Medicine: Abortion, Legal & Illegal

Every year a million abortions are performed in the U.S., and 99% of them are illegal. Back-room operations, they endanger a woman’s health and life. Some 8,000 are done by physicians in hospitals, with a semblance of legality, but even this is often a fiction. The law in virtually all 50 states declares that a therapeutic abortion is permissible only to save the mother’s life. In some hospitals, doctors construe this liberally and do an abortion if the woman threatens suicide, especially if she is unmarried or has been raped.

Last week the prestigious, 3,000-member New York Academy of Medicine reported in effect that New York State’s—and most of the nation’s—abortion laws are hypocritical, and would be a farce if they did not prove fatal to so many women. Most doctors, said the academy’s committee on public health, are so afraid of prosecution that safe abortions in hospitals have become fewer and fewer, while dangerous, illegal abortions have become ever more common.

The academy’s prescription: amend the law to permit “therapeutic abortion where there is a substantial risk that the continuance of pregnancy would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother, or that the child would be born with grave physical or mental defects.” As safeguards, the academy would require prior approval of an operation by a committee of hospital doctors, and the abortion would have to be done by a licensed physician under the usual safe, sterile conditions in a hospital.