ABSTRACT
In the USA during the 1930s, the demand for legal abortion had faded away; and after the Second World War, there was at first no pressure to get it restarted. Doctors in the USA stood to gain financially by legalization, whereas the British surgeons were concerned that a large increase in the number of abortion patients would draw resources from other services. In 1967 the situation in the USA seemed to be moving in the same direction as in Britain, with a limited liberation of the laws and an extension of rights only to some categories of women. Explaining the reasons for the abortion laws, Cyril Means stated that it had been an unsafe operation in the nineteenth century and he argued that the main purpose of the laws was to protect the life and health of women with unwanted pregnancies.
