Symptoms--After-effects--Criminal Abortion--Therapeutic Abortion--
Premature Delivery.

We have learned that forty weeks are required for the full
development of the human embryo, but this fact carries no assurance
that pregnancy will last so long; in reality, it may end abruptly at
any time. If growth is interrupted before the twenty-eighth week (the
seventh lunar month), the infant will be too immature to live. Even
when born alive, it will usually perish within a few hours, or a few
days at most. Children born during the seventh month have
occasionally survived; but the prevalent belief that they are more
likely to do so than if born a month later is erroneous. That
superstition originated at a time when great virtue was ascribed to
numbers. Since seven was a sacred number, it was considered more
auspicious to be born in the seventh month than in the eighth.
Universal experience, however, teaches us that the likelihood of
rearing a premature child is, by a rapidly increasing proportion, the
greater for every week that it remains within the uterus. This is
precisely what we should expect, for the period of its existence
there measures the perfection of its development; and that, under
ordinary conditions, determines how strong and hardy the child will
be.

Although during the first six months the outlook for the infant will
be equally unfavorable at whatever time pregnancy may be interrupted,
physicians prefer to distinguish cases which terminate in the earlier
part of this period from those which terminate in the latter part.
For technical reasons, the sixteenth week represents a natural point
of division. A birth which takes place before that time is called an
abortion; one which takes place between the sixteenth and the twenty-