PPFA Abortion Conference, 1955
Legal Aspects of Abortion in the United States

"The sooner the public is acquainted with the basis facts and implications of abortion in the United States, the better. Only through widespread knowledge of the situation can responsible public action be taken to correct the conditions that underlie the high incidence of illegal abortions in this country."
Frederick H. Falls, MD
Past President, Am. Assoc. for Maternal and Infant Health
Past President, AMA Section of Ob/Gyn

Presentation by Edwin M. Schur
Senior Student, Yale University School of Law, New Haven, CT

Schur summariezed US abortion laws, which despite his lamentation that they were "far from uniform," fairly consistently forbade abortion except for extreme medical indications. The greatest variation was not in what abortions were permitted and which were forbidden, but in what the penalties were. These typically included fines, as well as prison sentences ranging from less to one year to as many as 14 years.

Although many states provided penalties for the aborting woman on the books, Schur indicated that "to my knowledge, there are no recorded American prosecutions of aborted women, under these laws."

Schur concluded by lamenting that the laws did not allow abortion for the women who had been exposed to Rubella (and who faced a 20% risk of the baby being adversely affected in some way). He complained of the degree of leeway give to physicians' professional judgment, which he noted "leads to the tendency to perform the smallest possible number of 'therapeutic' abortions. In my opinion, this inevitably leads to a rise in illegal ones and in the abortion death rate."

The presentation was then joined by Milton Helpern, MD
Chief Medical Examiner, New York City

Helpern began by commenting, "I don't know of a single instance in which an abortion done in an approved hospital, presumably for therapeutic purposes, was ever questioned by the courts."

Helpern described the difficulty in prosecuting abortion cases because of the difficulty in ascertaining who the guilty party actually was. (It was a strange and nearly universal phenomenon noted among women hospitalized from criminal abortions that they exhibited much more concern about protecting their abortionists from prosecution than about protecting other women from their abortionists.) Helpern notes, however, that the number of fatal abortions seen by the Medical Examiner's Office had fallen considerably. Although Helpern outright attributes the fall to improved medical care, in the discussion that follows some credit is given to the prosecution of abortionists when women die.

The discussion then came to the legal responsibility of physicians to report all known or suspected criminal abortions. Was this a violation of confidentiality? Or does the physician have a duty to report a crime? There was disagreement on whether it constituted a breach of confidentiality to report a confirmed abortion. All seemed in agreement, though, that reporting suspected but not confirmed abortions was a bad precident.