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Bringing it back on point.

The Right of Abortion
By Harriet Pilpel
JUNE 1969 – www_theatlantic_com/magazine/archive/1969/06/the-right-of-abortion/303366/

… Notwithstanding all this, we continue to maintain strict antiabortion laws on the books of at least four fifths of our states, denying freedom of choice to women and physicians and compelling the “unwilling to bear the unwanted.” Yet, as Doctor Christopher Tietze and Sarah Lewit point out in the Scientific American for January, 1969: “Abortion is still the most widespread…method of fertility control in the modern world.”

According to experts who participated in a United Nations Conference on World Population in Belgrade in 1965, abortion is indeed the chief method of birth control in the world today, and they estimated that about 30 million pregnancies are purposely terminated by abortion each year. Of these, studies indicate that almost one million are in the United States.

Since, however, abortions are still so difficult to obtain, we force the birth of millions more unwanted children every year. If we really want to cut our population growth rate on a voluntary basis, we should make abortion available on a voluntary basis, at least in the early stages of pregnancy. When Japan liberalized its abortion laws some years back, it halved its rate of population growth in a decade. …

… It would seem that abortion-law reform—and better, repeal—is an idea whose time has come. It is more than time that it be supported by all those who want to slow down our population growth rate without resorting to coercion or compulsion. As Secretary-General U Thant and many of the UN agencies have repeatedly said, “The opportunity to decide the number and spacing of children is a basic human right.”

Until such time as we have a perfect contraceptive universally available and invariably used, voluntary abortion should be infinitely preferred to compulsory sterilization or compulsory birth control, and that may well be the choice. …