Asbury Park Press from Asbury Park, New Jersey • Page 21

ASBURY PARK SUNDAY PRESS, July 9, 1972 A2t Abortions: Also a Way of Life to Some lV3 I -r I 3 I'M V-, 4 1 JL wr A lilt IA V- jW a I.Cf f4 Policy Attracting -u A few months ago a Belgrade hotel worker noticed on agitated West German female guest, who said she was the wife of an important industrialist. The family doctor was called in to give a certification to a local hospital. A few months later the hotel worker received a grateful note of thanks from the visitor and a kitchen mixing machine produced by her husband's firm. Yugoslav hospitals charge foreigners the eiuivalent of $50 for abortions. But they do not encourage foreigners to come.

Similarly, Poland has made it difficult for foreign women to get abortions after a scandal involving a doctor's extortion ring in the port city of Szczecin some years ago. Scandinavian women who came for cheap abortions were photographed and blackmailed, it was disclosed. The liberal abortion policies of Yugoslavia and the Communist bloc have had one undesired result: Making the area seem a potential haven to West European and American women seeking abortion. Yugoslavia, with its open borders to the West, has been especially appealing. Foreign women are not entitled to an abortion on demand, but sometimes one is arranged through connections.

Several years ago an American woman and her husband arrived in Belgrade on a Yugoslav travel agency's package tour that included an abortion, a three-day stay in an A-category hotel, and round-trip fare for slightly more than $1,000. While thousands of Yugoslavs go to West Germany for jobs, the flow is the other way for abortions. Vandals Prey on a Historic Dwelling One day last month, an unmarried 16-year-old girl and her mother went to a downtown medical clinic in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where about 50 other women had gathered. Almost all the women in the waiting room had one thing in common: An unwanted pregnancy. In most parts of the United States, where abortion policy is still restrictive, the young girl's plight might have thrown the family into a crisis.

But not in the abortion culture of most nations in Eastern Europe. Here abortions are a routine event and were so long before the lines grew at clinics in New York City or Washington or Im Angeles. Indeed, abortion has become a way of life over the past 15 years in much of Communist Eastern Europe, an extensive experience with many lessons to tell. It has helped reshape the family. It has helped change popular attitudes toward marriage, women, and child-rearing.

Unexpectedly, it has also turned up medical problems particularly signs of a connection between abortions and later premature and still-born births that are worrying many doctors. But de-SDite this and other concerns, abortion is likely to remain as commonplace and as simple as it was for the young girl who showed up at the Belgrade Gynecological Clinic. She had already been certified by a doctor to be within the first three months of pregnancy, when the operation is legally permitted for non-medical reasons. All that remained was to get approval for the operation from the hospital's three-member abortion commission, made up of a gynecologist, an internist, and a social worker. The necessary "social" reasons were self-evident: The girl was a minor and unmarried.

The board approved the abortion, a two-minute operation that is performed about 35,000 times a year in the Yugoslav capital, and that costs about $7.35. The doctor's services are free; the charge covers the cost of anesthesia and a negligible hospital tax. On the same morning abortions were approved for "social reasons" for about 40 other women, including about 25 with two or more children, two other unmarried school girls and ten jobless or apartmentless women with one child. Rejected for abortions were seven married, childless women who offered no convincing "social" reason for terminating the pregnancy. For most city women living under communism, an abortion carries about as much social stigma as a visit to the hairdresser.

In fact, one Belgrade hairdresser says she has had 40 of them. Abortions far outnumber births in Yugoslavia and Hungary, and the ratio is only narrowly in favor of births Nestled pecefully in the meadows about half mile front-Route 9 in the Murray Grove section of Lacey Township sits what most county historians believe is the oldest dwelling in Ocean County," the Potter House. Rut "its location in serene surroundings may prove to be its undoing for as safe as it seems tucked away from the hustle and bustle of the 20th century, it has become easy prey for vandals A Vignette In the past two years, the Potter House that withstood the test of time for over 200 years, has been ravaged by vandals and historians fear that if something isn't done soon to not only preserve but protect the house, it will soon be beyond saving. The trustees of the Universalist Church, on whose property the house that played such a vital role in the birth of Universalism now stands, have decided they can't preserve the house and won't lease it as suggested by some but they will allow the township to move the building. Township officials are looking for a site and are also investigating the costs involved in moving the old structure, protecting it and then restoring it, restoration being an expensive matter.

Church trustees had decided to tear down the building which was completley encased inside another frame 40 years. However, historians appealed to church officials who agreed to reconsider. Up until six or seven years ago, the Potter House was one of the best preserved homes of its period in the state. The house was built completley of native wood, oak and pine for framing, cedar and white pine for clapboards and shingles. These were assembled with pegs of oak, locust, and hickory.

The house was built by Thomas Potter, son of one of the county's first residents. The large dwelling in the Good Luck settlement was to become the focal point in the beginning of the Universalist Church. Potter, a deeply religious man, frequently invited visit ing ministers to preach in the house, offering them food and lodging but after seven years of these services, Potter decided to build a meeting house, apparently at the urging of his wife who was tired of the inconvenience. Then one day in September of 1770, the Rev. John Murray, for whom Murray Grove is named, arrived.

A British brig on which he was a passenger, had run aground in the Old Cranbury Inlet and Mr. Murray was waiting for the wind to change. When Potter learned the Rev. Mr Murray was a minister, he told him, "I've been expecting you for a long time." Potter and the Rev. Mr.

Murray spent many an evening sitting around one of the many fireplaces in the Potter House waiting for the wind to change. Potter told the visitor the wind wouldn't change until the Rev. Mr. Murray preached a sermon. When days passed with no change, the minister took it as a sign and preached.

The wind finally changed and the Rev. Mr. Murray sailed away but he returned Visitors mans to wait until this year to enact abortion-on-request legislation. East Germany did not participate in the general liberalization because of the population drain it suffered until the closing of its borders in 1961. Another factor in its recent switch is assumed to have been this spring's opening of the border with Poland, which put East German housewives in easy reach of Polish clinics.

The radical shift in abortion policy in the 1950s probably is a central factor in the changing East European family, which is smaller than ever and more likely to have a working mother, if it has a mother present at all. Although the introduction of modern contraceptives and intensive education may have had the same effect, demographers agree that it would have been much slower in coming if not for abortion. The ability to terminate pregnancies also has altered attitudes toward family and marriage. For many young couples, child-rearing seems less of a rationale for marriage than do convenience and economic realities. They see abortion as means of maintaining rising living standards.

All this is not to say that abortion does not have its problems and its critics in Eastern Europe. It has both, with the critics tending to attack abortion on three points. One, of course, is the moral issue that it takes life. A Belgrade doctor, who routinely certifies women for abortion but refuses to perform the operation himself, describes the act as "genocide," just as many do in the United States. But by and large, the moral issue seems to have evaporated in this part of the world.

Another criticism is abortion's radical demographic and economic effects, an argument which has some validity. Almost overnight, abortion achieves and, as in the case of Romania, ov-erachicves population curbs. This is worrying such other countries as Hungary and East Germany, where many times as a guest at the Potter House and preached in the meeting house. The friendship between the two men led to the formation of the Universalist Church in the United States. After Potter died about 1790 the house became the property of the church.

Then is 1833 when the Murray Grove Association was formed, the Potter House was one of three dwellings used to house church members who visited Murray Grove At late as 1914, room and board was $1.50 per day in the Murray Grove and Ballou House but 25 cents more in the Potter House. The two-story Potter House contains about six bedrooms and numerous fireplaces. During the 1930s, the house was closed and covered with an exterior wall, with only a single doorway, and it remained in good condition until a few years ago. At the present time, the interior of the building is a shambles and although it is still possible to walk through parts of the upstairs, much of the second floor is in poor Holes have been chopped in the fireplaces in both the living room and the kitchen and the roof is half gone. Whether the 22-year-old house will survive for another generation, or even another summer, depends on the speed with which local officials can act to save the building that played such a prominent role in the early history of Lacey Township.

there are severe labor shortages and slowdowns in the rural runoff. The third argument concerns the effects on morality, particularly among young, unmarried girls. In this regard the East European experience has shown that by far the largest group of abortion recipients arc married women with several children. Unwed mothers still make up a small portion of the total. As seen from Eastern Europe, abortion critics may actually have overlooked their strongest argument, the medical one.

Although doctors concede that legalized abortion has saved the lives of hundreds of women who formerly died from careless, illegal midwifery outside hospitals, 15 years' experience still has left many doctors, including Communist ones, surprisingly dubious about the practice. They note growing evidence that abortions do have an effect on the fertility of women and on the ratio of premature and still-born infants in subsequent pregnancies, particularly when an abortion has been performed on a woman in her first pregnancy. Still unknown is the long-range psychological impact of the operation on women. Joint American-Hungarian studies on this question are now under way, using women subjects who have had multiple abortions. Doctors say that most of their patients show signs of emotional relief, 'hat there is no evidence that having an abortion has a worse mental impact than having an unwanted child.

Yet a Yugoslav woman who had an abortion 10 years ago muses, "Every time I see a child who is 10 years old, I ask myself, 'What would mine be Polish doctors particularly seem to have a horror of the very liberal law of New York state. "Is it true that abortions are given in the fifth month of pregnancy and that some of the embryos live?" one Warsaw physician asked. All this has resulted In a cautious reassessment. Given the state of social tensions no government seems about to follow the Romanian example. However, as the screening process in Yugoslavia shows, efforts are being made to curtail abortions for young married women.

Some doctors would like to eliminate abortions in first pregnancies altogether for health reasons, except for unmarried girls. Bulgaria already has such a regulation. And the Romanian law only allows abortions for women over 40, and victims of rape or incest, and for medically endangered women Theoretically, some kind of screening process exists everywhere, but often approval has been "virtually automatic." "We are moved by the tears of women," a Yugoslav doctor conceded. (Tin T'nrii-Wih. Pml Sfnlrfl in Czechoslovakia and Poland.

In Poland they arc free a hospitals but cost about $15 at doctors' "cooperatives" and up to $50 privately, where treatment is even more "discreet." Hungarian factory workers usually take three days leave and are treated at a hospital. The marvel is that abortion has become an acceDted practice in societies where family structure remains strong, where three-generational and extended families are still common because of the housing shortage, where young students or workers often eat lunch at the same table with tradition-minded grandparents. While Communists traditionally have espoused a "progressive" line on abortion, all Communist regimes actually pursued restrictive policies until the early 1950s. At that time it became clear that the baby boom was breeding future tensions in the form of overtaxed social services particularly housing by the end of the 1960s. Another factor in the abortion culture has been the large number of working women currently 60 to 65 per cent in Hungary of those between 15 and 55.

The post war policy of the Communist regimes has been to draw on women to increase the available labor pool. Though the original aim was purely economic, there undoubtedly has been a social Unknown May Cry Check In a Convention Stalemate Telstar: A Decade of TV From Space side effect, crown more Women have reluctant to leave their jobs to raise fu ture generations of workers. The abrupt switch in abortion policy in the 1950s was clothed in Marxist ideology and rationalized in the framework of socialist emancipation of women. But abortion policies have actually been influenced less by ideology than by political climates and practical considerations. Most of the 1950s liberalization occurred after the strict Stalinist period.

It proved to be one of the most popular acts in that time of thaw. Similarly, it was not ideology but practicality that prompted Romania in 1966 to go against the liberal trend. Shocked by the fact that abortions were virtually threatening to destroy its work force within a couple of decades, it implemented a tough anti-abortion law almost overnight. Romanian authorities moved to curtail what may have been a world record for abortions in 1965 in a population of 20 million, and about four times the number of live births. The effects were tragic.

Within a year the birth rate tripled. Desperate Romanian women, who could find no modern contraceptives in their own stores, turned pleadingly to foreign visitors for help in obtaining them from abroad. It also was not ideology that caused the East Ger- been computing for six years for the right to establish what promises to be a lucrative domestic communications satellite system. The satellite network would transmit not only television but also telephone, telegraph, and co mputer data signals After lengthy consideration of the case, the Federal Commwiicatinns Commission voted on June 16, 1972, to adopt an "open skies" policy. That 1:1.

all financially and technically qualified applicants would be permitted to provide domestic satellite service. The eight pending applicants and any others interested in the field have until July 25 to file new applications. When the new system or systems finally are launched, possibly within two years, the decade-old dream of les expensive and more efficient telecommunications may finally be realized. By ART BUCHWALD Everyone has his own scenario for this week's Democratic National Convention. The way things have been going with the party, one scenario has as much validity as the next.

This is the one that I have written and if it comes true, remember, you read it here. It is the fourth day of the convention and the Democrats have been unable to decide on a presidential candidate. The fight to seat delegations has taken up three days and those people who were ruled ineligible have refused to give up their seats to those who were officially designated as delegates to the convention. Almost every stale delegation has two people sitting iri every chair. No one dares leave the floor for fear that someone will grab his seat.

When someone tries to speak he is hooted down by the opposition faction. Larry O'Brien, the chairman of the party, has the podium ringed with the National Guard so no one can grab the microphone. The nomination speeches have not been heard, but the candidates have been nominated McGovern, Humphrey, Wallace, Chisholm, Jackson, and Muskie. There have been no demonstrations for the candidates in the hall because everyone is afraid if he gets up and marches they won't let him back in his section again. On the first ballot McGovern picked up 1.234 votes, well shy of the 1,509 he needed.

The rest were split among the other candidates with the uncommitted refusing to vole for anyone. The second and third ballot found no one budging. By the 10th ballot of Wednesday's all-night session, the convention was hopelessly deadlocked. Tht state delegations caucused right on the floor, trying to get people to change their minds. But it was impossible.

On NBC, John Chancellor and David Rrinkley became short-tempered and refused io talk to each other. Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner on ABC were also not speaking' to each other, and on CBS, Walter Cronkite wasn't talking to himself. It was obvious to everyone in and out of the convention hall that a compromise candidate had to be found one who had not already been nominated. But.

who? The Democratic party leaders call a recess behind the podium. They argue and thrash it out for several hours. Tho only man whose name is proposed ns the compromise candidate is a very famous, but controversial, figure on the American scene. He has announced many times that he is not a candidate for the presidency or the vice presidency, and has said under no conditions would he accept draft. Yel.

the leaders argue he is the one per-ion who can save the party. This young man, whose name had hern associated with very embarrassing inci dent, is a household wird now. Because of A decade ago, it seemed a miracle. There was Yves Montand, lin Pans, singing "La Chan-sonette" on American television screens. So what if the program had been taped beforehand or if the reception was less than ideal.

To viewers in Europe and North America, the first transatlantic telecasts relayed by the Telstar satellite were an exciting novelty that heralded a revolution in international communications. Telstor, built by the American Telephone Telegraph Co. and launched on July 10, 1962, bv the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was crude when judged by today's standards. But one newspaper was not far off the mark when it said the Telstar broadcasts constituted a "feat rivaling in significance the first telegraphed transmission by Samuel F. B.

Morse." Four scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel Township three of whom lived in Monmouth County played star roles in the Telstar project. Holm-del was used as a relay center from Andover, Me. They were E. F. O'Neill, Basking Ridge, project manager; Dr.

Rudolph Kompfner, Middlelown Township; associate executive director of research for the Labs' Communications and Research Division; Dr. William C. Jakes Middlelown Township, who was in charge of the Holmdel Telstar receiving station, and Lewis R. Lowry, Little Silver, who was in charge of Telstar operations at Holmdel. Additional space communi-c-itions landmarks soon followed.

In Aucus 1962, the deadlock at the convention, he is the only one who can possibly beat Nixon in November. The compromise candidate is not at the convention. He has purposely stayed away so people would believe he was not interested in the nomination. O'Brien puts in a call to him. Everyone, in turn, gets on the phone and tells him he has to be the candidate.

The compromise candidate speaks to George McGovern, Humphrey, Muskie and Wallace. They urge him to run. The candidate finally agrees to a draft and says he will take the next plane to Miami. And that's how Bobby Fischer, the U.S. chess champion, became the Democratic presidential nominee for 1972.

Hrrakllirouli in Blood The worst hazards of blood transfusion during surgery may now be avoided by the simple expedient of using the patient's own blood instead of someone else's. So-called autologous transfusion involves withdrawing a pint of blood from the patient before surgery, and then giving him large intravenous doses of iron and other nutrients to make up for the loss. If more than one unit of blood is considered necessary for the operation, as many as three or four units may be withdrawn, followed by the blood feeding regimen, so long as the blood will not be more than three weeks old when It is re turned to Its donor. The chief advantage of self transfusion is that it eliminates the risk of hepatitis. An estimated 30,000 Americans a year contract transfusion-connected hepatitis, and 1,500 or more of them die of the disease, according lo a 1970 National Research Council study.

11 Income of $50,000 Guaranteed in Lottery While Congress and the American people may be expected to debate the benefits and liabilities of a guaranteed annual income for some years to come, one lucky American sotii will be paid $50,000 a year for the rest of his life. The recipient can be anyone from J. Paul Getty to the infant son or daughter of a pauper. The only qualification is the purchase of a $3 ticket in the "summer special" New York State lofterv "the richest lottery ever played in America." The New York State lottery Commission estimates that a grand prize winner between one and five ycar.s old could win a lifetime total of $3.5 million and an adult between 35 and 40 about $2 million. If the winner does not live long enough to collect $1 million, the remainder will go to hi.i or her estate.

There also will be nine second prizes of $25,001) a year for four years, 90 winners of $10,000 each, 900 prizes of and 9,000 "consolation" prizes of $200. Tickets will he on sale from Wednesday to Sept. 5. The drawing will be held on Sept. 20.

The winners, armed with lawyers and accountant, will then begin figuring out ways of easing their tax burdens. Since 1964, six states New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have authorized lotteries to raise public revenues. The New York lottery, which began in June 1967, has turned over more than $160 million for education and warded $150 million in prizes. Ralph Batch, executive dwirector of the New Jersey Ixittery Commission, says that the Garden State's lottery collected almost $150 million in 1971. Around $69 million went for education, $66 million lor prizei and the remainder for administrative expenses.

and time-consuming. Indonesia, for example, has roughly the same land area as Alaska and consists of 3,000 islands spread over thousands of square miles of the Southwest Pacific. Only as atellitc could efficiently link these far flung fragments. Similarly, Brazil is stymied by thousands of square miles of juiu'lc that are just beginning to undergo development, and Iiuna by the twin problems size and poverty. "Within a relatively short time," Sig Mickelson asserted in Saturday Review, "regional or distribution satellites should be able to deliver sirong enough signals so tha' inexpensive earth stations those countries could provide a communications system comparable to Intelsat's worldwide service." Me.i'-while, a number of American companies have Congress passed the Communications Satellite Act, which authorized the creation of a private corporation to own ard operate an international satellite communications network.

The resulting Communications Satellite Corp. d'omsal) joined the International Telecommunications Satellite consortium (Intels, two vears later, Today, of course, live telecasts in color from any part of the world are relatively commonplace. President Nixon's trips to China and the Soviet Union were seen live on American television screens. Similar coverage is planned for the 1972 summer Olympic Games in Munich. The most dramatic development- in satellite communications may well come in large, sprawling countries where construction of facilities would be too costly.