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Birth Rates Must

Be Stabilized

Births and deaths must ultimately be brought into balance in any population. Birth rate reduction over time is the only reasonable choice if we are to maintain a "quality of life" for inhabitants of this earth.

Zero population growth (population stabilization), or ZPG, supported by the economists and other concerned citizens who testified before the Population Commission in 1971, means that births, in combination with net immigration, would not exceed deaths in the nation.

Achieving ZPG will require a long time, even in the United States. The average family size of 2.1 children cannot be equated to zero rate of growth. Options do exist by which society can reduce births, yet increase individual freedom of choice.

The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, a blue-ribbon panel with mandates from both the President and Congress (established by an act of Congress in 1970), after two years of study, declared that a national policy on stabilization of population is an urgent necessity. (Incidentally, President Nixon ignored the majority of the Commission's findings and recommendations. Nixon's only statement suggestive of support for curtailing population growth was in the familiar area of helping the poor. His support of family planning services did not extend to abortion, which he described as "an unacceptable form of population control". Nixon's anti-abortion position basically was to gain political support from Catholics in the 1972 election.)

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Options for

Achieving ZPG

What are some options for achieving ZPG (population stabilization)?

Some persons openly advocate compulsory measures such as a mass anti-fertility drug and "parent licenses"64 to stop population growth. It has also been suggested that the government issue licenses for reproduction or 2.1 baby ration cards. Couples could give, barter, or sell parts of their baby ration so that a woman who collected 10 of the fractional units would be entitled to a third baby.

Others warn that unless population growth is brought under control voluntarily, compulsion may ultimately become necessary.

Options for achieving ZPG which are consistent with human dignity and complete freedom of choice include:

. Education. It is generally believed that many couples will voluntarily limit their number of children once they gain a basic understanding of population dynamics. Additional Family style alternatives. Couples are experimenting with a greater sharing of children by adults.

Elimination of sexual stereotypes. Encouraging careers for women and discouraging early marriage would help. Working women who marry in their late twenties or thirties might be less inclined than younger women to retire to housekeeping and multiple babybearing. The basic suggestion is that girls be impressed with the idea that marriage and motherhood are not the only means of fulfillment. "We need to teach them that it is not necessary...to become mommies when they grow up and that if they do

become mommies they need not have a lot of children," writes Garrett Hardin, professor of human ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Universal availability of effective contraceptives. Both education about as well as availability of methods of fertility control are necessary to fulfill this option. More research to develop better contraceptives is also regarded as an important factor for reducing population growth, especially since each year 26% of couples who wish to delay a pregnancy fail to do so, and 14% of those who do not want any more children become pregnant.

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Legal, safe and reasonably priced abortions available to all women who "choose" to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. "Women should be free to determine their own fertility, that the matter of abortion should be left to the conscience of the individual concerned, in consultation with her physician and that states should be encouraged to enact affirmative statutes creating a clear and positive framework for the practice of abortion on request," recommended by the national Commission on Population Growth and the American Future in its (1972) report. Commission chairman, John D. Rockefeller, III, said: "The commission recognizes and would stress that many of its recommendations seek to achieve social goals desirable and important in their own right--for example, greater opportunities for women. and children and freedom of choice in reproduction."

WOMEN hold the key to population growth. The women's liberation movement could be ZPG's best friend...

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2/ HERSTORY OF ABORTION LAWS

Until 170 years ago, abortion was a personal and not a legal decision.

Here is a chronological rundown of court and legislative events that transformed abortion from a choice to a crime --and back again.

1327-1348.--Two 14th Century English cases established the common law right to terminate pregnancy at any time. The justices who consistently refused to regard abortion as criminal were all Catholic, and they were acknowledging abortion as a private individual decision and maintaining separation of church and state four centuries before that principle was embodied in our Constitution.

1803.--The first restrictive abortion statute was passed by the British Parliament on the grounds of protecting women's lives. The Parliament stated: "The reason assigned for the punishment of abortion is not that, thereby an embryo human being is destroyed, but that it rarely or never can be effected by drugs without the sacrifice of the mother's life."

1828.--American states followed the British example of restricting abortion, to protect the woman's life. New York

was the first and its abortion law served a model for many other states.

1858. The New Jersey Supreme Court said of that state's 1849 law (modeled on the 1828 New York law): "The design of the statute was not to prevent the procuring of abortions, so much as to guard the health and life of the mother against the consequences of such attempts.'

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1865.--The English surgeon Joseph Lister inaugurated antiseptic surgery that made abortion markedly less dangerous to

women.

1915.--Lister's procedures came into common practice in both the operating room and the delivery room; abortion mortality and childbirth mortality began to decline, and abortion became less dangerous to the woman than childbirth.

At that point, the argument that restrictive laws protected the woman's health and life no longer applied. Thus, restrictive abortion laws, which had been constitutional when adopted, became unconstitutional by, in effect, forcing women to accept the more dangerous of two procedures. (Today, properly performed, abortions are only 1/8th as dangerous to the pregnant woman's life as childbirth and even less so if performed in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.)

1962.--The Sherri Finkbine case sensitized the public to the need to liberalize abortion laws. Ms. Finkbine had taken thalidomide early in pregnancy and had subsequently learned of the possible danger to her fetus from that drug. She arranged for an abortion in Arizona, but pressure from local Catholic and fundamentalist clergy forced the hospital to withdraw its permission. She then went to Sweden where an abortion was performed, and the fetus was found to be grossly deformed.

1964.--A rubella epidemic broke out in the U.S. By that time the damage that rubella could do to a fetus in early pregnancy was widely understood. Many women-primarily those with money and/or influence--demanded and got legal abortions. But thousands of others were prevented by