Abortion in the U.S.

The U.S. received a rare, candid report this week from a specialist in the country's most hush-hush operation: abortion. In it Dr. G. Lotrell Timanus tells how he built up a roster of 353 physicians who would send patients to him for abortions in his Baltimore practice. From 1920 to 1951 he performed 5,210 of the illegal operations. The abortionist's testimony appears in Abortion in the United States (Harper-Hoeber, $5.50), the record of the 1955 international conference on abortion sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the New York Academy of Medicine.

In virtually every state of the U.S. abortion is illegal unless performed to save the mother's life, and then the legal restrictions are so severe that many hospitals and gynecologists will have nothing to do with even legitimate cases. In 18 states the woman who seeks an abortion (other than the rare "therapeutic" kind) can be jailed for her part in the crime. Yet the latest findings* of the late Alfred C. Kinsey's Indiana University team of sex researchers--whose sampling is admittedly small and not entirely representative of U.S. womanhood--offer striking statistical clues to the prevalence of the practice.

Of 5.293 women in the Kinsey survey, one out of every ten became pregnant either before marriage or after divorce. Almost 18 out of 20 such pregnancies ended in abortion. How and where the women got the abortions was not always clear, but the vast majority (17 out of 20) told interviewers that they had it done by "a physician." Of 1.044 abortions reported, eleven out of 20 were obtained by married women.

Baltimore's Dr. Timanus, now barred from practice and living in retirement, testified that he used the best medical techniques available (mostly in the days before antibiotics). In every case he tried to get the referring doctor to state in writing that the woman's health would be jeopardized by continuation of the pregnancy. Since Dr. Timanus performed almost five times as many abortions as turned up in the Kinsey study, his analysis may have a wider application:

P:Divided by age, 17 patients were twelve to 15 years old; 688 were 16 to 20; the biggest five-year age group was 21 to 25, with 1,834 cases; in the next five-year group there were 1,268, and in the group from 31 to 40 there were 1,312. After 41, there were only 91.

P:By marital status: 1,830 were single, 2,773 married, and 607 were widowed, divorced or separated. In contrast with the widely accepted notion that married women who already have several children make up the bulk of the abortion trade, only 402 of Timanus' operations were performed on women who had more than two children.

P:By occupation and family contact, there was an abnormally high proportion of medical personnel. Seven of Dr. Timanus' patients were physicians themselves, 58 were doctors' wives; 270 were graduate nurses.

Dr. Timanus and one other abortionist shared 90% of the Baltimore practice. Then Timanus retired, but "at least 20 doctors told me how serious it was that I do some work," so he started in again, upping his average fee from $150 or $200 to $400--payable in advance--"to make the thing more or less prohibitive." Then he was prosecuted, fined $5.000, and forcefully retired after a six-month jail sentence.

If Dr. Timanus' own figures were shocking, he had others that were more so: he personally knew a physician who had done, he estimated, 40,000 abortions in 50 years. One of the main problems of the conference was to find out how many abortions are performed annually in the U.S. Commonly accepted figures run from 200,000 to 1,200,000. In the end, the experts could only agree that the number must be astronomical.

* Published this week in Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion (Harper-Hoeber; $6).

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