Prognathism

“ I was very slow to be convinced that any woman of decent character would consciously perpetrate an abortion; still slower to see how any woman calling herself pure minded could so degrade the sanctities of marriage as to make steady and persistent attempts to prevent impregnation,—and yet I had for many years felt sure that a great many so-called ‘female diseases’ were incited and developed by the luxurious and indolent habits of our women, which permit them, when neither cultivated nor philanthropic, to become conscious of every phase of gestative action or sexual excitement. ”

“ Both sexes should be lead to understand, for example, that it is up to the woman to choose the hour of conception. And neither sex should be ignorant of the means of contraception. Following my thought to its logical conclusions, I would say that in a society which had not made it possible for its female constituents to refuse or avert an undesired pregnancy, those constituents would be perfectly justified in leaving their progeny to the care of the collectivity. ”

“ We have also seen that not only is abortion wrong, no matter from what quarter we contemplate the act, but so also is the deliberate prevention of pregnancy in the married alike detrimental to the health and to the moral sense. Moderation and temperance here, as elsewhere, afford the golden rule. Under the circumstances to which I allude, total abstinence may, as far as the health is concerned, be as injurious as is the other extreme of excessive indulgence. To the woman in good bodily condition, occasional child-bearing is an important means of healthful self-preservation ”

“ Not only do women become sterile in consequence of a miscarriage, and then, longing for offspring, find themselves permanently incapacitated for conception, but, in other cases, impregnation, or rather the attachment of the ovum to the uterus, being but imperfectly effected, or the mother's system being so insidiously undermined, the children that are subsequently brought forth are unhealthy, deformed, or diseased. ”

“ Sometimes, but rarely, the sexual excitement on the part of the woman may cause an abortion, or a miscarriage. The more usual result makes itself manifest in the drain on the nervous energy of the woman. When we consider that maternity in the human race involves greater sacrifice than in any other animal, it would seem that the addition of this last demand, namely, of satisfying the sexual desires of the husband during [132] the period of pregnancy, might prove "the straw that breaks the camel's back," and result in the more or less complete nervous breakdown of the woman. ”

“ I have not, I trust, heretofore, in my medical lifetime, been wholly unmindful of my duty as a physician, in endeavoring to instruct and to encourage your sex in these matters. But I have never wished to conceal my conviction that I regard pregnancy and childbirth as things of very serious moment in a woman’s life; and he who can trifle with them is almost worse than a very fiend. ”

“ Woman's mind is prone to depression, and, indeed, to temporary actual derangement, under the stimulus of uterine excitation, and this alike at the time of puberty and the final cessation of the menses, at the monthly period and at conception, during pregnancy, at labor, and during lactation; a matter that also seems to have been more thoroughly investigated by the authority I have so freely drawn from in reference to the question of abortion, than by any other writer in this country. ”

“ The false idea, which largely prevails, and which usually takes the form that there is no danger or possibility of conception unless the orgasm is simultaneous on the part of the man and woman, has caused many a woman to become pregnant when she thought such a result to be impossible, because she and her lover did not "spend" at the same instant. For the same reason, many a young husband has impregnated his wife when he least expected to do so, thinking that because he alone experienced the orgasm, that therefore conception was impossible. ”

“ The general attitude towards such sexual crises as menstruation and pregnancy is still strongly reminiscent of the primitive belief that woman is unclean at those times. Mothers still hesitate to enlighten their daughters concerning these natural biological functions, and as a result girls are unconsciously imbued with a feeling of shame concerning them. Modern psychology has given many instances of the rebellion of girls at the inception of menstruation, for which they have been ill prepared. ”

“ The months of pregnancy with most women are months of discomfort. Some women are in better health, more cheery and hopeful during the period of gestation than at any other period in their lives. But this is not generally the case; rather the reverse. During gestation some women are a terror to their husbands, and render themselves miserable, and all about [Pg 201] them uncomfortable and unhappy. During this period the wife ceases to be physically attractive, and for her own protection and the protection of the embryo, nature makes the wife sexually repellant. ”

“ What can a physically weaker and spiritually stronger woman do even if she desires continence with her whole soul, but her husband will have none of it? Is it not then her duty to protect herself in order that she may not give birth to a weakly progeny?
HARPER’S WEEKLY. 1915.
When Dr. A. A. Brill, Lecturer in Abnormal Psychology, New York University, and formerly Chief of Clinic in Psychiatry, Columbia University, was asked how he regarded contraception in relation to nervous diseases, he replied emphatically: “You can say that I am for it. It is much better than an abortion. ”

“ It is the experience of modern women that sex is an instinctive need to them as it is to men, and further that the prevention of conception brings to them no loss of poise, health, or happiness. On the contrary, when once they embark on the task of maternity, contraception is a blessed safeguard to health and recovery in the periods of rest between pregnancies. ”

“ The observance of the law of continence will do much to palliate the many nervous symptoms of pregnancy. I have known women so sensitive during gestation that even a touch or a kiss from the husband caused nausea and other distressing symptoms.
“The sexual relation at this time exhausts the mother and impairs the vitality of the child, inducing in its constitution precocious sexual development. The mind should be free from the subject, and every circumstance that has a tendency to promote desire should be studiously avoided. ”

“ But as the object of the present work is to illustrate abortion, and not the complete life-circle of the fœtus, I shall stop the number of my propositions at the fifth iiimonth of its intro-uterine existence. After that period, the various phenomena of fœtal gestation are so uniform, that they afford less matter of interest to the philosopher.
13. Conception, or that result which follows sexual congress, in virtue of which one, or more individuals, of the same species is called into being, takes place in the ovarium of women. ”

“ HARMFUL METHODS PRACTICED TO AVOID LARGE FAMILIES In this chapter it is shown that ignorance of scientific means of preventing conception involves women in harmful practices. The most common is coitus interruptus which results in nervous disorders. Long continued celibacy or unnatural continence leads to sex inversions. When, in spite of these unscientific practices, pregnancy follows, abortion, the greatest disgrace of modern civilization, is the only resort of the harassed mother, unless she will bear unwanted offspring. ”

“ A woman who has never been pregnant does not, as a general rule, conceive as readily as one who has already been impregnated before, perhaps partly from the fact that intercourse, under certain circumstances, is more likely to be excessive in such cases, at times producing acute or subacute inflammation of the cervix uteri, and consequent sterility, as is so constantly observed in prostitutes, very many of whom, upon ceasing their trade, after accumulating a little property, as in France, or upon being sent to out-lying colonies, as in England, and becoming married, at once fall pregnant. ”

“ Now the monogamic marriage makes this sort of plague almost a natural necessity, a sort of ineluctable scourge. It is impossible to ask a normal, positive, healthy man to exercise sexual abstinence for sixteen or eighteen months—that is to say, the nine months of his wife’s pregnancy and the seven or nine months of lactation. Only Manicheans, Puritans, or people thoroughly below par and quite devoid of virility, could possibly think of recommending such a course. ”

“ Pregnancy a period of continence.—When impregnation occurs and the womb becomes the closed home of embryonic life, sexual desire largely or entirely{533} ceases in the normal woman. She now enters a nine-month period of gestation. Again it is natural for her to repel sexual approaches of her husband. All the pregnant females among the lower animals and savage man faithfully repel the approach of their mates during gestation. This law is violated alone by semi-civilized and civilized man. ”

“ A woman loses the power to conceive when she reaches the "turn of life," when her menses cease, that is, when she is between forty and fifty years of age. And if pleasure in coition serves only to induce her to engage in the act for the purpose of increasing the probability of her becoming pregnant, if this is the sole purpose of desire for sex intercourse, such desire, such pleasure, ought to cease at that period of feminine life. ”

“ Where conception has occurred in a married woman, it may be fear for the future of the child, of a lowering of the standard of life of the family, or of the act of parturition, which leads to the practice of abortion; where the pregnant woman is unmarried, fears as to the future of mother and child may also be operative, but the principal motives are the dread of disgrace and the desire to conceal the fact that [259] pregnancy has occurred. ”

“ After one has traced the development of the human body in the uterus, and even faintly understood its growth and method of nourishment, it is impossible to believe that the mother’s thoughts or experiences could in any way deform or mark her child, or alter its sex. That the mother’s “reaching up,” for example, could slip the cord around the unborn baby’s neck is manifestly absurd, as well as the previously mentioned superstitions about the eight-month baby’s slender chances for survival. ”

“ We now come to the consideration of the subject of Contraception, pure and simple, the methods of which contemplate the manifestation of the usual physical sexual relations between husband and wife, accompanied by an avoidance of the union of the male and female elements of reproduction which result in conception. ”

“ I support the affirmative by appealing to all those of the profession who have had occasion to be consulted in cases of abortion and the expulsion of those singular productions of the uterine cavity, which seem connected with menstruation or faulty conception. Let them say whether a work, in which the principal of the infinitely varied aborted human ova, and of the uterine productions alluded to, are faithfully represented, be not likely to be useful ”

“ Advancement in life, before marriage, is another cause of frequent abortion, the uterus being then somewhat imperfect in its action. In general, we cannot do much in this case, except avoiding carefully the exciting causes of abortion, 91and by attending minutely to the condition of other organs during menstruation or pregnancy, we may, from the principles formerly laid down, do some good. ”

“ In the first place, every young female should be examined, before marriage, by a competent person, if there be the slightest reason to suspect deformity; and in case the deformity is found to exist, the consequences if she becomes pregnant, must be laid before her. If, after being told this, she will marry, or has already done so, the means of avoiding conception should be placed at her disposal, so that she may not be made, of necessity, a helpless victim. ”

“ It is necessary to emphasize this point because we have to realize that the modern movement for surrounding the pregnant woman with tenderness and care, so far from being the mere outcome of civilized softness and degeneracy, is, in all probability, the return on a higher plane to the sane practice of those races which laid the foundations of human greatness.
While rest is the cardinal virtue imposed on a woman during the later months of pregnancy, there are other points in her regimen that are far from unimportant in their bearing on the fate of the child. ”

“ This man, accustomed all his life to gratify his sexual passions promisculously, marries a virtuous young girl. In her menstrual periods she has had to do only with the secondary phenomena; with the expulsion of the ova not at all. She has had no instruction in the corresponding physiologic life of the man, and is astonished at the male sexual indications, and is led to believe in their physiologic necessities. The result is that she not only suffers physically, but feels outraged and disgraced. She is liable to the chance of maternity at any time; and such offspring will probably be sickly. ”

“ And the real truth is, that there is something that would be prodigious, if any thing natural could be properly termed prodigious, in that supremely tender sensibility with which women in general are so strongly impressed towards one another in the case of lying-in. What are not their bowels on that occasion? It may not be here quite foreign to remark, in support of the characteristic importance of the uterus or the womb, that in the antient Saxon language the word Man or Mon equally signified one of the male or female sex, as Homo in Latin. ”

“ On the other hand the development of a degeneration can hardly be an advantage for the species and we should hope for a return to the natural rule by abstinence from all alcoholic drinks.
The false modesty of women concerning their pregnancy and everything that concerns childbirth, the pleasantries often made with regard to pregnant women are a sad sign of the degeneration and even corruption of our refined civilization. Pregnant women ought not to hide themselves, or to be ashamed to carry a child in their womb ”