To hasten even an inevitable death is homicide, and that quality of merely hastening adds nothing for extenuation: every murder is merely a hastening of inevitable death. To give a dying man a fatal dose of morphine "to put him out of misery" is as criminal a murder as to blow out his brains while he is walking the streets in health; to ease pain is not commensurate with the horrible deordination of taking a human life. This subversion of the moral law in the interest of mawkish sentimentality is one of the gravest evils of modern social ignorance. Physicians are constantly mistaking inclination, or the mental vagaries of the nurses who influenced their childhood, for rules of moral conduct. A physician is not a public executioner, nor a judge with the power of life and death: his business is solely to save human life, never to destroy it. If there were anything in the objection that refusal to do abortion opposes the life of a useless fetus to that of a useful mother of a family, where would such false logic stop? If it held for the taking of life in an unpleasant condition, it would hold _a fortiori_ in every other less unpleasant condition where a life would not be at stake. When a note that you had given falls due and it would bankrupt you to pay it, does this inconvenience let you out of the difficulty in honor, in the moral law, or in the civil law? It certainly does not; but it should if the doctrine of the sentimentalists on abortion were true. An eclamptic woman, or one with hyperemesis gravidarum, conceived the child, got into the difficulty, and she and her physician have no right to tear up the note they have given to the Creator, especially when such tearing implies murder. Suppose, again, a woman has done a deed for which she has in due process of just law been condemned to death; suppose, also, there is only one man available to put her to death, and if this man were killed she could escape. Would her physician be permitted to shoot that executioner to let her out of the difficulty? Certainly not. That, however, is just what the physician does who empties an eclamptic uterus of an unviable fetus. You may not do essential evil that anything under the sun, good, bad, or indifferent, may come of it.