Abortion Due For Analysis At Meetings

An international Conference on Abortion, sponsored by the Harvard Divinity School with the cooperation of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, will be held in Washington, D.C., Sept. 6-8.

The conference plans to bring together experts from the fields of medicine, law, the social sciences, philosophy and religion. Participants will include six Harvard professors, Dean Griswold of the Law School, Mary Bunting, President of Radcliffe, and such figures as Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas and Whitney Young, Executive Director of the Urban League.

Ethical Issues

As the Divinity School sees it, the conference will:

* Explore ethical and philosophical issues: When does a person become a person? Does life begin at the moment of conception, when the heartbeat starts, or when he emerges from the womb?

* Clarify factual statements: At the moment there are no certain figures on the annual number of abortions in the country, and calculations vary from one abortion in every 5 births to one in every 20. (The conference will also take up the socio-economic aspect of abortion, which has been largely overlooked).

* Attempt to overcome the tendency to polarize the issue of abortion on religious lines: Rather than making it a Catholic non-Catholic issue, it will encourage ecumenical understanding;

* Try to increase interdisciplinary dialogue on the matter: In the past, the American Law Institute, the American Medical Association and other professional bodies have made statements on abortion, but they don't always agree. At the last big conference on abortion, in 1955, there was a serious disagreement between biologists and psychologists. The author of the major psychological report even refused to sign the conference's summary statement. This conference proposes to help smooth out such differences