There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme, that it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practice of women murdering their bastard children, alas, too frequent among us, sacrif icing the poor innocent babes, I doubt,8 more to avoid the expense than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most savage and inhuman breast.The number of souls in this kingdom being usually reckoned one million and a half, of these I calculate there may be about two hundred thousand couple whose wives are breeders; from which number I subtract thirty thousand couples who are able to maintain their own children, although I apprehend there cannot be so many under the present distresses of the kingdom; but this being granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy thousand breeders.
Something I realized while reading this was how topical it was in terms of abortion laws. In the South, the government made the option of abortion illegal, which obviously rose ire from the crowd. It was basically the white men in charge saying that the choice was "monstrous", clearly not realizing how hard it is to be a young single mom or someone who believes that they can't take care of a child yet. I can't tell whether or not Swift was pro or anti abortion (due to the tone of the essay) but it's interesting nonetheless.
The point of calling child-bearing women "breeders" was both funny and horrifying to me. But that's probably just because I have a very dark and weird sense of humor. It reminded me of a book called "The Handmaid's Tale" (if you haven't read it yet, do it ASAP), in which women are forced to do whatever a man wants them to do, including bearing a child.
The term souls was an interesting one to use. I doubt it has any real significance to the author, but interestingly, the United Kingdom had more than a million and a half people, at that point in time. I think that it's possible when using "souls" in this sense, he meant the heart of that person. This would leave out a significant number of people, with that being the higher-ups in Britain. I'm probably just reading too much into it, but I thought it was interesting.