It is not at all an uncommon thing for women in all ranks of
life, to encourage, and even seek removal of the ovaries in order to
escape an increase in the family.
They become acquainted with persons who have submitted to this operation
for ovarian disease, and noting nothing but improvement in their health,
attended by sterility, their intense anxiety to enjoy immunity from
child-bearing makes them eager to submit to operation.
It would be distinctly immoral to sterilize healthy women, who become
possessed with the old Roman passion for a childless life, or who simply
wish to limit their families for any selfish or personal reason.
Any law which recognizes the induction of artificial sterility should
make operative interference with those fit to procreate a healthy stock
an offence.
Induced sterility should rank with induced abortion, and be a criminal
offence, except in certain cases which could be defined.
There is much evidence to suggest that artificial sterilization may
become as a great vice, as great a danger to the State as criminal
abortion.
Artificial abortion, as commonly performed, is a much more dangerous
operation than tubo-ligature. Of the two operations, any experienced
surgeon would readily declare that the latter is the simpler and the
safer; the one less likely to lead to unfavourable complications, and
the one, moreover, that would leave the subject of it with the better
"expectancy of life.
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