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Doctors, meanwhile, are seeking to make abortion easier, safer—and, ideally, unnecessary. Because the New York experience has shown that early abortions are only one-sixth as likely as later operations to result in complications, physicians and counselors are trying to educate women to come in as soon as they have missed a period. Research is also progressing on substances that can safely induce menstruation when it is late. This would be not merely a morning-after pill, but perhaps, eventually, a fortnight-after pill.
Experience with conventional contraceptives has shown, however, many couples do not seem willing or able to use them consistently or properly. Easily available abortion may even carry with it the risk of promoting still more sexual irresponsibility, the attitude that a lost gamble in bed will be easily remedied on a clinic table. Yet if freedom to get an abortion virtually on demand is to become as common in this country as it is in Japan and parts of Europe, then a correlative sense of responsibility is necessary. Research and public education concerning contraception must be promoted even more vigorously than they have been. Ideally, abortion should be relegated to its proper role: an available but rarely used last resort.