Crime Of Abortion Candidly Discussed By Supreme Court Judge

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 1, 25 November 1947, Page 5

Crime Of Abortion Candidly Discussed By Supreme Court Judge

Why the State regards so seriously the offence of procuring a miscarriage was discussed by Mr Justice Fair in a summing up at a trial in the Supreme Court at New Plymouth recently. Such operations, he said, did serious harm to the community.

Offences of this kind tended to loosen moral standards and encourage promiscuous sexual relations. Not only did the practice result in fewer births but in .fewer marriages, and the destruction of the family life that provided the soundest permanent basis for community life. Besides these broad considerations behind the need for the law to suppress such practises there was the fact that medical science seemed to have established that an operation of this kind was likely to have a very harmful effect on the health of the woman upon v/hom it was pei’formed. Further, if more than one operation was performed medical science seemed to "show that the power of a woman for child-bearing was" destroyed. This aspect of the question was not generally publicly discussed, but in His Honour’s opinion it should be more widely known. In some countries Russia particularly —- where the practice of abortion was not forbidden by law, it was found after some years of examination of the results that it was harmful in its effects, and the law, as a result, was changed to make the practice illegal, as it was in most countries.

Persons who did this sort of thing for what money they could get were very often incompetent to perform the operation. Medical men occasionally performed an operation to save the life of the mother or to save* her from grave physical injury and in such circumstances it was lawful, but if done by an incompetent person there was a consequent danger from the operation itself to the life and health of the person concerned.