Disease of Unwanted Pregnancy

The subject was abortion, virtually unthinkable as a topic of public discussion only a few years ago. The sponsors of the Washington conference of physicians, sociologists, theologians and jurists were an unlikely pair: the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation and the Harvard Divinity School. Eunice Kennedy Shriver explained for the foundation that it was concerned with the subject because abortion has been recommended as a means of reducing the number of children doomed to mental retardation. Harvard Theologian Herbert W. Richardson said the conference was designed to put public discussion of abortion on a higher plane.

But the central question was whether it should be made easier for women to get legal and safely sterile abortions. Boston College's Jesuit Theologian-Lawyer Robert F. Drinan contended that even a therapeutic abortion under the model code recommended by the American Law Institute and recently adopted, in essence, by three states means taking a life. To ensure that no abortion should have legal sanction, Father Drinan suggested that the states should repeal all abortion laws.

Risks and Rejections. Legality aside, most of the discussion concerned abortion as a means of ex post facto birth control. "The 'disease' of an unwanted pregnancy is usually not fatal," said Obstetrician Kenneth J. Ryan of Case-Western Reserve University School of Medicine, "but living with it is so onerous that many women risk death via criminal abortion rather than suffer its far-reaching effects." How many? No one knew. "Estimates" running from 200,000 to 1,500,000 a year in the U.S. are worthless guesses, said the Population Council's Dr. Christopher Tietze. He also scoffed at estimates of 10,000 deaths annually from illegal abortions, suggesting there might be 500 and possibly 1,000, but no more. Even the lower figure gives a far higher death rate than that from legal abortions in Europe and Japan, he noted.

Several speakers dwelt on the cost of "unwanted-pregnancy disease." In physical terms, Johns Hopkins Pediatrician Robert E. Cooke, himself the father of a handicapped child, said it will be "many, many years before we have the medical means to repair genetic defects in the womb." In terms of the family, Dr. Sophia M. Robison, emeritus professor of Columbia University's School of Social Work, said it was still not generally realized how widespread is parental rejection of children who were not wanted in the first place. "Much social work in this area," she said, "is picking up the pieces instead of going to the roots of the matter--that is, granting the mother the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy." Judge Orman Ketcham of the District of Columbia Juvenile Court reported that "most of the juveniles who come before me were unwanted children."

Negro Needs. Manhattan Gynecologist Sophia J. Kleegman decried discrimination between private patients and the poor. "The number of therapeutic abortions in municipal hospitals is only about one-fifth that in private hospitals," she said. "This is because the rules are more stringent and the law is followed more closely in the municipal hospital."

Father Drinan saw race discrimination in North Carolina's relaxation of its abortion law because, he said, it was mainly aimed at reducing the Negro birth rate. But the National Urban League's Whitney Young Jr. (TIME cover, Aug. 11) saw the poor as the target and suggested that some states might make abortion easier to reduce the wel fare rolls. Young complained that the poor were discriminated against in that they could not obtain costly but safe abortions in the U.S. or travel abroad for them as can the well-to-do.

Measuring what has been accomplished so far, University of Pennsylvania Professor Louis B. Schwartz, a consultant on the American Law Institute's model code, conceded that it amounted to only "a very conservative liberalization." But he added that since a few legislatures have taken this step, "others will now follow their example, seeing that this does not mean political suicide."

Somewhat Sanguine. This was hardly enough for California Activist Pat Maginnis, 39, a medical technician who has had three abortions herself. Uninvited to the conference, she led pickets outside the Hilton Hotel and gave public lectures on self-abortion. It was her startling opinion that no law held the woman responsible for ridding herself of an unwanted child. Therefore, she argued, the police can take no action "even if you take your fetus into the police station and tell them you just did your own abortion."

Even this extreme measure may become academic within a few years. Princeton's Methodist Theologian R. Paul Ramsey predicted that "with safe, do-it-yourself abortion medications, abortion will be brought entirely into the arena of private decision." A bit sanguine perhaps, but not beyond possibility. The morning-after and once-a-month pills are still in the early laboratory and testing stages, but medical researchers are hard at work trying to make Dr. Ramsey's prediction come true.

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