the lack of such
knowledge.

_Case 1._ This class of case is so common that I almost feel like
apologizing for referring to it. She, whom I will call by the
forbearing name of Mrs. Smith, had been married a little over nine
years, and had given birth to five children. She was an excellent
mother, nursed them herself, took good care of them, and all the five
were living and healthy. But in caring for them and for the household
all alone, for they could not afford a servant or a nurse-girl, all
her vitality had been sapped, all her originally superb energy had
dwindled down to nothing; her nerves were worn to a frazzle and she
became but a shadow of her former self. And the fear of another
pregnancy became an obsession with her. She dreamed of it at night,
and it poisoned her waking hours in the day. She felt that she simply
could not go through another pregnancy, another childbirth, with its
sleepless nights and its weary toilsome days. She asked her doctor who
brought her children into the world to give her some preventive, but
he laughed the matter off. "Just be careful," was all the advice she
got from him. And when in spite of being careful, she, horror of
horrors, became pregnant again, she gathered up courage, went to the
same doctor, and asked him to perform an abortion on her. But he was a
highly respectable physician, a Christian gentleman, and he became
highly indignant at her impudence in coming to him and asking him to
commit "murder." Her tears and pleadings were in vain. He remained
adamant.

Whether he would have remained as adamant if instead of Mrs. Smith,
who could only pay twenty-five dollars for the abortion, the patient
had been one of his society clientele, who could pay two hundred and
fifty dollars, is a question which I will not answer in the
affirmative or negative. I will leave it open. I will merely remark
that in the question of abortion in certain specific cases the moral
indignation of some physicians is in inverse proportion to the size of
the fee expected. A doctor who will become terribly insulted when a
poor woman who can only pay ten or fifteen dollars asks to be relieved
of the fruit of her womb, will usually discover that the woman who can
afford to pay one hundred dollars is badly in need of a curettement.
Oh, no. He does not perform an abortion. He merely curets the uterus.

But to come back to Mrs. Smith. She went away from the indignant
adamant doctor. But she was determined