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stereotopic (no. 1) / bj 0503824192
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday, October 17, 1967
Liberalized abortion laws?
By Linda Sleffel
Former Kansan Assistant Managing Editor
Within the last year, Colorado, North Carolina and California have passed liberalized abortion laws. Similar bills have been presented in at least seven other states. Despite strong opposition by the Roman Catholic Church and by a few other groups and individuals, it seems likely that similar laws will be enacted in other states within a few years.
All of the new laws passed and most of those under consideration are patterned after a model bill drafted by the American Law Institute in 1959. Basically, they would allow a panel of doctors to sanction a therapeutic abortion when a pregnancy results from incest or forcible rape, when it threatens the physical or mental health of the mother or when it could reasonably be expected to produce a deformed or retarded infant. In addition, the new Colorado law allows abortions for girls under 16 who become pregnant as a result of statutory rape.
At its national convention last summer, the American Medical Association, long on record as opposing more liberal abortion laws, adopted a new policy similar to that of the new laws. Therapeutic abortions would be allowed if pregnancy threatens the life or health of the mother, if the infant might be born with disabling physical deformity or mental deficiency or if a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest threatens the mental or physical health of the mother. The AMA proposal also stipulates that documented evidence of the necessity of the abortion must be presented, that two other physicians must agree with the mother's own doctor and that the operation must be performed in an accredited hospital.
Public opinion favors
The legislative actions and the new stand of the AMA seem to be manifestations of general public opinion in favor of more liberal laws. In a poll conducted by the Stanford Chapter of the California Committee to Legalize Abortion, 72 per cent of the responding students favored legalized abortion, and 93 per cent felt that abortions should be as freely available to unmarried women as to married women. Last April, "Modern Medicine" announced that a survey of 40,000 doctors in all 50 states showed that 49.1 per cent of the responding Catholic physicians and 93.3 per cent of non-Catholic physicians approved of liberalized abortion laws.
While it seems almost certain that new laws will be passed, I feel that there are strong reasons why they should not be passed, reasons which at least deserve serious consideration before any changes are made in the existing laws, which generally permit abortions only to save the life or the health of the mother.
The essential disagreement in the abortion debate seems to be a moral and philosophical one; at what point does the developing fetus become a human being with the right to live? The heated nature of this debate can be seen in the fact that the Catholic Church and many other opponents of abortion consider the fetus a human being—with a soul—from the very moment of conception and see abortion as the actual murder of the unborn child. Supporters of abortion do not consider the fetus an actual person until much later in pregnancy and sometimes refer to the unborn infant as "a piece of fetal tissue."
The question is one of historical confusion. In ancient times, human life was thought to begin at the point of quickening—the infant's first discernible movement within the womb. And in fact, the Catholic Church sanctioned abortions until 1869, except for a brief period during the 16th century.
Biologists disagree
Biologists, while they now recognize that much of the infant's development takes place before the quickening, do not provide much help in determining the point at which the fetus can be considered a living human being. James C. Conniff writes in the New York Times Magazine, "By five or six days after conception, according to researchers, the human embryo has grown to about 150 cells. By eight weeks the fetus is recognizably human, with limbs, a heart that has been beating for a week or so, identifiable sex, and a brain that both produces and receives neuro-hormonal signals."
However, Thomas L. Hayes, a biophysicist in the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, writes in Commonweal that development of the fetus proceeds in important events, "but none represents a point in development where the biological form and function of the human individual are suddenly added. In fact, it apepars that such a point does not exist."
Since the question is not likely to be settled with any certainty, it seems best to leave it to individual consciences. I confess that I am one of those who regard the embryo as a living human being from the moment of conception. However, to a pregnant woman, the possible birth of a child who is unwanted, unloved, deformed or retarded, or even an unbearable financial burden, is a personal tragedy which makes such a philosophical debate seem trivial. The estimated one million illegal abortions performed each year in the United States in addition to some 10,000 legal ones, and the 4,000 or 5,000 women who die each year as a result of clumsy illegal abortions are witness to this fact. It is for this reason that I would like to point out some more practical arguments against abortion for reasons other than to save the mother's life or health.
To begin with, the bills under consideration would neither significantly cut the rate of illegal abortions nor make abortion a means of birth control. Strictly construed, as the Colorado law is being applied, they would not come close to allowing abortions on demand, and most of the women who are presently denied legal abortions would still be denied them. It is estimated that if all 50 states adopted the liberalized laws, legal abortions would increase by only two or three per cent. To be sure, there is some popular support for abortions on demand, but there is little likelihood of enacting such measures at the moment. The availability of contraceptives makes abortion increasingly less practical and less necessary as a means of birth control.
In spite of the system the laws set up for approving abortions, a number of practical and legal questions have been raised, especially in the case of the potentially deformed or retarded infant. For example, how great a chance of defect must exist before an abortion can be allowed? Who will determine this limit? What will happen if an abortion is performed and the fetus is then discovered to be normal? Does the fetus have a right to legal representation in the determination? In the light of a recent case in which a child with a birth defect was allowed to sue his mother for her carelessness during pregnancy, it seems possible that the unborn child's legal right may be recognized.
Medical progress a factor
It is in the case of these unborn infants threatened with deformities or retardation that abortion seems particularly unnecessary and unjustified, for the very medical progress that makes possible the diagnosis of such conditions before birth can provide ways to remedy a number of them. At the present time, tests can be made during the first few minutes after birth to test heart function, respiration, reflexes and other body functions. Potential causes of death and retardation can be diagnosed and treated before they damage the child. A vaccine for German measles, one of the leading factors in birth defects, is now available on a limited basis and soon will be generally available. Other medical possibilities are even more exciting.
These new developments, coupled with greater realization of the vulnerability of the fetus to drugs and X-rays and consequent care to prevent damage to the fetus, make the picture ever more hopeful.
Thus, I feel that opposition to abortion need not evade the problems caused by unwanted pregnancies or possible birth defects. Certainly in a nation with the resources of the United States today, there are better social and medical methods of dealing with these problems.
With these alternatives available, I feel that abortion represents an unnecessary disregard for human life. The birth of a child who is unwanted, unloved, deformed or mentally deficient is undoubtedly an evil, for such children truly number among the world's most unfortunate people. But it seems to me a greater evil that we should choose to deal with these unfortunates simply by destroying them.
"Be Assured We Are Keeping Her In A Secure Place"
©1967 HERBLOCK
THE WASHINGTON POST
Without Guevara
By Francis L. McCarthy UPI Latin American Editor
The death of Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia has broken the back of the Communist insurrectionary movement in that country and, perhaps, the rest of guerrilla-infested South America.
Guvarara's assignment from Moscow routed through Cuba was to establish "Sierra Maestras" from Venezuela down through the Andes to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina.
The Communists have never made any secret of their lifelong ambition to bring bloody revolution to the Andean third of the American continent.
It was in the Sierra Maestra of eastern Cuba that Guevara helped Fidel Castro bring about establishment of the first Communist satellite in the new world.
It would seem illogical to assume that international communism would abandon world conquest through subversion.
The Communists failed in Bolivia, as earlier in Venezuela, Colombia and Peru, because they counted on nuclei of trained and experienced revolutionaries enlisting the sympathy, aid and eventually, armed support of the peasantry.
It would seem more logical to presume a brief breathing spell for democracy in the new world pending profound Communist analysis of errors and defeats to date, a revision of strategy—and selection of a new field commander.
The Communist revolution failed in Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela and Colombia because it made no effort to disguise its ideological origin. It triumphed in Cuba because Castro did not tear the veil off the evil nature of his conspiracy until months after the triumph of the revolution.
The forces of democracy, national and international, which aided Castro to final victory were to subsequently fall victim to the Communist state they involuntarily aided in establishing.
The conclusion to be drawn would seem to be clear. That from the experience of Cuba the Latin American masses, even when they are for communist subversion, have not to date, swallowed the Moscow line.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
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