I will follow up the blogpost on the 18th century poem on abortion with the 18th century poem on miscarriage. It was published in the November 1787 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine in London. No author was listed.
Untimely sever'd
from its mother's womb,
Behold a
foetus in its liquid tomb.
Let those
who beauty, valour, wisdom prize,
See from
whence beauty, valour, wisdom arise;
The little
embryo of a future king
Must grow to
power from so small a thing.
Whether to
float in spirits, or to reign,
Depends at
last but on a mother's strain;
Nor does the
wreck of life more beauteous shew,
Dissect a
belle, anatomise a beaux,
The rattling
bones, beside the foetus plac'd,
Those
rattling bones, which erst a ball-room grac'd, -
The sad
remains of what was call'd divine,
Perhaps descended
from a royal line;
If free in
choice, which hadst thou rather been,
This still-born
foetus, or that wretched queen,
To live in
pain, with anxious cares oppress'd
By turns
exulting, and by turns distress’d;
The sport of
fortune, or the but of fate,
A slave to folly or a tool of state?
Or say, when
all the ills of life you view,
My dearest
partner, now I turn to you,
Dost thou
not envy this embryo's state,
Deriving pleasure
from his certain fate?
It broke a
fibre from thy womb to part,
But had it
liv'd, it might have broke thy heart.
Let us this
maxim in our minds instil,
Whatever
Heaven does, cannot be ill.
This is an
unusual poem in that it’s written about miscarriage, a taboo topic for the time, possibly more so than abortion. The historiography for miscarriage before the 20th century is rather thin. This is probably because there was a lot of self-censorship in regards to this phenomenon. Women would even refrain from telling their
husbands about their miscarriage, fearing the disappointment and wanting to
keep the pain to themselves. (Obviously the husband would not have even been aware of the pregnancy. It was not unusual for them to be unaware of the pregnancy state for several months.)
The narrator of this poem is male. This makes
the poem even more unusual. Men didn’t really deal with this topic.
The poem
starts off with the mention of the fetus in “spirits.” The fetus was preserved
in a jar in a liquid but I don’t know they used in the 18th century.
This situation would have been unusual but not implausible. Sometimes anatomists
preserved miscarried babies in a jar. The jar is probably in a lab as “rattling
bones” are placed next the jar. They are
supposed to be the bones of a queen. The narrator asks his wife: whom would you
have rather be, this miscarried embryo, or this dead queen? This queen would
have been at times happy and at times distressed, and possibly a “tool of the
state”, i.e. as a pawn of geopolitics she would have had to submit to the logic
of politics.
The poem ends
with a statement to the effect that this miscarriage might have been all for
the best, if the child had lived he might have broken the mother’s heart, and
what Heaven decrees is best. Thus the
mother is asked to resign herself to the wisdom of Providence.
I don’t
think this poem would actually be very comforting to the mother. It doesn’t seem
to offer any empathy at a woman’s pain for losing her child; the narrator
appeals to the abstract if of submitting oneself to God’s will rather than pine
for what was lost. Of course, there’s no actual proof that the baby would have made
the mother unhappy, so the point is rather moot.
The poem
does not really speak to the moral status of the unborn. It is recognized that he
died, and that the woman who bore him is his mother. But there’s nothing here
that can really enlighten us on the moral status of the embryo.
