I have no doubt that such a course of dieting in pregnancy would do a good deal toward mitigating not only the pains, but the dangers of the puerperal state.
The greatest of all dietetic enemies the world over is excess in quantity. You see, then, how admirably this theory would work in practice, although it might be false in real fact.
At any rate, you cannot be too careful of your diet when you are pregnant. There is no period of your lives in which it is more necessary to guard against all error than in this; and excessive alimentation, as I before remarked, is the greatest of all dietetic mistakes. It was one of Jefferson’s great canons of life, that we never repent of having eaten too little. So I will say after him, that I never knew a pregnant woman to suffer from taking too small an amount of nutriment, but I have known many to suffer from eating too much.
I have elsewhere remarked, that the period of pregnancy is necessarily attended by a greater liability to febrile and inflammatory disease than is ordinarily the case. Every one knows—that is, every one who knows any thing at all about the subject—that flesh-meat is more heating and feverish in its tendency than the farinacea and fruits. Mark, then, the evidence of the wisdom and benevolence of the Creator, in taking away, for the most part, your appetite for animal food when you are pregnant. You are more liable to disease at this time than you are at others; and when disease does lay hold, it is more apt to go hard with you. God in His mercy then says, “I will take away the woman’s appetite for flesh when she is pregnant; yea, I will give her nausea, and loathing, and vomiting, for her heart is prone to lead her to excess.”
Do not then, I warn you, eat animal food at this time, even if you should have some appetite for it, as is sometimes the case.
Observe, also, how very sumptuously you may live in the vegetarian way. Indian mush; rye mush; rye and Indian bread; rye bread; corn bread, or Johnny-cake, as it is called in many parts; hominy; cracked wheat; wheaten mush; peas; beans; pumpkins; squashes; melons; apples, green, dried, or otherwise, with a little of milk and eggs, if need be, a little sweet; and a great many other things, which I need not now mention, which you can have according to the season. How well we could live, all of us, if we but would, without causing the farmers to wring the chickens’ necks off, to beat out the brains of the faithful ox and the affectionate cow with an axe, or to cut off the head of the innocent lamb. Do you ever think of these things when you eat meat?
What would you think of a woman who would eat pork meat and pork grease in pregnancy? You have heard a great deal of scrofula—that dreadful disease. In the long catalogue of maladies to which the human body is subject, there is not one more fearful, more dreadful than this. Scrofula is the swine’s disease; and the word is from the Latin scrofa, which means a sow. The swine is, probably, of all living creatures, the most subject to it. Think, then, of a woman’s eating such food when she is performing so important an office in God’s government as that of nourishing within her own body a living child. How much pain, disease, and suffering may she cause by her improper conduct at this time; or, on the other hand, how much happiness and physiological well-being, if she pursues a proper course. “Wisdom’s ways are ways of pleasantness” to her also as to her child.
If it were not wandering to much from the tenor of my subject, I might speak of the cheapness of living on vegetable food.
In this country of abundance we do not often see much misery arising from want of sustenance. Still such things do happen, and now and then in almost every part. True, our charities are munificent, our country fertile, our people industrious, and on the whole, benevolent; yet, there is always room for charity to work in. If we cannot find an object at home, assuredly we can somewhere; and we ought never to be satisfied with our course of self-denial, so long as there is one hungry mouth more in the wide world to fill. I have often thought of these things, I admit, when I have been eating things which I ought not to have eaten. I presume you have done the same thing all of you, for the human heart is as prone to evil as the sparks are to fly upward, or a stone to fall to the ground.
If I could speak a word to a husband through you, on this important matter of diet in pregnancy, I would say to him, “Do not, as you love your wife, tempt her to any excess while she is pregnant. Remember how you loved her when she consented to give you that which was of incomparably more importance to you than the whole world besides, her own faithful, loving heart. Remember, too, how much she is made to suffer on your account. You can aid her by your example, and by your sympathy you can uphold her; but the pains, the agonies, and the perils of childbirth, these all are inevitably hers. I say, therefore, set your wife a good example yourself. If you do not thus aid her, surely as God liveth will you be made to suffer for your evil deeds.”