ion, it scarcely
appears to excite profound repulsion in a large proportion of the
population of civilized countries. The majority of women, not excluding
educated and highly moral women, who become pregnant against their wish
contemplate the possibility of procuring abortion without the slightest
twinge of conscience, and often are not even aware of the usual
professional attitude of the Church, the law, and medicine regarding
abortion. Probably all doctors have encountered this fact, and even so
distinguished and correct a medico-legist as Brouardel stated[437] that he
had been not infrequently solicited to procure abortion, for themselves or
their wet-nurses, by ladies who looked on it as a perfectly natural thing,
and had not the least suspicion that the law regarded the deed as a crime.

It is not, therefore, surprising that abortion is exceedingly common in
all civilized and progressive countries. It cannot, indeed, unfortunately,
be said that abortion has been conducted in accordance with eugenic
considerations, nor has it often been so much as advocated from the
eugenic standpoint. But in numerous classes of cases of undesired
pregnancy, occurring in women of character and energy, not accustomed to
submit tamely to conditions they may not have sought, and in any case
consider undesirable, abortion is frequently resorted to. It is usual to
regard the United States as a land in which the practice especially
flourishes, and certainly a land in which the ideal of chastity for
unmarried women, of freedom for married women, of independence for all, is
actively followed cannot fail to be favorable to the practice of abortion.
But the way in which the prevalence of abortion is proclaimed in the
United States is probably in large part due to the honesty of the
Americans in setting forth, and endeavoring to correct, what, rightly or
wrongly, they regard as social defects, and may not indicate any real
pre-eminence in the practice. Comparative statistics are difficult, and it
is certainly true that abortion is extremely common in England, in France,
and in Germany. It is probable that any national differences may be
accounted for by differences in general social habits and ideals. Thus in
Germany, where considerable sexual freedom is permitted to unmarried women
and married women are very domesticated, abortion may be less frequent
than in France where purity is stringently demanded from the young girl,
while the married wo