Page:Contraception; 1st ed. (IA in.ernet.dli.2015.94163).pdf/53

Recently, however, several medical practitioners who might fairly be described as not particularly favourable to the idea of voluntary parenthood have published statements of a modified approval of contraception under certain conditions. Such, for instance, as the paper by Professor Louise McIlroy, M.D., who said^[1]: "The reasons for the exercise of birth control should be medical only, and should be considered from two points of view, viz., that of:

1. The Individual—as to possible danger of pregnancy.
2. The Community—as to the undesirability of the propagation of the unfit."

Whatever division of opinion there may still be about the advisability or otherwise of contraception in individual cases there appears to me to be no possible ground for refusal to tell a patient what means to pursue to prevent conception when that same patient has been told that her life is risked, or that serious consequences to the offspring are to be anticipated, were pregnancy to occur.

It is self-evident that all cases in which, were pregnancy to intervene, an evacuation of the uterus or an induced therapeutic