The Mother and Her Child | Page 5

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 | ---------+-------------------------------------------------+------- Oct. | 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 | July. | 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | Aug. =========+=================================================+======= Nov. | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | Aug. | 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 | ---------+-------------------------------------------------+------- Nov. | 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 | Aug. | 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 | Sept. =========+=================================================+======= Dec. | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | Sept. | 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 | ---------+-------------------------------------------------+------- Dec. | 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 | Sept. | 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | Oct. =========+=================================================+=======
Supposing the upper figure in each pair of horizontal lines to represent the first day of the last menstrual period, the figure beneath it, with the month designated in the margin, will show the probable date of confinement.
CHAPTER II
STORY OF THE UNBORN CHILD
To every physician in every community, sooner or later in his experience there come thoughtless women making requests that we even hesitate to write about. Their excuses for the crime which they seek to have the physician join them in committing, range all the way from "I don't want to go to the trouble," to "Doctor, I've got seven children now, and I can't even educate and dress them properly;" or, maybe, "I nearly lost my life with the last one."
EMBRYOLOGICAL IGNORANCE
One little woman came to us the other day from the suburbs, and honestly, frankly, related this story:
"We've been married just six months, I have continued my stenographic work to add the sixty-five dollars to our monthly income. Doctor, we must meet our monthly payments on the home, I must continue to work, or we shall utterly fail. I am perfectly willing a baby shall come to us two years from now, but, doctor, I just can't allow this one to go on, you must help me just this once. Why doctor, there can't be much form or life there, it's only three months now, or will be next week, and you know it's nothing but a mass of jelly."
She had talked with a "confidential friend" in her neighborhood, had been told that she "could do it herself," but fearing trouble or infection, had come to the conclusion she had better go to a "clean, reputable physician," to have the abortion performed.
This is not the place to narrate the experiences of the unfortunate victims of habitual criminal abortion, but we would like to impress upon the reader some realization of the untimely deaths, the awful suffering, and the life-long remorse and sorrow of the poor, misguided women who listen to the criminal advice of neighborhood "busybodies." The infections, the invalidism, the sterility that so often follow in the wake of these practices, are well known to all medical people.
THE STREAM OF LIFE
And so after the patient's last statement, "It's nothing but a mass of jelly," we began the simple but wonderfully beautiful story of the development of the "child enmothered." Just as all vegetables, fruits, nuts, flowers, and grains come from seeds sown into fertile soil, and just as these seeds receive nourishment from the soil, rain, and sunshine, so all our world of brothers and sisters, of fathers and mothers, came from tiny human seeds, and in their turn received nourishment from the peculiarly adapted stream of life, which flows in the maternal veins for the nourishment and upbuilding of the unborn embryo.
Every little girl and boy baby that comes into the world, has stored within its body, in a wonderfully organized capsule, a part of the ancestral stream of life that unceasingly has flowed down through the centuries from father to son and from mother to daughter. This "germ plasm" is a divine gift to be held in trust and carefully guarded from the odium of taint, to be handed down to the sons and daughters of the next generation. Any young man who grasps the thought that he possesses a portion of the stream of life, that he holds it in sacred trust for posterity, cannot fail to be impressed with a sense of solemn responsibility so to order his life as to be able to transmit