1579 J. Jones Arte preseruing Bodie & Soule i. xv. 28 Limme and life it destroieth, by oborting, barening, poysoning, dissecting.

1580 C. Hollyband Treasurie French Tong Avortement, aborting.

1597 P. Lowe Whole Course Chirurg. viii. vi. sig. Ee4 The Alluminous are drying and heating, and is good for all colde and humide diseases and sickenesses, vomiting of bloud, staying the hemerrhoides, the monethly course of women, aborting with childe, varices on the legges, [etc.].

1665 Eight Sections Hippocrates Aphorismes vi. xxix. 115 If the Breasts of a woman with Child, grow slender on a suddain, she is in danger of aborting, or miscarrying.

1768 Smellie's Treat. Midwifery (ed. 4) II. xiii. 182 About her ordinary time of aborting, she found spasms, flatulencies, and compression of her loins and Abdomen, such as she was used to have formerly when she miscarried.

1825 W. P. Dewes Compend. Syst. Midwifery xxx. 387 Were a mere increase of circulation all that is required to effect this end, no woman should escape aborting who may labour under high arterial action.

1886 Times 18 Oct. 3/5 There are sound reasons, both physiological and pathological, for asserting that the aborting of one member of a herd may lead to abortion in other cows of the same herd.

1916 Biol. Bull. 31 248 In both phylloxerans and aphids..just such an aborting of one of the two classes of sperm-forming cells occurs.

1922 Eng. Jrnl. 11 469 He is the victim of vague depressions and discouragements, arising from the checking and aborting of the old, familiar impulses.

1979 Mycologia 71 424 Occasionally, inflorescence bracts and flowers are attacked in which case dwarfing and aborting of parts and production of small black pustules on them occurs.

1999 V. Narayanan in A. Sharma & K. K. Young Feminism & World Relig. i. 33 Many popular publications..point to the prevalence of female infanticide in some villages in India, amniocentesis which leads to the aborting of female fetuses, and dowry deaths.

2006 S. Heller Absence of Myth iv. 198 If the myth thus already contains the opposites, any attempt to suppress its own inner negativity involves an aborting of the movement into reflection.

a1624 Bp. M. Smith Serm. (1632) 256 What wilt thou giue them? barren wombes (or aborting wombs).

1653 W. Harvey Anat. Exercitations lxxii. 518 Such Conceptions as these, or Subventaneous eggs, Women do sometimes eject: and..we call them false conceptions, and slips. Such an egge as these, did Hippocrates shake from his aborting Minstrel.

1799 J. Burns Anat. Gravid Uterus 59 (note) At other times, it [sc. separation of the membranes] is only a necessary effect of the contraction or aborting action of the womb.

1862 Cultivator July 203/1 It is almost universally the case that an aborting cow comes into heat much sooner than a cow that goes her full time.

1897 Proc. Royal Soc. 1896–7 60 251 The whole closely resembles an aborting prothallus of Aspidium filix-mas or Pteris cretica.

1938 Times 21 Nov. 20/6 Once a herd has become widely infected, the best policy is to retain aborting cows on the farm.

1967 Canad. Med. Assoc. Jrnl. 97 547/1 He studied eight habitually aborting women in detail and tried to pinpoint the psychiatric features in these cases.

2004 Independent (Nexis) 3 Nov. 16 In her visceral triptych made in protest against Portuguese abortion laws, the powerful presence of her aborting women..defies victim status.