"Therefore, fœticide is not permissible at any stage of utero-gestation. "The killing of the defenceless fœtus is sometimes done in cases of uncontrollable vomiting of pregnancy, in cases of tubal or abdominal gestation, and the killing of the fœtus is done by electricity, injections of morphine in the amniotic sac, the puncturing of that sac, etc. "This practice is too lightly adopted by thoughtless or conscienceless physicians. This practice is much on the increase. I once heard a known obstetrician of the old school say: 'I would as lief kill, if necessary, an unborn child as a rat.' So much for the estimate he put on the value of human life! _O tempora! O mores!_ "Is it not time that this wanton 'massacre of the innocents' should cease? "Without wishing to load this paper with elaborate statistics, I shall furnish the latest arrived at in the two operations of craniotomy and Cesarean section. "In the combined reports of the clinics of Berlin, Halle, and Dresden, the maternal mortality in craniotomy was 5.8 per cent--of course, one hundred per cent of the children lost. "In Cesarean section the maternal mortality was eight or eleven per cent; children's mortality, thirteen per cent. "Caruso, the latest and most reliable statistician, not an optimist, sums up the results from the different clinics, and comes to the conclusion that craniotomy shows ninety-three and one one-hundredth mothers recover, Cesarean section eighty-nine and four one-hundredths. "Caruso, therefore, concludes that craniotomy on the living child is to be superseded by Cesarean section. He says, therefore, that the mother has three chances out of four, and her child nine out of ten, for life. "Leopold, as stated above, shows a much better result, viz.: ninety-five mothers saved out of one hundred by Cesarean section, a result equal that obtained in craniotomy." You notice, gentlemen, that the eminent physician whom I have been quoting speaks with much indignation of the killing of the embryo, when he calls it a "massacre of the innocents." By this odious term we usually denote the massacre of the babes at Bethlehem, ordered by the infamous Herod to defend himself against the future aggression, as he imagined, of the new-born King of the Jews. A craniotomist would, no doubt, feel insulted at being compared with Herod. And yet, if we examine the matter closely, we shall find that the two massacres, Herod's and the craniotomist's, could only be defended by the same plea, that of necessity. "Necessity knows no law," writes Dr. Galloway, in his defence of craniotomy, to which I referred in a former lecture. "The same law," he writes in the "Medical Record" for July 27, 1895, "which lies at the basis of Jurisprudence in this respect justifies the sacrifice of the life of one person when actually necessary for the preservation of the life of another, when the two are reduced to such extremity that one or the other must die. This is the _necessitas non habet legem_."