Abortion is now legal in practically all countries of Europe in the U.S. and Canada, in a few countries of Latin America, notably Cuba and Paraguay, in some countries of Africa, such as Zambia and South Africa, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most countries of Asia, especially India and China where it is not just legal but strongly promoted by the state. In China it is often forcibly imposed on women pregnant with their second child.

Illegal but practiced

In many countries, such as Thailand, Brazil, Indonesia and some Middle Eastern countries, it is not legal except for very restricted reasons but is sometimes widely practiced (under whatever heading) and is tolerated by the authorities as a means of birth control or population control. As such, it is often part of a package imposed on the countries concerned by foreign banks, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, as a condition for the receipt of loans.

Communist Russia was the first country to make abortion legal; that was very soon after the 1917 Revolution. Since then, it was gradually imposed on the countries of the former Soviet Union and then one by one (most during the 1950s) on the countries of Eastern Europe which were under its control. Prior to that, occupied Japan in 1948 also passed an abortion law.

In the West

In the West, Britain in 1939 was one of the first to relax the ban on abortion which was contained in its 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act. It was also the first to legalize what amounted to abortion-on-demand by the David Steele-sponsored Abortion Act of 1967. The state of Colorado also legalized abortion in 1967, the first U.S. state to do so.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, most other Western countries and many British Commonwealth countries (such as India and Zambia) have followed suit and passed laws sanctioning abortion – with some restrictions (as in Germany and Italy) and without restrictions, in effect, up to birth (as in the U.S. and more recently Belgium). In 1990 Britain updated its law to also allow abortion-on-demand to birth, for practically any reason.

Familiar methods

The method by which abortion is made legal in a country invariably has nothing to do with the will of the people. From Communist Russia to Capitalist America, it has been imposed on the nations concerned by fiat of the ruling elite or their representatives, such as the Communist Party in the case of Russia, or the Supreme Court in the case of America. In countries where a semblance of the democratic process was observed, such as in Britain, Canada and Italy, the whole procedure was surrounded by manipulation and deception.

The Bourne case in Britain in 1939 was a classic case of the law being flouted in order to change it. That chase concerned an abortion performed on a 14-year-old said to have been gang raped by a group of guardsmen. The doctor involved (Bourne) was a member of the Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) who had campaigned openly for changes in the law to make abortion more available on medical grounds. With the involvement of ALRA, the girl was referred to Dr. Bourne from ST. Thomas’s teaching hospital, with the statement that the gynecologist there refused to abort her because he was a Catholic. As there was no Catholic gynecologist then on the staff of St. Thomas’s Hospital, this statement was clearly untrue.

Dr. Bourne had the test case he was waiting for and arranged the abortion, later notifying the police that he had performed it. In his defense, he pleaded that he aborted the girl to save her from a serious mental illness and enlisted a psychotherapist to give evidence on his behalf. The judge (in applying the current law at that time) instructed the jury to take a reasonable view of the words “for the preservation of the life of the mother. I do not think that it is contended that those words mean merely for the preservation of the life of the mother from instant death…The law is not that the doctor has got to wait until the unfortunate women is in peril of immediate death and then at the last moment snatch her from the jaws of death.”

So the judge interpreted the law to say that if there was a chance that the mother would become a physical or mental wreck if she went to term, an abortion would be lawful. He gave every indication that the jury should find Bourne not guilty, and they duly acquitted him. This judgment effectively decriminalized abortion and opened the floodgates.

An interesting aside on Dr. Bourne’s conduct is that in accepting that the girl had been raped, he had in fact assumed the guardsmen’s guilt before they had been tried. This case set the scene almost thirty years later for the 1967 Abortion Act passed by the British House of Commons – on a Friday evening when most provincial MPs, who were likely to have opposed the Bill, had already left for their constituencies.

Organized confusion

The Italian experience was also deceptive. The 1978 law which allowed abortion caused such an uproar that a referendum was called in 1981 to put the matter to the people. The setting of this referendum was a classic case of organized confusion, with three propositions being voted for on the same ballot – one to extend the law even more, one to restrict it (but not to delete it completely), and one to leave it the way it was. There was, in fact, no pro-life option for the electorate to choose.

As a consequence, many convinced pro-life people did not vote, as they felt they could not vote for any proposal which would allow for the taking of innocent human life for any purpose. The result was that the status quo of the 1978 abortion law was retained as a “happy medium,” and the pro-life movement, in defeat, was also seen to have compromised its position by campaigning for a law allowing limited abortion.

Even in cases where a referendum went in favor of the pro-life position, such as in North Dakota, Michigan and New York in the U.S., that did not prevent abortion being imposed on those states. In the case of New York it came by a veto of the referendum results by the then governor Nelson Rockefeller, and ultimately by the infamous 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which imposed abortion-on-demand, in effect, on all 50 states.

That Supreme Court decision has since been generally accepted, even by those in favor of legalized abortion, as having been seriously flawed in its legal reasoning. The “right to privacy” on which the ruling was based was deemed by a previous court to have been found “in the emanations from the penumbra of the 14th Amendment: of the U.S. Constitution. Now an “emanation” is defined as a “vapor” and a “penumbra” as a “shadow”; so the right to abortion was found “in the vapors from the shadow of the 14th Amendment,” or, more accurately, it was invented by the U.S. Supreme Court, just as the right to privacy had been invented by another Court a few years earlier. However, it is fairly certain that if it was not the right to privacy on which it based its decision, the Supreme Court would have been equally capable of inventing “vapors” from another “shadow” in the Constitution on which to base it.

The fact that the alleged rape which was the bases of the Roe vs. Wade decision never actually took place, and that the child born to the “victim” is now nineteen years old and pro-life, is just so much water under the bridge to those who were determined to effect the sacrifice of one-and-a-half million real victims annually in the U.S. (or twice that number if you include their deluded mothers) regardless of the people’s wishes.

Another “rape” case, which was the basis for changing the French law, was also of a questionable nature. The girl involved had what she described as “forced sexual intercourse” with her boyfriend. Her cause was taken up by a well-known Marxist who turned the story into an emotional rape drama, during which the girl underwent an illegal abortion. As a result of the septicemia which resulted, she came to the attention of the police and was brought to trial. Her subsequent acquittal was the vehicle by which abortion was decriminalized in France. Legislation allowing abortion-on-demand during the first 12 weeks was passed two years later in 1975. There is now no legal time limit on abortions where there is a perceived risk to the mother’s “health” or to “fetal health.”

Mr. Sherwin is the secretary of the International Right of Life and lives in Rome. Part II will follow in a coming issue.