Abortion and Social Change

...A woman is forced to show her weaknesses, her inability to cope under stress, in order to secure the help of the profession...

...This 1965 survey was taken just at the point when public discussion was on the rise...

...to some black militants, "genocide...

...A preliminary question is why there has been so much activity aimed at even moderate revision of abortion laws during the 1960s...

...Reform Movements DURING THE PAST five years there has been mounting interest and political activity concerning abortion...

...There are several other lines of analysis and action that could gather political support among citizens and legislators for total repeal of penal code clauses pertaining to abortion...

...Legislators can easily develop a distorted image of far greater cleavage along religious lines than in fact exists...

...In February 1969, Lawrence Lader, Lonny Myers, and Garrett Hardin spearheaded the first nationally coordinated asso 3 Leighten VanNort points out that demographers in Western countries have so accepted the dominant values of their society that they have failed to deal in any thorough-going way with either abortion or infanticide as alternatives to approved methods of birth control, and he suggests demography must operate with a wider variety of assumptions: "On Values in Population Policy," Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, 38, 1960, 387-395...

...The law keeps the whole issue firmly in the context of maternal and child health: it is not a woman's rejection of maternity, but the unfortunate condition of her heart or liver or other organ, or an unfortunate exposure to German measles, that justifies granting a legal abortion...

...Such committees place a group buffer between patient and physician that may reduce the anxiety level of physicians by shifting responsibility for an abortion denial from himself to an impersonal committee...

...Justice Douglas argued in the Griswald vs...

...Unfortunately, euphemistic language can affect social reality...

...Yet the confrontation of exactly such circumstances in family life is a daily occurrence for social workers, psychiatrists, and physicians...

...All the law really affects in the Soviet Union, and all it affects in the United States, is whether women have medically safe abortions...

...As Kingsley Davis has recently pointed out,6 in the very countries that family planners cite as showplaces of success (Korea and Taiwan), the programs are aimed at women who do not want any more children because they already have four or more, and 5 Ibia...

...Many abortion law reformers have hoped that the ALI mental and physical health exemption would be broad enough to permit a wide range of interpretation...

...Experience in the Soviet Union (which has had an erratic history of shifting abortion from legally permissible to an illegal status and back again to legal) shows that the incidence of abortion remains constant...

...Demographers have investigated how many children young couples want to have, and how large a family they consider "ideal...

...There is a growing minority of Catholic spokesmen who consider total repeal preferable to moderate liberalization on the grounds that the latter sanctions at least some proportion of hospital abortions...

...Science, 158(3802), 1968, 730-739...

...Praise and social approval for women with large numbers of children are no longer appropriate to a crowded urban society...

...see also "Reproductive Ideals and Educational AttainmentAmong White Americans, 1943-1960," Population Studies, 21(2), 1967, 159-174...

...To begin this way is to underline the complexity of individual emotion and social cleavage in regard to abortion...

...Under the terms of the New York bill defeated in 1967, a woman with an unwanted pregnancy would have to apply for an abortion, pass the functional equivalent of a welfare "needs" test by permitting herself to be examined not by one but by several physicians while having her psyche probed for signs of distress, then wait out the slow machinery of the hospital bureaucracy for a decision that will affect in deeply personal ways what her responsibilities will be for the next fifteen or twenty years...

...In part, this is public-relations sugar to coat the pill of "birth control," which projects a less traditional image and suggests that some births are not wanted and that contraceptives are used to enhance the sexual pleasure of men and women apart from maternal health and family stability...

...for the patient and the loss of precious time if she is determined not to carry the pregnancy to term...

...The millions of American women who have had illegal abortions are not immoral women, nor do they feel disrespect for human life...

...It has been the strength of American political life to cut across nondivisible group cleavages such as religion, ethnicity, and race, and to seek alignments along economic lines within party structures...

...This had very special political consequences, because it neutralized the whole issue of birth control in our political life, paving the way for the gradual introduction of sex education in public schools, and for an increasing role of the federal government in appropriating large sums for birth control education both at home and abroad...

...it either prevents the implantation of a fertile ovum in the wall of the uterus, or produces a spontaneous abortion within a few weeks after uterine implantation (medical authorities are not sure which of these two processes are actually at work...

...38 percent wanted four or more children...

...Parental Control, Delayed Marriage and Population Policy," Population Reprint Series No...

...Reliance on the position that everyone should have the number of children they desire— the key idea in family planning ideology—is inadequate for the simple reason that people want too many children...

...There is, however, no longer any clear-cut distinction, even on technical grounds, between conception prevention and pregnancy termination...

...The Problem of Unwanted Pregnancies HERE WE REACH the heart of the abortion problem: what should an individual woman do who finds she is pregnant against her wish, and what should professional and public policy be toward such a woman...

...Unfortunately the ALI model code, drafted during the conservative 1950s, was the one available in the more liberal mood of the mid-1960s...

...In fact, even if all women of child-bearing age in the U.S...

...For one, legislators are less in contact with the average public than with articulate spokesmen of organizations and institutions...

...The widespread acceptance of contraception is in part a tribute to the appeal of the birth control movement itself...

...The postwar publication of the Kinsey reports sparked widespread discussion of sex and contraception...

...New Statesman, February 9, 1968, p. 166...

...yet public attitudes continue to show sharp distinctions between contraception, approved by an overwhelming majority, and abortion, viewed largely in negative terms...

...This committee procedure has the added risk that it increases the probability of surgical complications or mortality when a woman obtains an illegal abortion after a hospital denial—since the abortion will then be performed at a later stage of pregnancy...

...The intra-uterine loop is far more accurately described as an abortive device than a contraceptive one...

...Americans find this a disconcerting question: there is ABORTION AND SOCIAL CHANGE resistance to the image of a woman not wanting a child because it violates what we would prefer to keep intact, a sentimental reverence for a nurturant, loving mother...

...1 By comparison, abortion is far less dominant in the fertility-control picture of the United States...

...manner...

...They must be reassured that their constituency approves such reform, regardless of the views expressed by self-appointed spokesmen...

...As with birth control, there is a vast discrepancy between the beliefs and practices of the Catholic population and the doctrine of the Church...

...To a forty-fouryearold Japanese or Hungarian woman, the primary response might be "freedom" and "relief...

...but Kingsley Davis has argued strongly that underdeveloped countries will not avert major economic and political crises from overpopulation unless demographic practitioners mount a far more rigorous campaign of birth restriction, including widespread facilities for simple, inexpensive abortions . 4 Like American physicians on the domestic scene, public health officials often merely react with shock to the proposal that family planning clinics should be total fertility clinics, serving both married and unmarried women and providing abortion facilities for clients whose prescribed contraceptives fail them...

...The loop now is quietly used in American medicine, as physicians begin to worry about the side effects of the pill...

...This applies to economically affluent women as well as poor women, to American women as well as Latin American women, to white women as well as black women...

...Abortion continues to be a major method in Catholic countries where the distribution of birth control devices has been prevented or kept to a minimum, and in underdeveloped countries which have as yet had no widespread exposure to modem contraceptives...

...Of special importance was the wide dissemination of the finding that despite what the church said, the majority of American Catholics were using mechanical and chemical contraceptives...

...Despite their intimate knowledge of such problems, these specialists have not informed us concerning the probability of emotional damage to children born to mothers who unwillingly accept an unwanted pregnancy—although the same professionals espouse the view that the best "headstart" a child can have is to be born into a loving environment as a wanted child...

...They argue that they cannot in conscience support the ALI recommendation because the law continues to judge some abortions as morally permissible...

...There is no reason to be lieve the incidence of illegal abortion has changed drastically during the past thirty years...

...ABORTION AND SOCIAL CHANGE to note that 72 percent of Catholic adults," 83 percent of Protestants, and 98 percent of Jewish adults favored reform...

...Much of the medical and legal liter ature then becomes rather limited in rel evance...

...The Problem of Wanted Pregnancies BUT AN EVEN MORE difficult problem must be faced...

...In this context, the emphasis is kept on the welfare of the child, the mother, and family stability...

...Women themselves have played a minor role in public and professional discussions of abortion precisely because the problem is dealt with in the narrow legal-medical framework...

...In this case, they were subject to conflicting testimony of legal and medical experts and a uniformly opposed position by Catholic church spokesmen...

...A one-inthree probability of fetal deformity when the mother was exposed to German measles has been considered sufficient ground for recommending an abortion...

...Third, total repeal is more consistent with the values of traditionalists who abhor any abortion than is a moderate liberalization of the law along ALI lines...

...Judith Blake has analyzed fluctuations in family-size desires and compared them with actual fertility rates, showing that familysize desires have remained both relatively constant and high over long periods of time, thereby suggesting a gap between desired and attained family size that she calls "latent child hunger" and concluding that nowhere in the world did modernization alone have an abiding and drastically downward effect on family-size desires.6 Both Judith Blake and Kingsley Davis have urged the view that no significant stabilization of the population growth rate in either underdeveloped or industrialized nations can be expected so long as attention is narrowly focused on family planning programs...

...At any point in time, there are several million women in this country who have personally resorted to abortion to avoid an unwanted pregnancy...

...14 There is legal precedent for contesting the constitutionality of abortion laws in a closely related problem...

...Legal restrictions regarding access to medical advice on contraception and prescription of contraceptive devices were removed not by state legislation, but by contesting the constitutionality of the law...

...By the 1960s fourth or fifth pregnancies that had been welcomed by so many American couples in the preceding two decades, were no longer desired...

...Permitting women to abort unwanted pregnancies is one very small step toward reducing population-growth rates...

...Thus it has been the appeal to economic interests that welded Democratic party support among groups that would otherwise have been arch antagonists: white, fundamentalist Southerners and urban working-class Catholics and Jews...

...When abortion was 11 The New York State survey also indicated that even among Catholics who characterized themselves as "very religious," 63 percent favored the ALI reform...

...The refusal to consider abortion as part of fertility control is a serious limitation on the effort to assist countries belatedly con ALICE S. ROSSI fronting their population problems...

...Politics of Abortion Law Reform LET ME TURN FINALLY to the tactical question of how our punitive abortion laws can be changed...

...It has been the American experience that ideological issues which cannot be translated into economic terms are best resolved by recourse to the Supreme Court, the body that is outside the established party alignment...

...if she shows her strength, the profession will probably refuse her their services...

...238, University ofCalifornia Press (Berkeley), 1967...

...Using the 1965 survey as a baseline, there was a 20 percent increase over the two-year period in support of abortion law reform, from a 55 to a 75 percent level of approval in these two samples.12 Why, then, since Catholic voters in the state were clearly on the side of reformers, did the New York bill fail to pass...

...A court-contested case would therefore avoid the religious and racial cleavage that has marked the abortion issue, as well as enlarge and strengthen the rights of women to control their lives in light of their own intelligence, values, and conscience...

...After a preliminary attempt by the medical establishment's Medical Defense Union and Medical Protection Society to require that one of the doctors be a specialist, they settled down and prepared a pamphlet advising their members that general practitioners should be considered spe ALICE S. ROSS1 cialists in cases of social abortion because they are more capable of assessing a patient's situation than medical specialists who lack personal knowledge of the patient.8 In American discussion of abortion during the past five years, the problem has been kept almost exclusively in a medical, legal, and theological framework, and this has deter mined the thrust of most attempts at analysis and solution...

...ciation calling for total repeal of penal-code coverage of abortion...

...10 Results of this survey are not available in published form...

...Class-directed efforts in the contraceptive field unnecessarily politicize the population problem...

...An important development has probably been the trend toward more open discussion of all questions pertaining to human sexuality...

...I think a good case could be made that the hospital abortion committee procedure is very like the "needs tests" in the welfare field, and that it adds the same insensitivity to the indignities visited upon individual applicants...

...Some of the sting may be neutralized by placing abortion in a wider historical context, for abortion is only one of many devices man has used to control fertility...

...The loop does not prevent conception as condoms, diaphragms, and pills do...

...What women do with their lives is a central issue in fertility control and population 6 Judith Blake, "Demographic Science and the Redirection of Population Policy," Journal of Chronic Diseases, 18, 1965, 1181-1200...

...Only a few centuries ago many European cathedrals had revolving doors with a basket attached into which a woman could deposit her unwanted infant...

...In a 1965 survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, which I analyzed,° Catholics were only slightly less in favor of reform than Protestants, and most important, they made the same qualifications on situational grounds that members of other religions did...

...The 1965 survey asked separate questions for each of six situations, whereas the 1967 survey asked one question covering all three exemptions recommended by ALI—maternal health, fetal deformity, and rape...

...Most such women have other children they care for, often more adequately because they aborted an unwanted pregnancy...

...to a Catholic priest, "murder" and "sin...

...15 Roy Lucas, "Federal Constitutional Limitations on the Enforcement and Administration of State Abortion Statutes," The North Carolina Law Review, 46(4), June 1968, 730-778...

...Connecticut case that the statute violated constitutional amendments that created "zones of privacy" which the government is constitutionally prohibited from entering...

...But such reform does nothing to solve the basic problem, and it postpones coming to grips with the majority of cases— women who do not want a child they accidentally conceived...

...4 Kingsley Davis, "Population Policy: Will Current Programs Succeed...

...Maternity cannot continue to be an exclusive goal of women, for this encourages the view that the more children the better, as well as the view that no marriage is complete without a child...

...This incident suggests that abortion is now at the stage of public awareness that con traception was a few decades ago...

...Roy Lucas recently reviewed constitutional limitations on enforcement and administration of abortion statutes, and suggests there is ample legal ground for contesting the statutes as violations of constitutional rights.'s Since part of the difficulty in reforming abortion laws through state legislatures has been that the issue does not follow party lines but cuts within parties along religious lines, a movement to seek abortion law repeal through the courts is consistent with the political strategy Peter Drucker has shown to be most successful in our political history...

...The much more difficult but more effective solution must be a reduction in the rate of wanted pregnancies...

...Reform bills were introduced in 30 state legislatures during 1967, with Colorado, North Carolina, California, and Maryland the first states to pass slightly liberalized bills...

...state, or federal employees...

...Infanticide too has declined as a means of controlling fertility...

...What needs far more ex tensive circulation than it has yet received is the result of surveys showing only very slight religious group differences on the is sues of abortion law reform...

...but concern for maternal and child health stimulated by the thalidomide and German measles cases provided the impetus for a concerted attempt at legal reform since 1964...

...The medical statistician Christopher Tietze estimates that between i Malcolm Potts, "Legal Abortion in Eastern Europe," The Eugenics Review, 59(4), December 1967, 232-250, ABORTION AND SOCIAL CHANGE one-fifth and one-fourth of all pregnancies in the United States are terminated by induced abortion.2 In actual numbers, the estimates have been from 8,000 to 10,000 legal hospital abortions annually and from 250,000 to well over a million illegal abortions...

...Which of these associations people have no doubt reflects their age, marital status, religion, or nationality...

...It is reasonable to assume, however, that those women who want to control their fertility but lack money, knowledge, or a partner agreeable to contraceptive use, constitute a large category which relies primarily on abortion for fertility control...

...Except for emotional traditionalists or Catholics who adhere to strict doctrinal positions on abortion, there is widespread support for legal change that would permit abortion on health grounds...

...This is being urged under the guise of a mandate for helping the poor who need more birth control education and devices, but it is increasingly feared by many of us that it is really a poorlyconcealed mandate from the well-to-do who wish to see fewer and smaller families on welfare and a halt to any increase in the proportion of blacks in the American population...

...Mimeographed summaries have been released by the Association...

...For many years to come, a high incidence of abortion will continue to be the major brake on the dangerous population growth now taking place in Latin America and Asia, far overriding the effect of family planning programs, which distribute pills and loops...

...If anything, as more effective contraceptives have been developed, there has probably been a reduction in the annual incidence...

...Yet the family planning movement defines the loop as a contraceptive device and has been ac tively engaged in distributing it in underdeveloped countries...

...In my own research, college graduates had a desired family size mean of 3.2...

...Subtle as well as overt pressure censors the tongues of many women in these fields...

...There is no way of telling how many abortions in the United States are resorted to as the only method of fertility control, and how many as a backstop when contraceptives fail...

...It was in part due to this consideration that British reformers, in writing their Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill, specified that a decision can be taken by any two registered general practitioners...

...Yet, more important is 9 Alice S. Rossi, "Abortion Laws and their Victims," Trans-action, September-October 1968...

...used the pill, a 1 percent failure rate would yield as many as 250,000 unwanted pregnancies annually...

...Compared to either infanticide or child abandonment, abortion of a fetus during the first trimester of pregnanThis is a revised version of a paper given before the American Orthopsychiatric Association in Chicago, Illinois, March 21, 1968...

...They are more apt than their male colleagues to place abortion in the context of personal rights...

...If abortion is examined in the context of fertility control and in view of the place of pregnancy in the life of women, it is no longer so clear who is the appropriate expert...

...The psychology here is like that facing the welfare applicant...

...At the Washington conference in 1967, women figured more as actresses in the dramatic skits presented than they did as speakers and discussants...

...Would psychiatrists claim a different probability of emotional difficulty in an unwanted child...

...Significantly, abortion did not loom as a widely discussed problem until what Judith Blake describes as the "reproductive renaissance" of the 1946-1960 era came to an end...

...12 It should be noted that the two surveys are not strictly comparable...

...No progress was made in implementing proposals for revision of the abortion clause in penal codes between 1959, when the American Law Institute (ALI) proposed its revised model penal code, and 1964...

...Another survey was conducted by the Association for the Study of Abortion in 1967.10 A comparison of these two surveys gives a crude measure of attitude change during these two years...

...The bills passed in the last few years, and those under consideration in state legislatures, have been modeled after the American Law Institute's 1959 recommendations for revision of state penal codes...

...Clearly, protecting the health of a woman or avoiding a high risk of a deformed fetus are health reasons hard to object to...

...That abortion rates are higher in Catholic than in nonCatholic countries should itself be sufficient evidence that having an abortion is not an index of immorality or lack of respect for life...

...While surveys of physicians indicate overwhelming support for the ALI exemptions, they show a good deal less support for medically approved abortions for women who for personal or economic reasons do not want a child.' Therefore, there is little reason to expect that the majority of women who now resort to illegal abortions would be helped by physicians to obtain abortions in medically safe surroundings...

...Young unmarried women and emotionally disturbed or physically ill women may find the route to a hospital abortion somewhat easier, but healthy married women with an accidental third or fourth pregnancy are likely to be turned away...

...Preliminary data from Colorado and California support this expectation...

...The step from open discussion of contraception to open discussion of abortion was hastened by the rash of thalidomide cases a few years ago, strengthened and reinforced by the German measles epidemic at about the same time, with increasing numbers of ABORTION AND SOCIAL CHANGE people learning what medicine had known for twenty years, that such exposure constituted a serious risk of deformity in the fetus...

...Since the birth control pill was marketed a decade ago, there has been continual debate about its effect upon our sex lives and reproductive behavior...

...Undoubtedly, a large proportion of the poor women who enter municipal hospitals every day with postabortion complications use the only cheap but most dangerous method, self-induced abortion...

...Put this way, legal change to permit women to abort unwanted pregnancies would seem the easiest way to cope with the population problem, for it involves the removal of bar riers women do not want, rather than the more difficult task of changing deep-lying motivations...

...but this is at the expense of increased anxiety 7 Robert Hall, "New York Abortion Law Survey," American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1965...

...By 1969 this has become a delicate and pressing issue in American politics, for there is mounting pressure on Congress to pass legislation providing vastly expanded subsidies for family planning...

...What is particularly important to note is that the liberalized code exempts from prosecution predominantly women who want to be pregnant...

...Abortion reform and study associations have mushroomed in several dozen communities across the nation, and a first international meeting, under American sponsorship, was attended by representatives of more than a dozen countries this past fall...

...If not, the mental health fields should be among the first to support a legal change that would reduce the incidence of unwanted pregnancies brought to term...

...to an unmarried American college girl, "fear" and "pain...

...A clue to the only slight increases of legal abortion rate in these states can be seen in the way applicants are screened by hospital abortion committees...

...The gov ernment did not enter the family planning field until it became very clear that Catholics were themselves using contraceptives in very large numbers—which meant that the Church position did not represent the views of Catholic voters...

...Grateful acknowledgment is made to the National Institutes of Health, sponsors of my work under a Research Career Scientist Award (USPHSMH23768) . cy is clearly a far milder form of fertility control...

...Of all the professions in American society, law, medicine, and theology are precisely the ones in which women constitute a small minority well under 10 percent...

...They showed none of the doctrinal rejection of Church spokesmen...

...Abortion has been kept clearly separate from the family planning movement, and family planners have contributed relatively little to the public discussion about the incidence of abortion, the danger of illegal abortion for women's health, the role that abortion has historically played in restricting population growth rates, or the need to critically examine whether abortion has any place in a criminal code...

...ALICE S. ROSSI tion of individual civil rights and an effective political strategy...

...Vigorous attempts at legal reform in New York State failed in 1967 and slowly started again in 1968...

...The results pinpoint the major dilemma facing a rapidly expanding human population: people want too many children...

...Other women, deeply concerned with this issue, do not yet feel free to speak up publicly...

...defined as illegal in the Soviet Union, women simply obtained illegal ones, so that concern for their health and safety soon led to the repeal of the Soviet law...

...In the world today, abortion is used either as an alternative to other, primarily contraceptive methods of fertility control, or as a backstop method when other contraceptives fail...

...It may be years before Americans use the more neutral expression, "pregnancy termination," as the British did in naming their abortion law last year...

...Only in this way can there be a future reduction of family size...

...One high-ranking woman in the federal government wrote to me asking for a reprint of an abortion article on her personal stationery, explaining that while very interested in the problem, she could not express such interest on official stationery...

...Almost as many people want healthy mothers and babies as favor motherhood itself...

...Social or religious groups relying on inefficient contraceptive procedures, such as the rhythm method, are also likely to be overrepresented among those who resort to illegal abortion...

...3 Recent studies make clear that loop insertions and sterilization procedures are having "some" effect on Asian birth rates...

...If those who break the law are not immoral, and the law does nothing to restrict the incidence of behavior it was designed to restrict, the only effect of its retention on the statute books is to encourage disrespect for the law generally...

...In the United States in 1966 an average of 3.4 children was considered ideal by white women aged 21 and over...

...In France, the annual number of abortions equals that of live births...

...Finally, total repeal can be based on constitutional grounds that combine the protec 13 This view that the law should not govern morality is elegantly argued by the British legal scholar Granville Williams in The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955...

...The guiding ideology of this movement has been "family planning," which projects a positive, socially desirable image of married couples spacing their children in a rational 2 Christopher Tietze, "Foetal Deaths, Spontaneous and Induced, in the Urban White Population of the United States," Population Studies, 11(2), 1957, 170-176...

...Roy Lucas also suggests this argument applies with equal force to state restrictions on the distribution and use of chemical abortifacients, when medical advances have produced a reliable one...

...What must be changed to reduce these desires is the basic motivation for having children, and such an approach must necessarily involve changes in the structure of the family, in the position of women, in sexual mores, in opportunities for legitimate alternative satisfactions apart from family roles...

...Those few women lawyers, doctors, and psychiatrists who have been active in abortion reform have by and large taken positions that go far beyond the conservative ALI recommendations...

...14 Peter Drucker, "On the Economic Basis of American Politics," The Public Interest, Winter 1968...

...341 ALICE S. ROSSI growth...

...To make these as closely comparable as possible, the least endorsed of the three situations covered in both surveys is used as the base figure for 1965...

...The 1965 survey was based on a national probability sample, whereas the 1967 survey was confined to residents of New York State...

...A new cluster of issues becomes more relevant: sex and the relations between the sexes, the determinants of reproduction motivation, the role of maternity in the life goals of women, the question of a woman's right to control so private an area of her life...

...The fields in which women have been represented in significant proportions and have attained high status are nursing, social work, and education, very often as local, 8 Jane McKerron, "Abortion: Can Doctors Cope...

...this is also self-defeating since the solution must be sought in encouraging the comfortably-situated majority of the American population to reduce the number of children they want, not merely the small minority represented by the very poor...

...The mortality rate in pregnancy termination cases in Sweden, where the committee procedure is followed, is for this reason higher than it is in East European countries where the committee procedure is not followed...

...For one, current abortion laws simply do not fulfill their intended purpose of lowering the incidence of abortion...

...By now, such abandonment has been largely transformed into a more humane system of infant adoption...

...If there was ever any doubt that abortion remains the best strategy to effect changes in the birth rate, it must surely have been answered by the dramatic doubling of the Rumanian birth rate in the course of one year, from 1966 to 1967, following the legislative restrictions on abortion instituted in December 1966...

...What liberalization has meant, therefore, was an enlargement of the grounds for exemption from liability to criminal prosecution: these range from danger to the "life" of the mother, the most prevalent state clause, to grave risk to the physical and mental health of the mother, chance of deformity in the child, or pregnancy as a result of rape...

...In Latin America, there is an average of one abortion for every two live births, although in some countries, such as Uruguay, the ratio is estimated to be as high as three abortions for every live birth...

...Of course, this may be more than compensated for by the large increase in the number of young people reaching the sexually active years, as the baby boom of the postwar period reaches adulthood...

...In both great constitutional issues of recent times—civil rights and apportionment of voting districts—Supreme Court decisions took the place of political action within the party system...

...Second, there is a growing sentiment among legal scholars that any law which is not enforced, and is in fact unenforceable, should be repealed.13 This was the American experience with prohibition laws, and the same point applies to abortion statutes...

...girls not yet married or married women early in their child-bearing years are largely ignored...

...In 1967 the results showed an overall endorsement of reform among 75 percent of the sample...

...Until very recent years, family planners have studiously avoided helping unmarried women, and they have totally ignored the problem of unwanted pregnancies...

...Venereal disease was more openly discussed during World War II than ever before in American history...