“We greatly deprecate,” says Mill, “an increase of population, as rapid as the increase of production and accumulation.”[87]
“There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for an immense increase of population. But although it may be innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it.”
“I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary long before necessity compels them to it.”[88]
“If the opinion were once generally established among the laboring class, that their welfare required a due regulation of the numbers of their families, only those would exempt themselves from it who were in the habit of making light of social obligations generally.”[89] “The principles contended for include not only the laboring classes, but all persons, except the few who being able to give their offspring the means of independent support during the whole of life, do not leave them to swell the competition for employment.”[90]
“When persons are once married, the idea never seems to enter any one’s mind, that having or not having a family, or the number of which it shall consist, is at all amenable to their own control. One would imagine that it was really, as the common phrases have it, God’s will and not their own, which decided the number of their offspring.”[91]
“In a place where there is no room left for new establishments,” says Sismondi, entirely ignoring the escapes offered by emigration and the increased importation of food, “if a man has eight children, he should believe that unless six of them die in infancy, these, and three of his own contemporaries of each sex, will be compelled to abstain from marriage in consequence of his own imprudence.”[92]
The direct result of remarks like these last, so pointed and plainly to be understood, is seen in the statistics I have so largely given. Would mankind, in following such advice, merely resort to greater abstinence before their means allow the expense of children, and to greater prudence after that period, no fault could be found; but when we discover criminal abortion thus justified and almost legitimated, we may well oppose to such doctrine the words of the indeed admirable Percival, “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.”[93]
Fear of child-bed, in patients pregnant for the first time, or who had suffered or risked much in previous labors, might formerly have been allowed some weight in excuse, but none at all in these days of anæsthesia. It has been urged, and not so absurdly as would at first sight appear, that the present possibilities of painless and so much safer delivery, by changing thus completely the primal curse, from anguish to a state frequently of positive pleasure, remove a drawback of actual advantage, and by offering too many inducements for pregnancy, tend to keep women in that state the greater part of their menstrual lives.
The consideration in detail of the various other causes to which I have alluded as accounting for the prevalence of abortion, together with that of the many special reasons offered in individual cases by way of excuse, I postpone for the present; merely premising that where ignorance is so evidently and so extensively its foundation, those who, possessing, yet withhold the knowledge which by any chance or in any way would tend to prevent it, themselves become, directly, and in a moral sense, responsibly accountable for the crime.