“The doctrine of the Catholic Church,” remarks Bishop Fitzpatrick, “her canons, her pontifical constitutions, her theologians without exception, teach, and constantly have taught, that the destruction of the human fœtus in the womb of the mother, at any period from the first instant of conception, is a heinous crime, equal, at least, in guilt to that of murder. We find it distinctly condemned as such even as far back as the time of Tertullian, (at the end of the second century,) who calls it festinatio homicidii, a hastening of murder. The Pope, Sixtus the Fifth, in a bull published in 1588, subjects those guilty of the crime to all the penalties, civil and ecclesiastical, inflicted on murderers. It is denounced and reprobated in many other canons of the church.
“The reason of this doctrine (apart from the authority of the church) must, it seems to me, appear evident upon a little reflection. The very instant conception has taken place, there lies the vital germ of a man. True, it is hidden in the darkness of the womb, and it is helpless; but it has sacred rights, founded in God’s law, so much the more to be respected because it is helpless. It may be already a living man, for neither mothers nor physicians can tell when life is infused; they can only tell when its presence is manifested, and there is a wide difference between these two things. At any rate, it is from the first moment potentially and in radice a man, with a body and a soul destined most surely by the will of the Creator and by his law, to be developed into the fullness of human existence. No one can prevent that development without resisting and annulling one of the most sacred and important laws established by the Divine Author of the universe, and he is a criminal, a murderer, who deals an exterminating blow to that incipient man, and drives back into nothingness a being to whom God designed to give a living body and an immortal soul.
“From this it follows that the young woman whose virtue has proved an insufficient guardian to her honor, when she seeks by abortion to save in the eyes of man that honor she has forfeited, incurs the additional and deeper guilt of murder in the eyes of God, the judge of the living and the dead. Who can express what follows with regard to those women, who, finding themselves lawfully mothers, prefer to devastate with poison or with steel their wombs, rather than bear the discomforts attached to the privilege of maternity, rather than forego the gaieties of a winter’s balls, parties, and plays, or the pleasures of a summer’s trips and amusements?
“But abortion,” the Bishop continues, “besides being a direct crime against a positive law of God, is also an indirect crime against society. Admit its practice, and you throw open a way for the most unbridled licentiousness, you make woman a mere instrument for beastly lust. Every woman is somebody’s mother or daughter or sister or wife; or she bears all these relations at once. Whatever protection, therefore, we would claim for a woman because she stands in any of these relations to us, we should also extend to all women, because they bear some one of all these relations to others. Most assuredly, then, we should remove none of the safeguards that protect female virtue. But if we take away the responsibility of maternity, we destroy one of its strongest bulwarks.
“It affords me pleasure,” he concludes, “to learn that the American Medical Association has turned its attention to the prevention of criminal abortion, a sin so directly opposed to the first laws of nature, and to the designs of God, our Creator, that it cannot fail to draw down a curse upon the land where it is generally practiced.”[104]
Such being the doctrine of the Catholic Church, and statistics nevertheless proving that its so stringent statutes against the destruction of fœtal life, enforced alike by denouncement and excommunication, are constantly broken in Catholic France, it is more than probable, from the existence of this fact, in addition to all the various causes of the crime we have seen equally prevailing there and in this country, that the actual number of abortions is much greater with ourselves; at least with the American and native portion of our population. We have indeed shown that this is really the case in Massachusetts.[105]
Viewing this subject in a medical light, we find that death, however frequent, is by no means the most common or the worst result of the attempts at criminal abortion. This statement applies not to the mother alone, but, in a degree, to the child.
We shall perceive that many of the measures resorted to are by no means certain of success, often indeed decidedly inefficacious in causing the immediate expulsion of the fœtus from the womb; though almost always producing more or less severe local or general injury to the mother, and often, directly or by sympathy, to the child.
The membranes or placenta may be but partially detached, and the ovum may be retained. This does not necessarily occasion degeneration, as into a mole or hydatids, or entire arrest of development. The latter may be partial, as under many forms, from some cause or another, does constantly occur; if from an unsuccessful attempt at abortion, would this be confessed, or indeed always suggest itself to the mother’s own mind? Fractures of the fœtal limbs prior to birth are often reported, unattributable in any way to the funis, which may amputate indeed, but seldom break a limb. A fall, or a blow, is recollected; perhaps it was accidental, perhaps not, for resort to these for criminal purposes is very common. In precisely the same manner may injury be occasioned to the nervous system of the fœtus, as in a hydrocephalic case long under the writer’s own observation, where the cause and effect were plainly evident. Intra-uterine convulsions have been reported; as induced by external violence they are probably not uncommon, and the disease thus begun may eventuate in epilepsy, paralysis, or idiocy.
To the mother there may happen correspondingly frequent and serious results. Not alone death, immediate or subsequent, may occur, from metritis, hemorrhage, peritonitic or phlebitic inflammation, from almost every cause possibly attending not merely labor at the full period, comparatively safe, but miscarriage,—increased and multiplied by ignorance, by wounds and violence; but if life still remain, it is too often rendered worse than death.