In the majority of instances of forced abortion, the act is committed prior to the usual period of quickening. There are other women, who have confessed to me that they have destroyed their children long after they have felt them leap within their womb. There are others still, whom I have known to wilfully suffocate them during birth, or to prevent the air from reaching them under the bedclothes; and there are others, who have wilfully killed their wholly separated and breathing offspring, by strangling them or drowning them, or throwing them into a noisome vault. Wherein among all these criminals does there in reality exist any difference in guilt? I would gladly arrive at, and avow any other conviction than that I have now presented, were it possible in the light of fact and of science, for I know it must carry grief and remorse to many an otherwise innocent bosom. The truth is, that our silence has rendered all of us accessory to the crime, and now that the time has come to strip down the veil, and apply the searching caustic or knife to this foul sore in the body politic, the physician needs courage as well as his patient, and may well overflow with regretful sympathy. That there has existed a wide and sincere ignorance of the true character of the act, I have already allowed; it is a point to which I shall again refer. At present let us turn from the crime against the child, to the crime as against the mother's own life and health. I here refer more particularly to her own agency therein. Of the guilt of abortion when committed by another person than herself, and with reference both to the mother's life and that of the child, there can be no doubt, but it is to the woman's own agency in the act, as principal, or accessory by its solicitation or permission, that we have now to deal; not as to its abstract wrong alone, but as to its physical dangers, and therefore its utter folly. IV.--_The Inherent Dangers of Abortion to a Woman's Health and to her Life._ It is generally supposed, not merely that a woman can wilfully throw off the product of conception without guilt or moral harm, but that she can do it with positive or comparative impunity as regards her own health. This is a very grievous and most fatal error, and I do not hesitate to assert, from extended observation, that, despite apparent and isolated instances to the contrary-- 1. A larger proportion of women die during or in consequence of an abortion, than during or in consequence of childbed at the full term of pregnancy; 2. A very much larger proportion of women become confirmed invalids, perhaps for life; and, 3. The tendency to serious and often fatal organic disease, as cancer, is rendered much greater at the so-called turn of life, which has very generally, and not without good reason, been considered as especially the critical period of a woman's existence.