Abortionist Convicted

One of the best abortionists in the U.S. went to jail last week. She is Manhattan's Mrs. Alice Mary Heinrich Chairman, 56, a plump, kindhearted Hungarian of good family, with a medical degree from a Budapest medical school.

In Austria in 1921 she married her fourth husband, Imre Czernayack, exiled Hungarian revolutionary. Abortion was at that time de rigeur among far left Communists all over the world, as no good female revolutionary was supposed to be hampered by children. (For this reason, many good abortionists are Russian.) Alice and Czernayack came to the U.S. soon after their marriage. Shortly after their arrival they changed their name to

Chairman and she got a medical license.

The license was revoked in 1940 when Dr. Chairman (now married to a fifth husband) was put on probation in cennection with an abortion case. Last week's conviction was for operating (fee: $100) on a 19-year-old Army wife already the mother of twins. Sentence: one year. Dr. Chairman served three months on a similar charge a year ago.

The unusual thing about Dr. Chairman is that she is a good practitioner. Most abortionists have only a smattering, if any, of medical training. A run-of-the-mill abortionist arrested in Manhattan last week (while operating on a patient lying on a kitchen table) never studied medicine but had done 200 operations since last July.

In 1940, Dr. Fredrick Joseph Taussig estimated there were 681,600 U.S. abortions yearly, killing 8,000 mothers and making many more ill or sterile. A.M. A. Journal Editor Morris Fishbein estimates there has been a 20 to 40% increase since Pearl Harbor -- perhaps 1,000,000 cases a (year. In a year, less than 3,000,000 U.S.

babies are born. Even well-performed abortions are dangerous. For this reason, Russia reversed her abortion stand in 1936, made a ruling similar to U.S. laws: only permissible abortions are those necessary to save mothers' lives.

In the U.S., only about one-fifth of the abortion seekers are unmarried. The rest are women who do not want to be bothered with babies (or whose husbands do not), do not want to lose jobs, think they have enough children already, cannot afford children, or fear childbirth.

The recent increase is attributed mostly to women who do not want to lose war-plant jobs. The frightened sweethearts of irresponsible servicemen have somewhat swelled the abortion figures. The Y.W.C.A. claims that if such a girl comes to them, they can almost always persuade her to have her baby, can often persuade her beau to marry her. Unfortunately, most single girls in trouble think abortion is the only alternative to suicide.

The standard way of attacking abortion is to arrest and convict the operators. This is expensive and has never brought any decrease in the number of illegal operations. Everybody knows that abortions will decrease when pregnancy is free from financial worry and social ostracism. But no one has yet figured out how to achieve those freedoms.

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