If a woman marries in good faith a man she deemed a gentleman, but who turns out to be a syphilitic sot who disgraces her and makes her life a perpetual misery, immeasurably worse than the condition of any eclamptic woman, no greater blessing could come to her and her children than his death. Would she therefore be justified before any tribunal of God or man in murdering him to get rid of her trouble? No; she must bear with her evil for the sake of social order and of eternal right. So must the eclamptic woman.
If it is murder to kill a child outside the womb, and mere therapeutics to kill it inside the womb, then it is murder to shoot a man on the street, and mere good marksmanship to shoot him to death inside his house, especially if he is an undesirable citizen. All reputable physicians deem a fetus in a _normal_ pregnancy so good that they will not dream of destroying this fetus. They absolutely refuse to effect an abortion to get rid of a fetus which may disgrace an unmarried woman and her family, and they are perfectly right in this refusal. They talk and write with genuine indignation of race suicide. The only reason they have for the refusal to do what they call criminal abortion is that the disgrace or inconvenience of the woman is not commensurate with the destruction of a human life. They observe the natural human instinctive repugnance to murder in this special speech and writing, and then go home and get their obstetrical bags and complacently murder the first baby they find in the womb of a _married_ matron who has a disturbed stomach or kidneys. They show here the fine intellectual acumen and reasoning ability of a chronic lunatic. The first fact in the social order is that justice, law, order, should prevail, no matter what the cost. It might be better that the fetus should _die_ than that the mother should die, though that is not always true. It is not better that an unbaptized fetus should die than that a mother in the state of grace should die. But these are irrelevant considerations. It is never better that the fetus should be _killed_ than that the mother should die. That is a very different matter.
The _Mignonette_ case in 1884, tried in England by Lord Coleridge, is a good example of evaluation of lives as in therapeutic abortion, which came to grief. A ship called the _Mignonette_ foundered 1600 miles from the Cape of Good Hope, and three of its crew, with a boy, were for a long time at sea in an open boat without provisions. When they were almost starved the boy lay on the bottom of the boat, asleep or half conscious from weakness. Two of the men plotted to kill the boy for therapeutic purposes; they needed his flesh to save their own lives. They killed the poor lad just as the therapeutic abortionist kills a fetus. They got his uncooked flesh for four days. Later Lord Coleridge got them and he sentenced both of them to death. Another Lord will get the therapeutic abortionists.