Abortion and the Psychiatrist

Extract

The Catholic psychiatrist can justly feel that the Ramsey Committee’s findings are likely to make harder rather than easier his present work in the moral setting in which he conceives it: because mainly of the indeterminate, even muddled, attitude taken up by the Committee towards the status of the foetus and the psychiatric possibilities in the mother; because secondarily no understanding is shown of the present difficulties of the Catholic psychiatrist confronted with the demand for termination.

In speaking thus frankly, there is no intention to impugn the Committee’s breadth of vision, constructive desire or sincerity. The writer has the Committee’s chairman, Professor Ramsey, as a personal friend and wise and far-seeing administrative colleague. Acquainted also with the other two Oxford dons on the Committee, R. M. Hare, and Basil Mitchell, and with the Committee’s psychiatrist, Portia Holman, he knows all three of them for their humane concern. These characteristics pervade the Report. The first two chapters sum up admirably the reasons for the present importance of abortion; the history of British legislative concern for the question abutting in the two currently relevant statutes and their successful assailment by Alec Bourne, the gynaecologist; and that of Christian canonical concern from Tertullian onwards, including the period of distinction (never, it seems, one of essential nature but only of ground for varying the penalty for infanticide), between foetus animatus and foetus inanimatus. The Committee concludes Chapter II with the affirmation that the subject is a proper concern for the law on the primary ground, which any Catholic will endorse, that every human being has the right to life unless his unlawful act forfeits it.