e so
tangled?

The time drew very near, and Angela was beginning to suffer severe
pains. Those wonderful processes of the all-mother, which bind the
coming life in a cradle of muscles and ligaments were practically
completed and were now relaxing their tendencies in one direction to
enforce them in another. Angela suffered at times severely from
straining ligaments. Her hands were clenched desperately, her face would
become deathly pale. She would cry. Eugene was with her on a number of
these occasions and it drove home to his consciousness the subtlety and
terror of this great scheme of reproduction, which took all women to the
door of the grave, in order that this mortal scheme of things might be
continued. He began to think that there might be something in the
assertion of the Christian Science leaders that it was a lie and an
illusion, a terrible fitful fever outside the rational consciousness of
God. He went to the library one day and got down a book on obstetrics,
which covered the principles and practice of surgical delivery. He saw
there scores of pictures drawn very carefully of the child in various
positions in the womb--all the strange, peculiar, flower-like positions
it could take, folded in upon itself like a little half-formed petal.
The pictures were attractive, some of them beautiful, practical as they
were. They appealed to his fancy. They showed the coming baby perfect,
but so small, its head now in one position, now in another, its little
arms twisted about in odd places, but always delightfully, suggestively
appealing. From reading here and there in the volume, he learned that
the great difficulty was the head--the delivery of that. It appeared
that no other difficulty really confronted the obstetrician. How was
that to be got out? If the head were large, the mother old, the walls of
the peritoneal cavity tight or hard, a natural delivery might be
impossible. There were whole chapters on Craniotomy, Cephalotripsy,
which in plain English means crushing the head with an instrument....

One chapter was devoted to the Caesarian operation, with a description of
its tremendous difficulties and a long disquisition on the ethics of
killing the child to save the mother, or the mother to save the child
with their relative values to society indicated. Think of it--a surgeon
sitting in the seat of judge and executioner at the critical moment! Ah,
life with its petty laws did not extend here. Here we came back t