The ordinary medical doctrine in the text-books is that as soon as a diagnosis of ectopic gestation is made laparotomy should be done and the sac with the ectopic fetus removed. If the fetus is alive and inviable this procedure will, of course, kill it. Only a few obstetricians of authority advise an expectant treatment. Schauta found 75 recoveries and 166 maternal deaths in 241 cases treated expectantly--a mortality of 69 per cent. If there are no symptoms of maternal hemorrhage but the fetus is evidently dead, the fetus is to be removed. If it is evidently alive, or doubtfully alive, the treatment must be expectant. The woman is to be removed to a hospital and kept under constant watch, day and night, with everything prepared for immediate operation. Any woman while bearing an ectopic fetus is in constant grave danger of death, but the moralists hold that her danger is not so imminent before actual rupture as to justify the death of the fetus by precautionary removal. In 1886 the Archbishop of Cambrai proposed the following list of questions to the Holy Office for decision: 1. May a pregnant woman in danger of death from eclampsia or hemorrhage be prematurely delivered of a viable child? 2. May a woman in the same condition be delivered in urgency by means which will kill the infant? 3. May a woman _in articulo mortis_ be delivered of a viable child if the delivery will somewhat hasten her death? 4. May the woman in question 1 be delivered of an inviable fetus? 5. May the woman in question 3 be delivered of an inviable fetus? 6. May a woman who is about to become blind, paralytic, or insane from her pregnancy be prematurely delivered of a viable child? 7. May the woman in question 6 be delivered by means which will kill the fetus? 8. May the woman in question 6 be delivered of an inviable child? 9. May the woman in question 6 be delivered of an inviable child, supposing the child to be _in articulo mortis_? 10. May an ectopic fetus be killed by operation, electricity, or poison, to avert possible danger of death from the mother? 11. May a surgeon who has opened the abdomen for some condition not uterine incidentally remove a viable ectopic fetus? 12. With conditions like those in question 11, except that the fetus is not viable, may the surgeon remove the inviable ectopic fetus? Three years later, August 19, 1889, the Holy Office answered these questions comprehensively: "In Catholic schools it may not be safely taught that craniotomy is licit, as was decided May 28, 1884, or any other surgical operation which directly kills the fetus or the pregnant mother." _Safely taught_ here is a somewhat technical expression which has been interpreted by the Holy Office in another connection as meaning that the act is illicit morally.