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How? The reformers have solid answers: not by public indifference but by more birth control information and family support. Not by moral absolutes toward unwed pregnancy but by moral concern for each concrete situation. Not by punitive laws but by medical freedom to help panicky women make rational choices—and if need be, have safe, early, cheap abortions. For both mother and fetus, the reform movement holds, such is the real due process required. Much of this might come about simply by more liberal interpretation of existing state laws. Court cases going back to 1929 give U.S. doctors almost the exclusive right to decide when abortion is necessary to save maternal life; several decisions hold that the danger need not be imminent or certain; in the future, even life-shortening unhappiness might be a legal ground. But few doctors are ready to rely on those decisions in the absence of a Supreme Court ruling.
That leaves state legislatures facing the most important question in the debate: Why not repeal all abortion laws? Last month that suggestion came from Jesuit Theologian-Lawyer Robert F. Drinan, dean of Boston College Law School and chairman of the American Bar Association's family-law section. In attacking the limited-abortion plan, Father Drinan argued that repeal has "at least the merit of not involving the law and society in the business of selecting those persons whose lives may be legally terminated."
Ultimately, of course, the issue may become academic. The rapid development of contraceptives suggests that women may some day become essentially infertile and thus free to decide precisely when they wish to become fertile. Such safe, do-it-yourself abortifacients as the morning-after and the once-a-month pill are also likely to make abortion entirely a private matter. Still, those pills are far from being perfected—and may well run afoul of anti-abortion laws. Meanwhile, even present contraceptives do not solve the abortion problem.
Along with poverty, ignorance and moral strictures against birth control, the unpredictability of human sexual practices makes unwanted pregnancy inevitable. The way to deal with the problem forthrightly is on terms that permit the individual, guided by conscience and intelligence, to make a choice unhampered by archaic and hypocritical concepts and statutes.