Taken from the Appendix of the author's article, "Abortion and Public Policy: What Are the Issues?" in the New York Law Forum, vol. XVII, no. 2, 1971. NARAL NATIONAL 250 WEST 57TH STREET THE MAJOR Issues and the ARGUMENTATION IN THE ABortion DebaTE EMILY C. MOORE Some of the issues are basic, having to do with whether abortion should be permissible and legal under any circumstances; others are more specific, dealing with particular aspects of proposed legislation such as permissible indications, limitations to hospital facilities, etc.; others concern the anticipated difficulties in implementing a law involving moderate or dras tic changes. The reader can easily distinguish these three categories in the condensed argumentation below. The author wishes to draw the reader's attention to the format of the following presentation. The discussion on the left paraphrases the issue as presented by the party raising it; the discussion on the right paraphrases the opposing view. ETHICAL-MORal-Religious Issues Opponents of liberalization 1 Life begins at the moment of conception; the 1. 2. It is just one step from abortion to euthanasia; legal abortion reflects and encourages declining morality and loss of reverence for the sanctity of life. Proponents of liberalization Life began eons ago; the question is when does a human person begin-some say at conception, some at nidation, some at quickening, some at viability, some at birth, some at a later date; the assignment of personhood is arbitrary and differs among faiths. If abortion were considered by society to be murder, there would be some 30 million women behind bars. If fertilized ova were considered persons, we would require registration and burial of all spontaneously aborted fetuses (including many expelled with late menstrual flow). A hydatidiform mole starts as a fertilized egg, ends as a mass of cells, and could in no way be described as a person. A blueprint is not a house, an acorn is not an oak, DNA is not a person. 2. Abortion and euthanasia are separate issues (though determining the end of the human person is as difficult a question as determining the start); we set speed limits at 60 MPH and do not necessarily then move them to 70 MPH (one step does not necessarily lead to another); reverence for life includes concern for the quality of children born and consideration for the rights and well-being of women unwillingly pregnant. Fear of pregnancy is notoriously inefficient as a deterrent to sexual behavior. Why should the woman be punished and not the man? Why should an innocent child also be punished? Does the punishment fit the crime? 3. Promiscuity will be encouraged by legal abortion; 3. * B.A., 1959 Cornell University; M.A., 1966 Hunter College; M.S., 1968 Columbia University; Staff Associate, Demographic Division, The Population Council, City of New York. 1. A physician is trained to preserve life, not to 1. This is a narrow view of medical responsibility; destroy it. physicians are also concerned with the quality of life and the preservation of health mental and physical of the woman and her family. Late pregnancy abortions are due to a) procedural delays in hospitals, b) the impossibility of early determination of some forms of deformity and c) changed circumstances or denial of pregnancy-none of which will be legislated away. Improved administration, easier availability of anonymous pregnancy detection and pregnancy counseling, and widespread educational efforts will prevent most women from obtaining abortions-legal or dangerously illegal-late in pregnancy. (Proponents are not in agreement on the issue of determining a permissible gestation limitation by law, many would prefer it to be left to the medical profession's responsibility; others approve a limit of 28 weeks, 26 weeks, 24 weeks, 20 weeks, 18 weeks, 16 weeks, 12 weeks.) These restrictions are mainly attempts to limit the number of abortions. Proponents are not in agreement on the medical advisability of restriction to hospitals or to hospitals and approved clinics, but they uniformly oppose obstructive committees and quotas. This, too, is merely an attempt to limit the number of abortions. While proponents are not in agreement on the medical advisability of abortions performed by paramedical personnel (nurse midwives) acting under a doctor's supervision, most would agree that an abortion performed by a trained paramed is likely to be safer than one by a psychiatrist or dermatologist; the disagreement lies not in the ability of parameds to perform routine abortions by suction, but in the occasional emergency requiring more highly trained personnel. 5. Opponents Contraceptive services should be offered instead 5. of legalizing abortion. (However, not all opponents of liberalization would support this suggestion.) Proponents Of course contraceptives should be more widely available and promoted; however, in the present state of contraceptive technology, and given the continuing possibility of human error in the use of even the best methods, abortion is needed as a backstop; its use is not preferable to contraception, but once a pregnancy occurs, it is the only means of birth prevention. 6. There won't be enough physicians and hospital 6. While states which have liberalized abortion beds to accommodate the mass of women who will seek abortions. 7. Nurses and other hospital personnel will be unwilling to participate in such an operation. laws may have experienced initial pressure on personnel and facilities, this does not appear to have remained a continuing problem. As deliveries decrease in number and as bungled illegal abortions require less hospital time and space, the legal abortion demand will probably turn out to be less on balance. Some may initially find participation repugnant; some may continue to do so; their right to refuse should be granted, but in most situations to date, there have been sufficient personnel to fill in. 3. Substitute measures will not alleviate the men- 3. tal and physical health problems associated with unwanted pregnancy, excessive childbearing or pregnancies occurring in rapid succession. 4. The original reason for passing restrictive abortion laws was not for the protection of the fetus (there were no or few Catholics in the legislature at the time), nor for the protection of public morality, but for protection of the women from a then-dangerous surgical procedure, more dangerous than childbirth. Since the reverse is now true (childbirth is more risky than hospital abortion), the law ceases to be constitutional.38 4. These may be tragic cases, but alternatives to legal abortion should be developed instead: adequate sex information and contraception, facilities for adoption or homes for unwed mothers, adequate social insurance and housing so that these do not constitute reasons for illegally aborting. Yes they will. That may be true, but there are now new, compelling reasons for retention of the restrictive laws, whatever the reason for their original passage. 3 See Means, The Phoenix of Abortional Freedom: Is a Penumbral or Ninth-Amendment Right About to Arise From the Nineteenth-Century Legislative Ashes of a Fourteenth-Century Common-Law Liberty?, 17 N.Y.L.F. 335 (1971). SOCIAL ISSUES 1. Legalizing abortion in this state will create an 1. This was the warning in Colorado (first state to abortion "mecca" for the entire country. modify) and each successive state; such has not proved the case. A look at abortion ratios in Hungary, Japan, and even Scandinavia, and a comparative look at ratios in the United States will suffice to set at rest the description of New York, or Baltimore, or Denver as "abortion capital of the world." 2. Legal abortion abroad has not eliminated illegal 2. Mere modification doesn't, in fact, eliminate ilabortions. legal abortion; it only makes a dent. But farreaching liberalization (as in Japan and Hungary) does drastically curtail it (as reflected in decreased deaths and hospital admissions for "incompletes"), but the residual can be attributed to remaining restrictions and lack of privacy within the legal registration system. And possibly Hitler wouldn't have been born either. We do not miss the many persons not born because they were spontaneously aborted. If Beethoven's father had coughed at the critical moment, a being other than Ludwig would have been born instead. If the abortion "mecca" argument fails to prevent liberalization, then last-ditch efforts to curb the numbers of abortions performed takes the form of suggestions for residency requirements. Not only are they probably unconstitutional but the medical delivery system has been found adequate to handle the influx of non-residents wherever laws have so far been liberalized. Under restrictive laws, poor women suffer most, as reflected in their disproportionate mortality and underrepresentation in the few hospital abortions performed under restrictive laws. Legal abortion will be made available on a voluntary basis to those women who want to use it-there is no suggestion for coercive measures in a call for liberalization. Opponents 1. Legal abortion will decrease the number of un- 1. Society would do better to make substitute wanted children, battered children, child abuse cases, and possibly subsequent delinquency, drug addiction, and a host of social ills believed to be associated with neglectful parenthood. provision for unwanted children with adequate institutions and benefits to enable each child to have a warm and loving home. Many women who do not want a child when they discover their pregnancy do change their minds and love the child when it is born-and vice versa. It cannot Proponents 2. Legal abortion will decrease the number of illegitimate births. 3. Legal abortion could decrease the tragedy of the birth of deformed children. 5. Opponents statistically be proven that children born to women denied legal abortion fare any worse than those presumably willingly conceived; irresponsible parenthood stems from many causes and should be dealt with accordingly; unwanted children can turn out to be creative genuises, contributing much to society. 2. Although we are alarmed by the surging increase in illegitimacy, society must find alternate ways of preventing it sex education, adequate contraception or of dealing with it once it occurs adoption services, child care allowance, jobs for unwed women. 3. Legal abortion provides, the only humane dis- 4. 4. position of a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. Deformed children have as much right to live as others; many deformed persons lead normal and constructive lives. If you sanction the disposal of deformed fetuses, you may soon also decide to do away with the elderly and the useless, or the non-productive adult. Tragic as these cases may be, that is not adequate justification for the destruction of human life. (Opponents do, however, sometimes find rape so abhorrent that they would make an exception.) Under restrictive laws, rich women with know- 5. That is a matter of discriminatory application how obtain safe legal or quasi-legal abortions, 6. A bad law, unenforced and unenforceable, fos- 6. ters disrespect for the law in general. 7. The population explosion compels us to take 7. every means necessary to curb our growth rate. Since contraception alone seems insufficient to reduce fertility to the point of no-growth, and since population experts tell us that eliminating unwanted fertilty would go a long way toward achieving replacement ferility, we should permit all voluntary means of birth control (including abortion) so as to avert the necessity for coercive measures. of the law, not of its substance. Neither group should seek or obtain an abortion, safe or unsafe, legal or illegal. Many laws are difficult to enforce; that is not sufficient justification for their eradication. The United States is not experiencing a population explosion. Problems of pollution and environmental degradation are due more to other causes (increased affluence) than to population growth. Growth is good for business. If growth seems detrimental to our quality of life, then we should step up family planning programs utilizing contraception only, avoiding the necessity for including abortion. If you can use abortion to control the size of the population, then you will also justify eunthanasia and genocide. 8. Legal abortion will result in a reduction in wel- 8. There you are-genocide, the elimination of fare rolls. (As has often been remarked, the abortion reform effort makes strange bedfellows.) "undesirables." Society must make adequate provision for its needy --not merely ensure their non-birth. RIGHTS AND ResponsibilitIES Opponents 1. The father should have some say, or equal 1. say, since it's his fetus too. Proponents He's not a "father" (any more than she's a "mother") until a child is born. He may contribute 50% of the genes, but he does not have to bear and care for the outcome. A husband's consent clause violates the woman's right to |