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2 Loy. U. L. A. L. Rev. 1 (1969)
Religion, Morality, and Abortion: A Constitutional Appraisal

handle is hein.journals/lla2 and id is 7 raw text is: RELIGION, MORALITY, AND ABORTION: A CONSTITUTIONAL APPRAISAL by Mr. Justice Tom C. Clark* Thought without action is an abortion; action withoui thought is folly.1 Our society is currently in the midst of a sexual revolution which has cast the problem of abortion into the forefront of religious, medi- cal, and legal thought. In my day at the bar all discussion of abortion was taboo. For more than sixty years the American Medical Associ- ation had a negative policy respecting abortion. The A.M.A. 'often sought the prosecution of any doctor who. engaged in the practice of abortion, regardless of the merits of the individual situation. Society's general attitude toward abortion was such that the patient was ostracised and the doctor was disgraced. As in so many other facets of its moral code, however, society was hypocritical in its behavior. Despite the public pronouncements against its practice, abortions increased, especi- ally among married women, and judicial action against the participants decreased in proportion.2 Some social commentators argue that Freud prepared the way for the Kinsey Report, which in turn set the' stage for the sexual permis- siveness that Reinhold Niebuhr called moral anarchism.' This per- meating permissiveness engendered a need for more efficient birth control methods, such as the pill, and precipitated the doom of the old hypocrisy. The law, lagging behind as usual, began to emerge from its quagmire and rid itself of the archaic restraints on abortion. In 1962 the Ameri- can Law Institute proposed an affirmative* policy declaring that the termination of pregnancy is justified whenever (1) its continuance would gravely impair the physical or mental health of the mother, (2) the child would be born with grave physical or mental defects, or * Associate Justice, Supreme Court of United States (Retired), 1949-67. 1 The Wisdom of Nehru, 34 WIsDoM 62 (The Wisdom of -India ed. 1960). 2 R. THOMLINSON, POPULATION DYNAMICS 198-99 (1965). 3 Niebuhr, Kinsey and the Moral Problem of Man's Sexual Life, in AN ANALYSIS OP THE KINSEY REPORTS ON SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IN THE HUMAN MALE AND FEMALE 62 (D. Geddes ed. 1954).

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