[Termination of pregnancy called "therapeutic." Requirements, limits and insufficiencies of the law].

The authors point out the difficulties in applying the two final paragraphs of article L 162 of the Public Health Code which authorizes and explains the justification for terminating pregnancies later than the legal term of twelve weeks of amenorrhoea. These difficulties arise mainly because of the different ways in which it is possible to interpret how serious a menace to the health of the woman is caused by the pregnancy, which at present cannot be the only reason for provoking a purely medical decision for terminating the pregnancy while deciding how desperate the obvious distress is. On the other hand, the definition of a strong probability that the child to be born would have a particularly serious malformation, recognised as incurable when diagnosed and which constitutes the second indication for terminating the pregnancy on so called therapeutic grounds seems also to lack precision. The authors draw attention to how strictly the law has to be applied as far as termination of pregnancy is concerned as well as basic conditions for carrying out the procedure, which can act as a support for the sole but very definite precise judgement of the Appeal Court of Paris on the 9th July 1982. This can be considered as a judgement for bidding any deviations form the legal requirements of a text that is a very definite one and has to be interpreted strictly.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)