without exaggeration make a volume the size of the latest edition of 

the Standard Dictionary, printed in the same small type. Some of them 

are positively heartbreaking. They make you sick at the stupidity of 

the human race, at the stupidity and brutality of the lawgivers. But I 

do not wish to appeal to your emotions. I do not wish to take extreme 

and unique cases. I will therefore briefly relate a few everyday 

cases, which will demonstrate to you the beneficence of contraceptive 

knowledge and the tragedy and misery caused by 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