OBJECTION the Twelfth. IT is not probable, that the men-practitioners would have come into the vogue in which we see them, if numbers of instances were not to be produced in their favor, of their having terminated happily many labors, in which they have been preferably employed, and to the exclusion of the midwives. ANSWER. THIS only proves, what none in their senses will deny, that the greater part of the cases of labor are so mild, that not even that faultiness of the men-practitioners, which is palpably owing to an incurable imperfection of Nature, not, in short, all that is bungling or deficient in their preliminary disposition and manual operation, can absolutely frustrate the kindness of that Nature, of which these intruders are not ashamed of assuming the honor. But that inference of the men in favor of themselves is as ridiculous as it is false. In those cases of labor, which are much the less frequent, and require no extraordinary assistence, the utmost of the real merit of these bunglers is only of the negative kind: that is to say, they have not destroyed the mother nor the child; and indeed, every thing considered, great is the praise to them thereof. It is not always, even in naturally easy labors, that the women who employ men to lay them have not a harder bargain of them. BUT even in these propitious labors, the mischief done to a lying-in woman, by employing of a man to the exclusion of a midwife, is not a small one, if pain is an evil, and the lessening that evil a desirable good. For certainly there can hardly be a case of lying-in supposed, in which some _labor-pains_ are not felt. The bringing forth children in pain, stands hitherto the irreversible decree of nature, from which few women can promise themselves a total exemption. But these pains, if they cannot be entirely spared, to the lying-in woman, will always admit of actual or preventive alleviation. That alleviation can be no inconsiderable object to women, who are by their nature so tender and so impatient of pain. Even then in the prospect and presence of the very gentlest labors, there are two natural points to be respectively attended to. The one is the predisposition of every thing, according to art, so as to render the expected labor-pains as moderate as possible. The second is in the manual function, at the actual crisis of the delivery. Now, in both these points, for reasons above-deduced of the superior aptitude in women derived to them from Nature herself, a woman may reasonably depend not only on a more simpathizing cherishment, but a more efficacious assistence from those of her own sex. There are a thousand little tender attentions suggested by nature, and improved by experience, that a midwife can employ both preventively and actually to the mitigation of her charge’s pain; attentions which, if even they ever entered into a man-midwife’s head, could not be accepted but with