in midwifery, the exclusion of a fetus before it has acquired a sufficient degree of perfection to enable it to perform respiration and the other vital functions. See MIDWIFERY.

The practice of procuring abortions was prohibited by the ancient Greek legislators Solon and Lycurgus. Whether or not it was permitted among the Romans, has been much disputed. It is certain the practice, which was by them called vicibus vim inferre, was frequent enough; but whether there was any penalty on it, before the emperors Severus and Antonine, is the question. Noodt maintains the negative; and further, that those princes only made it criminal in one particular case, viz. of a married woman's practising it out of resentment against her husband, in order to defraud him of the comfort of children: this was ordered to be punished by a temporary exile. The foundation on which the practice is said to have been allowed, was, that the fetus, while in utero, was reputed as a part of the mother, ranked as one of her own viscera, over which she had the same power as over the rest: besides, that it was not reputed as a man, homo; nor to be alive, otherwise than as a vegetable: consequently, that the crime amounted to little more than that of plucking unripe fruit from the tree. Seneca represents it as a peculiar glory of Helvia, that she had never, like other women, whose chief study is their beauty and shape, destroyed the fetus in her womb. The primitive fathers, Athenagoras, Tertullian, Minutius Felix, Augustin, &c. declaimed loudly against the practice as virtual murder. Several councils have condemned it. Yet we are told that the modern Roman ecclesiastical laws allow of dispensations for it. Egane mentions the rates at which a dispensation for it may be had.

The practice of artificial abortion is chiefly in the hands of women and nurses, rarely in that of physicians; who, in some countries, are not admitted to the profession without abjuring it. Hippocrates, in the oath he would have enjoined on all physicians, includes their not giving the pessus abortivus; though elsewhere he gives the formal process whereby he himself procured in a young woman a miscarriage. It may, however, be observed, that often all the powers of art prove ineffectual, and no less often do the attempts prove the means of punishment by the fatal consequences which they produce.

among gardeners, signifies such fruits as are produced too early, and never arrive at maturity.