It was also advised that the encouragement of criminal abortion, by publication, lecture, or otherwise, or by the advertisement, sale or circulation of such publication, should be made penal, and that the present well worded statute against the personal advertisements of abortionists, and their nostrums, should be rigorously enforced.
To the words now quoted were added, and they are still applicable, the following:—
“We have aimed at a statute, which, while it better defined this atrocious crime, and covered the usual grounds of escape from conviction, established also the proper standard of competence in all medical questions involving issues of life and death. We believe that it would be the means of preventing much of the present awful waste of human life. But enforce such a law, and the profession would never allow its then high place in the community to be unworthily degraded; nor, as now, would those be permitted, unchallenged, to remain in fellowship, who were generally believed guilty, or suspected even of this crime.”[255]
In the same belief, strengthened by nearly three years careful reflection, that criminal abortion can, to a great extent, be controlled by law, if but the community so will, we proceed to the last division of our subject, and discuss the duty of the medical profession toward the ultimate suppression of the crime.
IX. THE DUTY OF THE PROFESSION.
I have stated that the prevalence of criminal abortion is in great measure owing to a seeming neglect of fœtal life on the part of medical practitioners, and that in other degree it is attributable to ignorance by the community of the actual character of the offence, an ignorance of physiological facts and laws; and on both these points abundant proof has been afforded of the truth of my assertions.
I have also stated that medical men, in all obstetric matters, are the physical guardians of women and their offspring; a proposition that none can deny.
We have seen that unjustifiable abortion, alike as concerns the infant and society, is a crime second to none; that it abounds, and is frightfully on the increase; and that on medical grounds alone, mistaken and exploded, a misconception of the time at which man becomes a living being, the law fails to afford to infants and to society that protection which they have an absolute right to receive at its hands, and for the absence of which every individual who has, or can exert, any influence in the matter, is rendered so far responsible.
Under these circumstances, therefore, it becomes the medical profession to look to it, lest the whole guilt of this crime rest upon themselves.