While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as
justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds
of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a
disgrace to civilization.
The effects of such operations upon a woman, serious as they may be,
are nothing as compared to the injury done her general health by drugs
taken to produce the same result. Even such drugs as are prescribed by
physicians have harmful effects, and nostrums recommended by druggists
are often worse still.
Even more drastic may be the effect upon the unborn child, for many
women fill their systems with poisonous drugs during the first weeks
of their pregnancy, only to decide at last, when drugs have failed, as
they usually do, to bring the child to birth.
There are no statistics, of course, by which we may compute the amount
of suffering to mother and child from the use of such drugs, but we
know that the total of physical weakness and disease must be
astounding. We know that the woman's own system feels the strain of
these drugs and that the embryo is usually poisoned by them. The child
is likely to be rickety, have heart trouble, kidney disorder, or to be
generally weak in its powers of resistance.
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