SOME ASPECTS OF ABORTION. 345 



tions per woman. This was 4.77 in Franz's, 4.59 in Hellier's, 4.15 in Stumpf's, and 

 4.58 in the present series. Hellier's group came largely from the laboring classes 

 of Leeds. The Carnegie series comprises women from widely different stations 

 in life and from widely scattered communities, and those of Franz and Stumpf 

 came from different regions of the European continent. Since these four series 

 included 3,762 women, it would seem that one can assume that the average of these 

 groups, or 4.54 full-term pregnancies per abortion, probably approaches the truth 

 very closely indeed. This truly remarkable agreement found in women from three 

 countries also seems to imply that the proportion of births and abortions per woman 

 is largely, if not wholly, independent of nationality and environment. 



A very large proportion of the women in the histories of whom the matter 

 was recorded were childless. This, as shown in table 16, was true of 143 out of 585 

 cases, or of 24.4 per cent. Hellier found the childless to form only 1.3 per cent of 

 his series of 1,800 gynecological cases from among the working classes of Leeds. 

 Approximately the same percentage of the present series as was childless had but 

 a single child. A somewhat smaller number had two children, the childless and 

 those who had one and two children forming 67.1 per cent of the whole group. 

 Yet one woman had borne 14 and another 16 times. 



Franz found that primiparae formed only 4.86 per cent of his series of 844 

 cases, but if we could assume that all the cases in the Carnegie series which were 

 reported as childless actually were primiparae, then the percentage of the latter in 

 this collection would be 24.7. However, since such a marked discrepancy exists 

 between the percentage recorded by Franz and the latter figure, it is more than 

 likely that a considerable number of the women recorded as childless in this series 

 were not primiparae after all. This is indicated also by the fact that only 78 out 

 of 697 women, or 11.2 per cent, of which number the 585 included in table 16 form 

 a part, were unrecorded as to offspring or previous abortions. Only 2 additional 

 cases were recorded as not having suffered an abortion previously. Consequently 

 only 80 out of these 697 women, or 12.9 per cent, apparently were in their first 

 pregnancy. 



Franz found abortion twice as common in multiparse as in nulliparse. From 

 clinical cases Graefe (1896) concluded that women who had borne three times 

 aborted most frequently, but he added that this finding was not confirmed in his 

 private practice. Stumpf found the ratio of abortions to births 1 to 5.1 in primi- 

 parae, but only 1 to 2.21 in multiparae having up to and including 5 children, and 

 1 to 2.22 in multiparse having more than 5 children. 



As shown in table 16, the average number of abortions per woman is practically 

 the same in the childless and in those having had one child, but with the second 

 child a rise of almost 16 per cent takes place, for the average number of abortions 

 per woman changes from 2.5 to 2.9. Another smaller advance is shown to occur 

 with the fourth child, although there are relatively slight fluctuations in women 

 having had 4 to 7 children. Since the number of women having borne 8, 9, and 

 10 children was so small, no conclusions could be drawn regarding them. 



