April, 1909) is in favor of a change in the law permitting abortion (provided it is carried out by the physician) in special cases, as when the mother’s pregnancy has been due to force, when she has been abandoned, or when, in the interests of the community, it is desirable to prevent the propagation of insane, criminal, alcoholic, or tuberculous persons.

In France, a medical man, Dr. Jean Darricarrere, has written a remarkable novel, Le Droit d’Avortement (1906), which advocates the thesis that a woman always possesses a complete right to abortion, and is the supreme judge as to whether she will or not undergo the pain and risks of childbirth.  The question is, here, however, obviously placed not on medical, but on humanitarian and feminist grounds.

We have seen that, alike on the side of practice and of theory, a great change has taken place during recent years in the attitude towards abortion.  It must, however, clearly be recognized that, unlike the control of procreation by methods for preventing conception, facultative abortion has not yet been embodied in our current social morality.  If it is permissible to interpolate a personal opinion, I may say that to me it seems that our morality is here fairly reasonable.[442] I am decidedly of opinion that an unrestricted permission for women to practice abortion in their own interests, or even for communities to practice it in the interests of the race, would be to reach beyond the stage of civilization we have at present attained.  As Ellen Key very forcibly argues, a civilization which permits, without protest, the barbarous slaughter of its carefully selected adults in war has not yet won the right to destroy deliberately even its most inferior vital products in the womb.  A civilization guilty of so reckless a waste of life cannot safely be entrusted with this judicial function.  The blind and aimless anxiety to cherish the most hopeless and degraded forms of life, even of unborn life, may well be a weakness, and since it often leads to incalculable suffering, even a crime.  But as yet there is an impenetrable barrier against progress in this direction.  Before we are entitled to take life deliberately for the sake of purifying life, we must learn how to preserve it by abolishing such destructive influences—­war, disease, bad industrial conditions—­as are easily within our social power as civilized nations.[443]

There is, further, another consideration which seems to me to carry weight.  The progress of civilization is in the direction of greater foresight, of greater prevention, of a diminished need for struggling with the reckless lack of prevision.  The necessity for abortion is precisely one of those results of reckless action which civilization tends to diminish.  While we may admit that in a sounder state of civilization a few cases might still occur when the induction of abortion would be desirable, it seems probable that the number of such cases will decrease rather than