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Florida currently has an influx of skilled Cuban refugee doctors who once made Havana an abortion mecca and are now doing the same for Miami, where some 30 abortion mills last year paid off assorted officials and took in an estimated $20 million. But all too many U.S. abortionists are dangerous defrocked doctors—alcoholics, drug addicts, sexual perverts—or worse, bungling amateurs who don't hesitate to finish a sloppy job by tossing clients off tenement roofs or dismembering those who die. Equally sobering are the slum women who cannot afford even amateurs and do it themselves with hatpins, coat hangers and putrid soap solutions, which are often followed by lethal infection. Most desolate of all, perhaps, are those who cannot and dare not abort. Among the poor, who still know little about contraceptives, one result is ever more unwanted children, the key carriers of delinquency, divorce and crime. In 20 years, illegitimate births in the U.S. have more than doubled, to 291,000 a year, rising to 26% of all nonwhite births, compared with 3.6% of whites.
Toward Reform
All the polls show that Americans heavily favor reform. Of 40,089 U.S. physicians who answered a survey by Modern Medicine last spring, 87% favored liberalizing the abortion laws—including 49% of the Catholics. According to the National Opinion Research Center, 71% of Americans favor legal abortion if the woman's health is endangered, 56% in rape cases and 55% if there is a strong chance that the baby may have a serious defect. Conversely, 80% are against abortion for unwed girls and 83% against it for mothers who do not want more children—the main seekers of abortion.
As in other sex-law issues, the surveys suggest that Americans tend to disapprove publicly what they practice privately. Now the consensus is having political effects. Last spring Colorado became the first state to legalize hospital abortions on three principal medical grounds. Based on a model code drafted by the American Law Institute, the new statute authorizes abortion whenever a pregnancy 1) threatens grave damage to the woman's physical or mental health, 2) results from rape or incest, or 3) is likely to produce a child with a severe mental or physical defect. Even then, abortions require unanimous approval by a hospital panel of three doctors. North Carolina has followed suit, but does not require panels. California's new law is similar to Colorado's but bars abortion of potentially defective children. In varying degrees, the same formula is up for debate in at least ten other state legislatures.