Free The Cider House Rules by John Irving Page B

Larch’s conviction regarding sexual abstinence. He waited for whatever had destroyed Mrs. Eames to claim him, but the autopsy, which was performed by a distinguished pathologist, seemed off the track.
    “Scurvy,” the pathologist said.
    So much for pathologists, thought Wilbur Larch. Scurvy indeed!
    “Missus Eames was a prostitute,” Larch told the pathologist respectfully. “She wasn’t a sailor.”
    But the pathologist was sure about it. It had nothing to do with the gonorrhea, nothing to do with the pregnancy. Mrs. Eames had died of the sailor’s curse; she had not a trace of Vitamin C, and, the pathologist said, “She had destruction of connective tissue and the tendency to bleed that goes with it.” Scurvy.
    Though this was a puzzle, it convinced Larch that it wasn’t a venereal puzzle and he had one good night’s sleep before Mrs. Eames’s daughter came to see him.
    “It’s not my turn, is it?” he sleepily asked the colleague who roused him.
    “She says you’re her doctor,” the colleague told him.
    He did not recognize Mrs. Eames’s daughter, who had once cost less than Mrs. Eames; now, she would have charged more than her mother could get. If, on the train, she had seemed only a few years younger than Wilbur, now she seemed several years older. Her sullen teen-age quality had matured in a brash and caustic fashion. Her makeup, her jewelry, and her perfume were excessive; her dress was slatternly. Her hair—in a single, thick braid with a sea-gull feather stuck in it—was so severely pulled back from her face that the veins in her temples seemed strained, and her neck muscles were tensed—as if a violent lover had thrown her to her back and held her there by her strong, dark pigtail.
    She greeted Wilbur Larch by roughly handing him a bottle of brown liquid—its pungent odor escaping through a leaky cork stopper. The bottle’s label was illegibly stained.
    “That’s what did her in,” the girl said with a growl. “I ain’t having any. There’s other ways.”
    “Is it Miss Eames?” Wilbur Larch asked, searching for her memorable cigar breath.
    “I said there’s other ways!” Miss Eames said. “I ain’t so far along as she was, I ain’t quick. ”
    Wilbur Larch sniffed the bottle in his hand; he knew what “quick” meant. If a fetus was quick it meant the mother had felt it move, it meant the mother was about half through her gestation period, usually in her fourth or fifth month; to some doctors, with religion, when a fetus was quick it meant it had a soul. Wilbur Larch didn’t think anyone had a soul, but until the middle of the nineteenth century, the common law’s attitude toward abortion was simple and (to Wilbur Larch) sensible: before “quickening”—before the first, felt movement of the fetus—abortion was legal. More important, to the doctor in Wilbur Larch, it was not dangerous to the mother to perform an abortion before the fetus was quick. After the third month, whether the fetus was quick or not, Wilbur Larch knew it had a grip on the uterus that required more force to break.
    For example, the liquid in the bottle Wilbur Larch was holding had not provided sufficient force to break the grip that Mrs. Eames’s fetus had on her—although, apparently, it had exerted enough force to kill the fetus and turn Mrs. Eames’s insides to mush.
    “It’s gotta be pure poison,” Mrs. Eames’s tough daughter remarked to Wilbur Larch, who dabbed a little of his beloved ether on the bottle’s stained label, cleaning it up enough to read.
    FRENCH LUNAR SOLUTION
    Restores Female Monthly Regularity!
    Stops Suppression!
    (Suppression, young Larch knew, was a euphemism for pregnancy.)
    Caution: Dangerous to Married Women!
    Almost Certainly Causes Miscarriages!
    the label concluded; which, of course, was why Mrs. Eames had taken it and taken it.
    Larch had studied the abuse of aborticides in medical school. Some—like the ergot Larch used to make the uterus contract after