Extract While physicians opposed to abortion have responded with articles . . . most doctors from the pro-choice side have remained quiet. Dr. Robbie Mahood is an exception. . . . “I certainly don’t support abortion as a method of birth control”. Has the abortion issue creat- ed divisions in the medical profession? “Certainly there is disagreement within the profession about this, but this probably reflects the division within the general population”, Mahood said. “I would guess that there is a pro-choice majority [among physicians].”
Extract The CMA will establish an ad hoc committee to review the association’s abortion policy in the wake of the Supreme Court of Canada’s Jan. 28 ruling that over- turned Criminal Code restrictions on abortion.
Extract The adjectives range from “bloody outrageous” to “appalling and disgusting”, for just about no one is satisfied with a therapeutic abortion service that annually prompts hundreds of Newfoundland women to leave the province to get abortions. . . many women cannot get abortions in Newfoundland, in part because most of the province’s doctors won’t perform them, and in part because community standards are conservative. . . Dr. Carl Robbins, medical director of the General Hospital, thinks local doctors are unwilling to perform abortions because of personal conviction and the influence of values developed while training.
Extract Canada’s standard of obstetric care is excellent, and although some improvements can be made, they can be carried out within the existing system. That is the main finding from a major CMA study on obstetric care, the first of its kind in Canada, which has been sent to association members with this issue of CMAJ. . . . There is no reason for Canada to introduce a midwifery system since there is neither a calculable need nor a significant demand, the CMA has concluded.
Extract Statistics Canada has just released its detailed report of abortion in Canada for 1975. The report carries much more information than its predecessors. There are, for example, new sections on teenage abortions, sterilizations concurrent with abortions and associated complications, comparisons with abortion rates in other selected countries and gestation weeks by selected demographic and medical characteristics.
Extract [Outline of the findings of the Badgley Committee studying the operation of the abortion law.] A trend seen since 1970 is the reduction in the number of “back street abortions” and the sharp decrease in morbidity and mortality stemming from such procedures. Perhaps the most telling sentence in the 474-page report is this: “The procedure in the Criminal Code for obtaining abortion is in practice illusory for many Canadian women.
Extract . . . This year’s abortion debate departed from tradition by ignoring the ethics of the procedure in favour of a call for steps to ensure the safety of Alberta women. The association passed a series of resolutions aimed at urging women to avoid unwanted pregnancies or, if that fails, to seek abortion counselling as soon as possible to reduce the number of more dangerous late abortions. . .
Extract The annual report of the section of obstetrics and gynecology engendered some highly emotional debate on abortion in spite of the attempts of the chairman, Dr. W. J. Jory, to keep diatribes, charges and accusations to a minimum. Little new was added to forming a solution to the problem.
Extract Dr. Doran said that there are now 12 centres in Canada where genetic amniocentesis is performed, including his own group in Toronto which has done 195 in less than three years. The overall goal of the technique, he said, is to reduce genetic disease by therapeutic abortion (technically illegal under the present Criminal Code) and eventually by prevention.
Extract [The following extract from an appreciation of the situation by the senior medical officer after 24 hours’ contact with the camp will serve to illustrate the state of affairs at the beginning.] . . .
. . .It has been found necessary due to the lack of doctors and nurses from home to employ German doctors and nurses. No doubt the additional medical skill thus added have proved beneficial in a general sense, but the patients are naturally terrified of being looked after by Germans even under supervision, remembering how they were tortured in the past. It has been established that patients were often given intravenous infusions of benzol and creosote by the German medical staff, so that now, when the doctors approach with hydrolysate for intravenous infusion, the patients often cry out begging not to be taken to the crematorium. . .
Conclusion This is a brief preliminary report of Belsen Camp to give the medical profession in Britain some idea of the medical problems involved. It is a complete understatement. No words can describe the stench of decaying faeces, rotting bodies, and burning rags, which in the first weeks one could begin to smell miles from the camp, and it can but be left to the imagination of the medical men who read this article to appreciate what the doctors, nurses, and students at Belsen have endured and accomplished. Since the camp was taken over from the Germans more than 20,000 internees have been buried; some 30,000 are left, of whom 11,200 are in the main hospital area. . . .
