La demande abortive et ses reponses dans la periode intermediaire. (The demand for abortion and the medical response during the intermediary period)
Geraud, R.
Contraception Fertilite Sexualite 1(1): 5-7
1973
ISSN/ISBN: 0301-861X PMID: 12276846 Document Number: 66348
The unconscious and conscious motives of French physicians absolutely opposed to abortion, those who are ambivalent, and the "abortionists", as well as of pregnant women accepted or refused are expounded upon as found in this interim when the punitive abortion law of 1920 is ignored but liberalized legislation is not yet ennacted. The author states that physicians who decide whether to abort acquire a phobia against women and their profession to avoid the moral problem. Ideologic abortionists act by convenience only, using the woman's demand as the indication, and become obsessed with abortion. Uncertain physicians are pathologically afflicted with guilt, conflict, and doubt. Women refused are humiliated, ambivalent, aggressive, never reconciled with themselves, although they become reconciled with their pregnancy. Women given abortion are forgiven socially, but unconsciously feel guilty and frustrated, because loss of a child is equivalent to loss of a phallus. The author wondered if there were studies of postabortion psychopathology in women permitted or refused an abortion. He believes that the "anti-gynecology" of evacuating the uterus (as opposed to real gynecology that fills the uterus) should be submitted to the single criterion of health for its own sake.