cause you to be very reluctant to hire me. However, before making your decision, please read on. I submit to you that such feelings are based on a stereotyped image of blind people which views us as helpless and dependent, and on a traditional misconception that blindness is a tragic and all-embracing handicap. In reality, blind people are simply people who happen not to be able to see, no more no less. We have the same range of abilities, interests, and personality traits that sighted people have. Blind people are employed as teachers, administrators, biologists, radio and television broadcasters, secretaries, etc. Thus, blind people are employed in a wide variety of occupations.

If you hold the philosophy that I do, that a person's past record of work and achievement is indicative of probable future performance, then I would submit to you that my academic qualifications, professional training and work experience, and community involvement well qualifies me to be employed by you.

With the aid of a number of alternative techniques such as a reader for extensive reading, a driver for extensive intra-city travel, and braille notes for public speaking, I can perform any job I choose as well as a sighted person with abilities similar to mine.

I would urge you not to dismiss my application merely on the grounds that I am blind. I would be a great asset to your organization. I hereby request an interview with you at your earliest convenience. Only through an interview would you be able to determine whether I possess the necessary qualifications, and at that time I would be able to discuss my qualifications and experience, and the alternative techniques I would use to perform my job. In conclusion, I would hope that you will judge me on my ability, not my disability.

Senator BAYH. We appreciate your taking time to be with us, and I might say that we would be more than happy to introduce your resume into the record, and for those who have not had a chance to read it, it is impressive, and would that all people who do not suffer from your handicap of less than full sight had the accomplishments that you at your age in life do have.

Here you discuss your feelings, and you have heard Ms. Katz discuss hers. It leaves me, as chairman of this subcommittee, with great feelings of inadequacy as one who has to sit in judgment on a question like this.

May I ask, how old are you now?

Ms. HARTLE. Pardon me?

Senator BAYH. Is your age a fair question to ask a woman witness in a Senate hearing?

MS. HARTLE. I am 22.

Senator BAYH. You say your heart condition has been corrected and gives you no problems now?

Ms. HARTLE. Yes, that is correct.

Senator BAYH. Obviously, from what you have been able to accomplish and the way you were able to go through your statement, the vision problem is one that, although it is an inconvenience, certainly has not kept you down. I can see why you have very strong feelings about the question of abortion.

Would you have the same feelings if you knew you were pregnant with a baby that had Tay-Sachs, such as is the experience of Ms. Katz, or if you had a test that showed that your baby was going to have Down's syndrome?

Ms. HARTLE. Yes; I think I would. I guess I have come to believe that with the proper training other people just as myself can lead an independent life, and I think that if we put our energies into legalizing abortion, what will happen is that medical research to try to cure other disabilities and research to discover alternative techniques that disabled people might use in their lives will decrease. People will not see such a need to do this.

Senator BAYH. Are we as a society so insensitive and irresponsible that we must consider alternatives limited to either abortion or to research?

Are those the only two alternative available to us?

I think that it would be tragic if that were the consequence. We do need to do more in the area of preventing some of these unfortunate occurrences and make it possible for human beings to live with them if they are afflicted and indeed look for a cure.

Ultimately, do you really feel that we must weigh off abortion versus research?

MS. HARTLE. What I am saying is that if we legalize abortion, then I think that research will not go on in full force that it would if abortions were not legalized.

The techniques that blind people use, by and large, were discovered by blind people, not sighted people, not agencies for the blind, not professionals who work for the blind. They are discovered by blind people themselves. I feel that we are not ever going to erase handicapped people from the world. That is not going to occur. We still are going to have a lot of people who are going to become disabled late in life. I have a friend who had polio when she was close to 2 years old, and so she was left with that. There is never going to be a way to eliminate disabled people from the world.

If 50 percent of the population were disabled, we would have made a lot more strides in terms of research and in terms of alternative techniques, in terms of education, employment opportunities and societal attitudes than we have to this date.

Senator BAYH. I share your feeling that we have not adequately dealt with this. I speak with a little experience as a chairman for several years of our Easter Seals crippled children and adult program, as well as a member of the national board.

I would hope that we could do more. Personally, I do not see this country ever accepting the alternative of liquidating those who do not reach some normal standard.

Getting back to the Tay-Sachs question-and I hate to use that specific example, but it seems to me that it draws the question very quickly. You responded to my question with an answer that I concur in, but I do not think it is an answer to the specific question I asked. You said that you thought disabled people could be taught to function and to make a contribution. I think almost all can.

But Tay-Sachs is the kind of disease where fatality, death, described by Ms. Katz, is inevitable.

What about that?

Ms. HARTLE. You are asking me if at this point in time if I became pregnant and I knew that the child would have Tay-Sachs

Senator BAYH. If you would rather not answer it, I understand, because these are very tough questions to ask. They must be equally tough to answer.

Ms. HARTLE. Well, I have a very strong philosophical position on the question of abortion. So I am sure that I would carry the baby to term and probably become quite active in trying to find alternative methods for the baby to live and to develop research to curb this problem.

Senator BAYH. I can understand your philosophical reason. I just want to make sure that the answer is based on that, not on the feeling

that right now, we have the capacity to make it possible to have a Tay-Sachs baby lead a normal life. We do not have that capacity right now, and I think we should recognize that. I certainly share your feeling that we ought to be doing more in this area in making it possible to find answers to those tragedies.

I appreciate your bringing your expert personal thoughts to our committee regarding experiences from being sexually assaulted. You emphasized the necessity for the presence of quick medical care and knowledge of what should be done. I salute you for that and I concur. You emphasized the importance of disseminating information and how inadequate that process is now, and you also, as dramatically as I have ever seen, described some of the misconceptions that society has generally placed on rape. I refer to the place in your statement where you said that the idea that women who are raped somehow ask for it or did something to precipitate it must be dispelled once and for all. The notion that a woman could not have been raped if she did not struggle must be recognized for what it is—a falsehood.

One of the real tragedies in our society today is the way women are made to feel almost like the criminal when assaulted in this way. It is a difficult question to me as a lawyer to look at how you balance due process of the man against the woman who is almost defenseless in a situation like that and faced with ostracism by society.

How many other communities have the kind of community centers similar to the ones in Minneapolis and Washington that you referred to where a woman can get this kind of treatment?

Ms. HARTLE. There is one in Los Angeles; there is one in Detroit, one in Chicago. I believe one in Missouri, one in Maryland. Those are the ones that I know of right offhand.

Senator BAYH. What do I do if I happen to be a young lady in Shirkieville, Indiana, or some other place lacking these facilities, and I am assaulted?

I must say that I accept your answer as to what we should do. But what do we do now before that is possible, where a woman is beset upon by a man, forced into this situation?

Ms. HARTLE. Get the information out to the women in grade school, high school, college, to try to disseminate the information. Over the past 2 years the whole issue of rape has come out of the taboo area and into the public sphere. There have been movies, documentaries, press articles, and all sorts of things, publications, written on the subject of rape over the last 2 years.

It is finally recognized that there is a social problem. Rape is increasing across the country, and especially in urban reas and around college campuses. So that is why I recommend that we set up more community counseling centers and through other ways we educate the public about rape. I think it is starting to happen, but we still have a ways to go.

Senator BAYH. Thank you very much, Ms. Hartle. We appreciate you letting us have your personal thoughts and your personal experience. I certainly want to add my commendation for the contribution that you are making to society.

We will recess our hearing now pending the call of the Chair. [Whereupon, at 12:45 p.m., the hearing was recessed, subject to the call of the Chair.]

ABORTION: PART II

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26, 1974

U.S. SENATE,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS
OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY,

Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met, pursuant to recess, at 2:05 p.m., in room 1318, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Senator Birch Bayh-chairman of the subcommittee-presiding.

Present: Senator Bayh.

Also present: Lynne Fishel, research assistant; Abby Brezina, chief clerk and Teddie Phillips, assistant clerk.

Senator BAYH. We will convene our hearings.

I would like, prior to our hearings, to offer a word of explanation to some of you who may have been inconvenienced by the absence of the chief counsel of the subcommittee, Mr. J. William Heckman. He has come down with some variety of hepatitis. Rest is the only thing the doctors say he can do to get better. I appreciate the fact that his assistant is substituting very efficiently for us.

Our first witness this afternoon is Dr. Irving C. Bernstein, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Hospital.

Doctor, we appreciate your being with us and taking the time to let us have your expertise on the subject.

STATEMENT OF DR. IRVING C. BERNSTEIN, CLINICAL PROFESSOR OF OBSTETRICS AND GYNECOLOGY AND CLINICAL PROFESSOR OF PSYCHIATRY, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA HOSPITAL

Dr. BERNSTEIN. Thank you.

The staff has already told you that I am at the medical school, so I will not go into that.

Senator BAYн. Pardon me, Doctor.

Could you pull that mike closer to you?

Dr. BERNSTEIN. I am chairman of the Mental Health Committee of the Minnesota State Medical Association, psychiatric consultant to the Hennepin County Welfare Department, chairman of the Clinical Faculty Committee of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology of the University of Minnesota Medical School, and chief of the Psychiatric Department of Mt. Sinai Hospital, Minneapolis.

I am speaking as an individual and I do not represent specifically any of these organizations.

From the psychiatric point of view of the psychiatrist, there are no indications for recommending therapeutic abortions. Yet, prior to the Supreme Court decision regarding abortion, it was estimated that 80 percent of all abortions done in hospitals were done for socalled psychiatric indications. More appropriately, the function of a psychiatrist in this field should be to help manage the occasional patient who requires an abortion for medical reasons, since termination of pregnancy is not without psychiatric risk.

Sims states, "Abortion, even if therapeutic, may in itself produce a psychosis." Noyes and Kolb state, "As high as one-fifth of the women allowed therapeutic abortions later expressed regret for accepting the procedure."

As already stated, prior to the Supreme Court decision most abortions done in hospitals were done for psychiatric indicatons. In my opinion, the psychiatrists involved in recommending this procedure were recommending them not on the basis of medical facts, but for the convenience of some adult, and not necessarily for the pregnant patient. The patient was usually referred to the psychiatrist after she had missed one or two menstrual periods and the referring physician wanted an opinion quickly because he wished to operate within the first trimester of pregnancy if at all possible.

Because the psychiatrist was under pressure of the shortage of time and the pressure of the referring physician, who had already decided that the patient should have a therapeutic abortion, but who had been unable to find an acceptable medical reason for it, the examination was usually neither complete nor objective. At that particular time threats of suicide and the fear of the future were at their height, and thus some psychiatrists, probably in good conscience, believed the possibility of suicide was imminent and recommended an abortion. One psychiatrist, a Dr. Bolter, felt the psychiatrist was acting as an unfortunate accomplice. He did not know what he was being asked to do.

Dr. Halleck, who is a professor of psychiatry and was at the University of Wisconsin-he is now somewhere on the east coast-who believes somewhat differently, from me, about abortion. says that psychiatrists who recommend abortions for psychiatric reasons are deliberately lying.

Abortion is an area in psychiatry in which some psychiatrists were intent on dealing with the neurotic symptom as a primary maneuver. It is customary for the psychiatrist to deal with what is behind the presenting symptoms, and not to take statements of patients at face value. Actually, it is better to treat a pregnant woman for psychiatric illness, rather than abort her and not treat her psychiatrically.

In the area of abortion, psychiatrists to have a role to play. Psvchiatric consultation is beneficial in helping patients tolerate the occasional abortion which is indicated for other than psychiatric rea

sons.

Termination of pregnancy is not without psychiatric risks. Psychiatrists are also valuable to referring physicians in determining psychiatric contraindications for therapeutic abortions.

For example, a patient was referred because of her adamant demands to have an abortion because it was inconvenient for her to have a baby at that particular moment. She was threatening suicide.