Category: Law

(Correspondence) Abortion Law Reform

Denis Pells Cocks

British Medical Journal, BMJ
British Medical Journal

Extract
Nowadays therapeutic abortion is performed relatively rarely for organic disease, and the indications are largely psychiatric with often associated secondary social factors. Whilst some clarification of the old law may be necessary in order that all can understand the situation, we must beware lest in reframing the law this results in the opening of the floodgates in the demand for termination on more liberal grounds.

Cocks DP. (Correspondence) Abortion Law Reform. Br Med J. 1966 Feb 26;1(5486):539.

(Correspondence) Abortion Law Reform

Robert Burns

British Medical Journal, BMJ
British Medical Journal

Extract
It seems reasonable, therefore, to conclude that an increasingly large number of therapeutic abortions will be dealt with privately in the future. I am therefore perturbed that an attempt is being made to limit the activities of medical practitioners who are not in the N.H.S. I refer to the desire of Lord Dilhorne to make it necessary that at least one of the two doctors who will take responsibility for a therapeutic abortion must be in the N.H.S.

Burns R. (Correspondence) Abortion Law Reform. Br Med J. 1966;1(5485):482.

The Problem of Social Control of the Congenital Defective: Education, Sterilization, Euthanasia

Foster Kennedy

The American Journal of Psychiatry
The American Journal of Psychiatry

Extract
. . . What to do with the hopelessly unfit? I had thought at a younger time of my life that the legalizing of euthanasia . . . Now my face is set against the legalization of euthanasia for any person, who, having been well, has at last become ill . . . But I am in favor of euthanasia for those hopeless ones who should never have been born-Nature’s mistakes.

. . . should the social organism grow up and forward to the desire to relieve decently from living the utterly unfit, sterilize the less unfit, and educate the still less unfit-then the Law must also grow, along with the amplitude of our new ideas for a wiser and better world, and fit the growing organism easily and well; and thereafter civilization will pass on and on in beauty.

Kennedy F. The Problem of Social Control of the Congenital Defective: Education, Sterilization, Euthanasia. Am J Psychiatry. 1942 Jul;99(1):13-16.