Gynecology: Disease of Unwanted Pregnancy

The subject was abortion, virtually unthinkable as a topic of public discussion only a few years ago. The sponsors of the Washington conference of physicians, sociologists, theologians and jurists were an unlikely pair: the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation and the Harvard Divinity School. Eunice Kennedy Shriver explained for the foundation that it was concerned with the subject because abortion has been recommended as a means of reducing the number of children doomed to mental retardation. Harvard Theologian Herbert W. Richardson said the conference was designed to put public discussion of abortion on a higher plane.

But the central question was...