of them who are under the force of prejudice, or governed by habit, or by both at once, would, on a point that concerns themselves and children so nearly, assume liberty enough of mind to shake off the dangerous yoke, they would undoubtedly find it better and safer to listen to that salutary instinct of Nature so authorized by reason, which inspires them with that repugnance to submit themselves in the manner they must do that submit themselves to men-midwives, who have the impudence to call that repugnance a “false modesty:” as if that Modesty could not be a true one, a foolish one I am sure it could not be, that should murmur at being so cruelly sacrificed to such a bubble’s bargain as it is, by those innocents, who, over-persuaded by a deceitful promise of more effectual aid, too often embrace a torturous and a shameful death, for which, to add ridicule to horror, they are expected to pay their executioners larger fees than to one of their own sex for a more decent, a more safe, and always a less painful delivery.