Mabiki

The primitive Japanese rice farmer thinning out seedlings calls the process mabiki --to make intervals. Colloquially, the word means infanticide, used to space surviving children. In Japan today, the term might well find new use. Abortion is rampant, and human seedlings are being thinned as drastically as the tender rice shoots.

There are 2,000,000 births a year in Japan, and there is probably one abortion for each live birth, the University of Rochester's Dr. Wesley T. Pommerenke reports in Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey. This he believes to be the world's highest abortion rate, though he admits that it is impossible to prove the point statistically. Japan's abortions are legal, or almost so: the law permits them if there is danger to the mother's health or a likelihood that the child will be subnormal. In practice, reports Dr. Pommerenke, it is usually enough for a woman to say that her husband is out of work, or that it will be difficult for the family to feed another mouth.

Hospitals with government-approved abortion facilities are marked by special plaques at their entrances. No fewer than 8,000 of Japan's 85,000 practicing physicians have specific permits to perform abortions and have organized their own special society. In some hospitals a salaried doctor works systematically down a "destruction line," doing abortions under medically acceptable conditions. But in the side streets Dr. Pommerenke found cut-rate "clinics" that resembled abattoirs.

In a dozen years the birth rate in overcrowded Japan has fallen from 30 to about 23 per 1,000 per year. Only one-fifth of this drop, Dr. Pommerenke believes, has been brought about by contraception. The rest is due to abortions. One reason: knowledge of contraceptives has not reached many areas. But a more effective reason is that in the cities, where contraceptive knowledge and materials are readily available, many women take their chances on an occasional abortion. On the average it probably costs no more than $5 --less than the price of a year's supply of contraceptives. But Dr. Pommerenke believes that the cost to women in illness, sterility, emotional shock and sometimes even death cannot be computed.

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