The most popular home medical reference book in the early nineteenth century was William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, reprinted 28 times in America from 1770-1850.
In the section, “On Rules of Conduct during Pregnancy”, Buchan wrote:
“The dread of public shame or private scorn, though no excuse for murder, may urge the victim of seduction to commit a crime at once so abominable and so dangerous. But is it possible that a married woman should madly and wickedly attempt to procure abortion, merely from an apprehension of a large family, or to avoid the trouble of bearing and bringing up children? Can she hope to taste the joys, and yet destroy the fruits of love? What a frantic idea — the same poison puts an end to both. And in vain does she flatter herself that her guilt is concealed, or that the law exists to punish it. The laws of nature are never violated with impunity; and in the cases alluded to, the criminal is made at once to feel the horrors of late remorse…
But suppose that [an abortion] brought about by such deplorable means did not endanger the health and life of the mother; suppose that an act held in such abhorrence, both by earth and heaven, could possible escape punishment; suppose a women deaf to the cries of nature, incapable of tender emotions, and fearless of the immediate sufferings in her own person — I have one argument here to make her stop her murderous hand: perhaps the embryo, which she is not going to destroy, would, if cherished in her womb, and afterwards reared with due attention, prove the sweetest comfort of her future years, and repay all her maternal care with endless gratitude. It may be a daughter to nurse her in her old age, or a son to swell her heart with joy at his honorable and successful career in life. I only wish her to pause for a moment and to consider, that by the willful extinction of the babe in her womb, all her fairest hopes are extinguished also, and that the present danger is aggravated by the certainty of future despair.” – William Buchan, 1813
