Gynecology: New Grounds for Abortion

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As Governor John Love signed the bill in front of TV cameras, Colorado last week became the first state to legalize abortion on three principal medical grounds, with appropriate legal safeguards. Until Love's action, most abortions had been illegal in all 50 states. Although 45 states permitted "therapeutic abortion" to save a woman's life, that provision covered only 10,000 legal abortions a year. The total of illegal abortions in the U.S. is estimated at 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 a year, with a high rate of resulting infections and hundreds of deaths.

Follow the Lead. Based on a model code drafted by the American Law Institute, the Colorado statute authorizes abortion whenever a pregnancy 1) results from rape or incest, 2) threatens grave damage to the woman's physical or mental health, or 3) is likely to result in the birth of a child with a severe mental or physical defect. Even then, an abortion must be performed in a licensed hospital, and only after a panel of three doctors have unanimously approved the operation.

Similar legislation has died or been pigeonholed in a dozen states this year as a result of church opposition, mainly from Roman Catholics. Colorado's bill was carefully steered through the lower house by Denver Representative Richard D. Lamm, who kept the debate as unemotional as possible, relying on research prepared by the American Lutheran Church. Lamm gave Catholic opponents a quick history lesson.

Barring Transients. To the argument that "abortion has always been forbidden by the church," Lamm replied that until the reign of Pope Sixtus V (1585-90), termination of pregnancy was permissible within 40 days of conception for a male fetus and 80 days for a female.* Sixtus banned all abortions, but was reversed in the year after his death by Gregory XIV, who declared abortion illegal only after the fetus quickens. Not until 1869, said Lamm, did Pius IX revert the church to the position of Sixtus V. Lamm urged Catholics to follow the lead of Boston's Richard Cardinal Gushing, and not ask for secular law to enforce church doctrine. At the last minute, Lamm and his colleagues accepted an amendment that exempts any hospital employee from aiding in an abortion if he states in writing that he objects on moral or religious grounds. The vote: 40-21 in the house, 20-13 in the senate.

Since the legislature adjourned immediately after the vote, Governor Love could have buried the bill by a pocket veto. After weighing thousands of pro and con letters, Love declared that the bill tightened as well as liberalized the law, by limiting abortions to licensed, accredited hospitals and requiring approval by a medical panel. As for widely voiced fears that Colorado might become an "abortion mecca," Love was confident that physicians and hospitals would not risk their reputations and accreditations by lightly approving abortions for transients.

If Love had felt any need for medical support, he got it the day before he signed. Of 40,089 U.S. physicians who answered a poll by Modern Medicine, 87% favor liberalizing the abortion laws—including 49% of the Roman Catholics.