not to give birth to another
child. She confided her trouble to a neighbor, who sent her to a
midwife. The midwife was neither very expert, nor very clean. Mrs.
Smith had to go to her two or three times. After bleeding for about
ten days she developed blood poisoning, from which she died a few days
later, at the early age of twenty-nine, leaving a disconsolate father,
who in time to come will probably find consolation with another woman,
and five motherless children, who will never find consolation. One
may find a substitute for a wife, there is no substitute for a mother.

And such tragedies are of daily occurrence. May the Lord have mercy on
the souls of those who are responsible for them.

Before I proceed further I wish to say that it is the terrible
prevalence of the abortion evil, with its concomitant evils of
infection, ill health, chronic invalidism and death, that more than
any other single factor urges us in our birth control propaganda. And
those who want to forbid the dissemination of any information about
the prevention of conception are playing directly into the hands of
the professional abortionists. They could not act any more zealously
if they were in league with the latter and were paid by them. And
having mentioned the subject of abortion, I wish to utter a note of
warning. In our birth control propaganda, we must be very careful to
keep the question of the prevention of conception and of abortion
separate and apart. The stupid law puts the two in the same paragraph,
some ignorant laymen and equally ignorant physicians treat the two as
if they were the same thing, but we, in our speeches and our writings,
must keep the two separate, we must show the people the essential
difference between prevention and abortion, between refraining from
creating life and destroying life already created; we must show the
viciousness of meting out the same punishment for two things which are
fundamentally different, different not only in degree but in kind--and
it is only by thus keeping the two things apart, by showing that we
stand for one thing--prevention--and not for the other--abortion, that
we can ever gain the general sympathy of the public and the
co-operation of the legislators. I do not say that there are not many
cases in which the induction of abortion is not only justifiable, but
imperative; but that is a different question, and the two issues must
not be confused. And we would and should resent any atte