The second case is always attended with immediate risk of life. Pregnancy never terminates without intense suffering, seldom without the death of the child, frequently with the death of the mother, and sometimes with the death of both mother and child.
The third case is by far the most common, and the most open to general observation. In the middle ranks, the most virtuous and praiseworthy efforts are perpetually made to keep up the respectability of the family; but a continual increase of children gradually, yet certainly, renders every effort to prevent degradation unavailing, it paralyzes by rendering hopeless all exertion, and the family sinks into poverty and despair. Thus is engendered and perpetuated a hideous mass of misery.
The knowledge of what awaits them deters vast numbers of young men from marrying, and causes them to spend the best portion of their lives in a state of debauchery, utterly incompatible with the honorable and honest feelings which should be the characteristic of young men. The treachery, duplicity, and hypocrisy that they use towards their friends and the unfortunate victims of their seductions, while they devote a large number of females to the most dreadful of all states which human beings can endure, extinguishes in them, to a very great extent, all manly, upright notions; and qualifies them, to as great an extent, for the commission of acts, which, but for these vile practices they would abhor, and thus, to an enormous extent, is the whole community injured.
Marriage in early life is the only truly happy state, and if the evil consequences of too large a family did not deter them, all men would marry when young, and thus would many lamentable evils be removed from society.
A simple, effectual, and safe means of accomplishing these desirable results has long been known, and to a considerable extent practiced in some places. But until lately has been little known in the United States.
Accouchers of the first respectability, and surgeons of great eminence, have in some peculiar cases recommended it. Within the last two years, a more extensive knowledge of the process has prevailed and its practice has been more extensively adopted. It is now made public through the medium of this book; and to those who deem its use expedient, may not only prevent much unhappiness and physical inconvenience, but will be of incalculable benefit to society.
The great utility and importance of the use of this instrument, may be summed up under the following heads:
1st. That no married couple shall have more children than they wish to have and can maintain.
2nd. That no unhealthy woman shall bear children, that cannot be reared, and which endanger her own life in the parturition:
“Women, for no other crime than having followed the dictates of a natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts and sympathies of society. It is less venial than murder! and the punishment which is inflicted on her who destroys her child to escape reproach, is lighter than the life of agony and disease to which the prostitute is irrecoverable doomed. Has the woman obeyed the impulse of unerring nature;—society declares war against her, pitiless and eternal war; she must be a tame slave, she must make no reprisals: theirs is the right of persecution, hers the duty of endurance. She lives a life of infamy; the loud and bitter laugh of scorn scares her from all return. She dies of long and lingering disease: yet she is in fault, she is the criminal, she the froward and untameable child—and society, forsooth, is the pure and virtuous matron, who casts her as an abortion from her undefiled bosom! Society avenges itself on the criminals of its own creation; it is employed in anathematizing the vice to day, which yesterday it was the most zealous to teach.