THE just deference so universally paid to holy writ will, I presume,
allow no prejudice to be found against my availing myself of those
inferences and decisions to be drawn from it, which are so agreeable to
the eternal laws of common sense.
IF the arts and sciences, acquired by experience, and by acts often
repeated, had, as they certainly were not invented by men only, that
could not at least be said of those acts of the human life, which are
indispensably necessary to its preservation. Such faculties may with
more propriety be termed instinctive, than invented ones. The faculties
of eating, of drinking, of lying down to rest, common to both sexes, are
not perhaps more natural, more matter of instinct, than the faculty of
one woman assisting another in her labor-pains being appropriated to the
female sex.
THERE is no occasion to give one’s imagination the torture to account
for Eve’s delivering herself of her first children. There is no reason
to establish it as an absolute necessity that Adam should have assisted
Eve in her first lyings-in; whose labor-pains might not only be less
severe, than they afterwards became in accomplishment for the curse
pronounced on the human race for the sin of those first parents, but
also more consonant to piety, to believe that God, being the best of
fathers, infused into Eve knowledge sufficient of the manner of
delivering herself; a manner more natural and more conformable to the
ideas of that decency imprinted with his own hand in the human heart, in
no point more strongly, nor more universally, than in this matter of the
women lying-in, when both men and women have an equal repugnance to the
interposition of any assistance, but that of the female sex, to which
the faculty of ministering in that case seems innate.
BUT admitting even that Adam, for the want of females for that function,
before the daughters of Eve were grown up to a capacity of it, actually
did assist Eve, in the seasons of her delivery; that would establish no
inference of right for the future: since we know that their children and
descendents in time following did not make use of men to lay the women.
IN Genesis, chap. xxxv. ver. 17. there is mention made of Rachel’s
midwife. In the same book, chap. xxxviii. ver. 27, and 28. we see they
were intelligent midwives. Thamar being with child. “It came to pass in
the time of her travail, that behold, twins were in her womb.”
VER. 28. “And it came to pass that when she travailed, that the one put
out his hand, and the _Midwife_ took and bound upon his hand a scarlet
thread, saying, this came out first.”
AND here I intreat the reader not to impute to me any idea so absurd as
that of meaning to defend an erroneous practice solely from the
antiquity of it; I intend nothing further by this citation, than to
prove the antiquity itself, which if not decisive in favor of the
practice by women, can at least be no prejudice against it.
OBJECTION the Second.
THE art of midwifery being equally noble for its subject as for its end,
since it is the only one which enjoys the prerogative of saving, at one
operation of the hand, more than one individual at once; ought the less
noble sex to dispute pre-eminence in it with the men? On tracing things
back to the remotest distance of times, it must be allowed, that if the
women, through a mistaken modesty, in those times of ignorance and
simplicity, commonly made use of midwives, it may be presumed there were
also men-practitioners employed in difficult cases.