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The Right of Abortion
HARRIET PILPEL
JUNE 1969 ISSUE
Mothers and children demonstrate in favor of liberalized abortion laws. (AP)
E XCEPT IN THE story of the Emperor's New Clothes, I cannot think of a more startling
example of mass refusal to see the obvious than is presented by current attitudes toward the
population problem on the one hand and abortion on the other.
For several years, we have heard warnings about the population crisis. Indeed, so concerned
are we that there now are voices in the land calling for “compulsory sterilization” and
“compulsory birth control,” for the withholding of public support for illegitimate children in
excess of a certain number, for conditioning welfare monies or parole or whatever on coerced
sterilization, and so on. Yet little is done to make sterilization easily available on a voluntary
basis, particularly to the poor and underprivileged. Despite the lack of legal strictures against
it, it is often withheld by doctors and hospitals from those who need it and want it most. At
the same time, there begins to appear on the part of some an alarming readiness to
subordinate rights of freedom of choice in the area of human reproduction to governmental
coercion.
Notwithstanding all this, we continue to maintain strict antiabortion laws on the books of at
least four fifths of our states, denying freedom of choice to women and physicians and
compelling the “unwilling to bear the unwanted.” Yet, as Doctor Christopher Tietze and
Sarah Lewit point out in the Scientific American for January, 1969: “Abortion is still the most
widespread...method of fertility control in the modern world.” According to experts who
participated in a United Nations Conference on World Population in Belgrade in 1965,
abortion is indeed the chief method of birth control in the world today, and they estimated
that about 30 million pregnancies are purposely terminated by abortion each year. Of these,
studies indicate that almost one million are in the United States. Since, however, abortions
are still so difficult to obtain, we force the birth of millions more unwanted children every
year. If we really want to cut our population growth rate on a voluntary basis, we should
make abortion available on a voluntary basis, at least in the early stages of pregnancy. When
Japan liberalized its abortion laws some years back, it halved its rate of population growth in
a decade.
I DO NOT recommend abortion as a birth-control method of choice. I merely state that it is in
fact the most important single method of birth control in the world today, and to cut down on
population growth we should make abortion easy and safe while we continue to develop other
and more satisfactory methods of family limitation. In addition to the 5 million women in the
United States without access to birth control for whom abortion would seem a matter of right
when they want it, there are the uncounted thousands who after conception suffer some
disease (like German measles) or discover some defect which makes the birth of a live and
healthy baby unlikely, and the many, too, whose contraceptive methods occasionally don't
work. As the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women notes in a
pamphlet:
There is no perfect contraceptive. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports that the
intrauterine devices, one of the most effective contraceptives available today, have a failure
The Right of Abortion
HARRIET PILPEL
JUNE 1969 ISSUE
Mothers and children demonstrate in favor of liberalized abortion laws. (AP)
E XCEPT IN THE story of the Emperor's New Clothes, I cannot think of a more startling
example of mass refusal to see the obvious than is presented by current attitudes toward the
population problem on the one hand and abortion on the other.
For several years, we have heard warnings about the population crisis. Indeed, so concerned
are we that there now are voices in the land calling for “compulsory sterilization” and
“compulsory birth control,” for the withholding of public support for illegitimate children in
excess of a certain number, for conditioning welfare monies or parole or whatever on coerced
sterilization, and so on. Yet little is done to make sterilization easily available on a voluntary
basis, particularly to the poor and underprivileged. Despite the lack of legal strictures against
it, it is often withheld by doctors and hospitals from those who need it and want it most. At
the same time, there begins to appear on the part of some an alarming readiness to
subordinate rights of freedom of choice in the area of human reproduction to governmental
coercion.
Notwithstanding all this, we continue to maintain strict antiabortion laws on the books of at
least four fifths of our states, denying freedom of choice to women and physicians and
compelling the “unwilling to bear the unwanted.” Yet, as Doctor Christopher Tietze and
Sarah Lewit point out in the Scientific American for January, 1969: “Abortion is still the most
widespread...method of fertility control in the modern world.” According to experts who
participated in a United Nations Conference on World Population in Belgrade in 1965,
abortion is indeed the chief method of birth control in the world today, and they estimated
that about 30 million pregnancies are purposely terminated by abortion each year. Of these,
studies indicate that almost one million are in the United States. Since, however, abortions
are still so difficult to obtain, we force the birth of millions more unwanted children every
year. If we really want to cut our population growth rate on a voluntary basis, we should
make abortion available on a voluntary basis, at least in the early stages of pregnancy. When
Japan liberalized its abortion laws some years back, it halved its rate of population growth in
a decade.
I DO NOT recommend abortion as a birth-control method of choice. I merely state that it is in
fact the most important single method of birth control in the world today, and to cut down on
population growth we should make abortion easy and safe while we continue to develop other
and more satisfactory methods of family limitation. In addition to the 5 million women in the
United States without access to birth control for whom abortion would seem a matter of right
when they want it, there are the uncounted thousands who after conception suffer some
disease (like German measles) or discover some defect which makes the birth of a live and
healthy baby unlikely, and the many, too, whose contraceptive methods occasionally don't
work. As the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women notes in a
pamphlet:
There is no perfect contraceptive. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports that the
intrauterine devices, one of the most effective contraceptives available today, have a failure
