‘ABORTION in the UNITED STATES A Conference Sponsored by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. at Arden House and The New York Academy of Medicine “ Epitep By : MARY STEICHEN CALDERONE, M.D., M.S.P.H. Medical Director, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. Inmnopuction BY M. F. ASHLEY MONTAGU RB cas” (IH) 14S A HOEBER-HARPER BOOK“ABORTION IN THE UNITED STATES Copyright © 1958, by PAUL B. HOEBER, INC. Medical Book Department of Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America EH All rights reserved For information address PAUL B. HOEBER, INC. Medical Book Department of HARPER & BROTHERS 49 East 33rd Street, New York 16, N.Y. Library of Congress catalog card number: 58-07397Report of the Statistics Committee May 29, 1957 This Committee has reviewed a report submitted by its chairman, Dr. Tietze, entitled “Demographic Characteristics of Females Interviewed by the Staff of the Institute for Sex Research, Compared with the Urban White Population’* and a paper on “Fetal Deaths, Spontaneous and In- duced, in the Urban White Population of the United States” by Tietze and Martin.j On the basis of this review, and in the light of previous knowledge of the work of the Institute for Sex Research and of published research on the subject of induced abortion in the United States, the Com- mittee has come to the following conclusions: 1. The 5,293 women whose histories are analyzed by the Institute for Sex Research in its forthcoming monograph, Pregnancy, Birth and Abor- tion,* do not constitute a representative sample of the population of the United States. The methods employed by the Institute in the collection of its data were not designed to produce such a sample. It is possible, never- theless, to compare the interviewed group with the general population and to draw useful conclusions from this comparison as to the nature and validity of the data collected. 2. The respondents constitute a predominantly urban group of white women whose educational level, and, presumably, socioeconomic status, are far above the average. More than four fifths of the group had attended college or were still attending college at the time the histories were ob- tained. One fifth of the total had done postgraduate work. 3. The distribution by marital status and the numbers of live births of the respondents show that certain patterns of behavior are similar to those observed in the urban white population of the United States. While nup- tiality, stability of marriage, and marital fertility are somewhat below the levels in roughly comparable segments of the general population, the * See Appendix D. t Population Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, Nov. 1957. 178 f j i Ps