wallace@ucbvax.ARPA (David E. Wallace) (08/10/85)
I ran across a quote the other day, which struck me as interesting in view of the discussion here about the profitability of abortions: "The practice [abortion], furthermore, is not a hard one. It does not involve the usual hardships of the life of the medical man. Patients come flocking to him and in the space of a few hours he can collect enormous fees. The costs of an abortion range from $50 to $250 (a midwife, of course, charges much less), and a skilled abortionist can perform a number of them per hour. A condition develops that unfits the abortionist for a return to practice with its customary difficulties and its ordinary $3 and $5 fees." If the style didn't tip you off, the numbers in that last line should be a dead giveaway that this is not a contemporary text. In fact, it is taken from "Abortion: Legal or Illegal," by A. J. Rongy, M.D. (New York: Vangard Press, 1933, p. 137). Quick summary, based on skimming through the rest of the book: the author surveys the then-illegal but (by his account) common practice of abortion, and concludes that the prohibition on abortions is at least as ineffective and as destructive to society as the better-known prohibition on alcohol. What I found interesting about this text in light of recent discussion is that the numbers quoted for the cost of an abortion don't seem to have changed much in the last 50+ years, whereas the fees for ordinary practice have increased from 1-3 orders of magnitude (depending on what the "ordinary $3 and $5 fees" were for). I would assume that the cost to the doctor has also risen significantly over that time, although I have no data on this. Although I can't calculate the relative profitability of abortion to childbirth today, it would certainly seem that both the relative and absolute profitability of abortion have decreased significantly over the last 50 years. Dave Wallace (...!ucbvax!wallace wallace@Berkeley)