"Life, Death and the Law"

...The laws concerning birth control derive from a combination of religious abhorrence of sexuality and state abhorrence of a possible population decline...

...For example: A pre-viable fetus enjoys legal protection under the abortion laws largely because of assumptions about the time at which it is invested with a soul...

...The laws concerning the protection of life are antiquated ami have often occasioned recourse to contradictory interpretation, casuistic definition, evasion and plain illegality...

...Reviewed by Henry Schwarzschild Writing about the ethics of suicide thirty years ago, Sidney Hook declared that "we must recognize no categorical imperative 'to live,' but [only] "to live well,' " howsoever the good life may be defined...

...some jurisdictions make instigation to suicide a capital crime while others do not even consider it an offense...

...in Massachusetts, judical decisions in recent years have affirmed that, while a physician may not prescribe contraceptives for a patient even though pregnancy would mean certain death for her, contraceptives may be sold to prevent disease among those engaged in sexual intercourse, even illicit...

...Writing about the problem of eugenics in connection with birth-control, abortion and euthanasia laws, he clearly rejects Nazi Germany's racial "eugenics," but dismisses casually Nazi espousal of this cause as having no bearing on the problems at hand...

...If so, he misses a crucial point: In totalitarian states, neither the "sanctity of life" nor the expanding freedom of the individual to control his own life is ever a motive for law reform—raisons d'etat are all, and population policies are never dictated by considerations of morality or human improvement...

...But there is, in addition, an occasional note of impatience on Williams's part with all religious attitudes, impatience with the social fact of attitudes, deriving from religious belief, which do not hold "social utility" to be the highest good...

...Judicial decisions concerning children born as a result of artificial insemination by a third-party donor declare that such a child is illegitimate...

...All in all, it is a good work, for it means to increase man's freedom to arrange his life in dignity...

...The complexities of the law of suicide give rise to the perplexing situation of an attempt being punishable while the accomplished act, by definition, escapes punishment...

...The result is that, even in the advanced state of New York, contraceptives are banned except for the cure or prevention of disease (therefore a sale is lawful if it is for the purpose of venereal disease prophylaxis, but unlawful if for the purpose of birth control...

...As must be expected, some of his argument is directed against the restrictive positions of the Roman Catholic Church on matters of this sort...

...Referring to Soviet and Communist Chinese abortion and birth-control policies, Williams remarks drily upon the on-again-off-again legislation in the Soviet Union, but he seems to take the "on-again" attitude for real coin, i.e., for a genuine attempt at progressive reform...

...it is the product of a civilized mind, unrestricted by irrelevant dogma, addressing itself to a reader who wants to explore the effect of social regulations on acts most private...

...One might have wished that the publisher had devoted as much good taste to the design of the book's dust jacket and typography as the author has lavished on its contents...

...But it is neither a professional's textbook nor a reformer's tract...

...The result of these laws is incalculable psychological and physical harm, and the busy existence of illegal abortion mills run by sordid and septic amateurs at extortioners' rates—a human wrong compounded by social injustice...

...Professor Williams deals too lightly, I believe, with the attitude of the totalitarian state to "the sanctity of life...

...Williams's examination of the historical and religious background of the laws is most urbane and useful...

...The law requires much life to be maintained—and, indeed, to come into being—that is not good life...

...It is not at all paradoxical that enlightened opinion (which again comes to us from the British Isles) concurrently militates against capital punishment and in favor of more permissive abortion laws and the like— for both causes share the desire to have the state's control over man's life restricted to the extent to which this is socially useful...

...It is reasonable enough to demand an end to the imposition on us all of the dogmas of one religious community...

...Professor Williams, a jurist who is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and president of the Abortion Law Reform Association of Great Britain, does not find it useful to have the criminal law prescribe penalties or prescribe remedies in situations where not social utility but morality or religious dogma demand restrictions of our freedom to act...

...at worst, they have been self-defeating and have caused great social injustice and human suffering...

...Yet, articles in British technical journals of the early 1930s give evidence that some British proponents of eugenic reform were frightfully receptive to Nazi propaganda about producing a "healthy racial community...

...The legal code, however, pronounces against this moral dictum...

...and it holds out criminal sanctions against even the most beneficent interference with this principle...

...The laws concerning infanticide require monsters and defectives to be kept alive to their own and everyone's suffering...

...Professor Williams's examination of their justification and effect, and his proposals for reform, are measured, humane, reasonable— and radical...

...With broad and graceful erudition, informed by a feeling for jurisprudence, medicine, history, theology, and social policy, Williams demonstrates the urgent need for reform and rationalization of social and medical attitudes, and of the criminal codes, respecting infanticide, birth control, sterilization, artificial insemination, abortion, suicide, euthanasia and their refined variations...

...The laws concerning euthanasia punish severely any assistance to voluntary release from evils no longer sufferable or remediable...

...Arthur Koestler's Notes on Hanging, in treating of the state's insistence on destroying life, complements Williams's book, which deals with the state's insistence on preserving it...

...Glanville Williams shows in illuminating detail how the criminal law of the English-speaking countries denies the liberty of the individual to exercise control over the principal processes of life: procreation, birth, death...

...This volume, an expanded version of the Carpentier Lectures delivered by the author at Columbia University in 1956, deals with esoterica in law and medicine always in the interest of enlightened action on these truly vital matters, i.e., matters affecting life...