Letters to the Editor
vasumurti
Published Letters: 108 Editor's Choice: 2
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is abortion morally equivalent to contraception or infanticide?
[Read the article: Coat hangers and crochet hooks ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]None of the arguments in favor of killing the unborn would justify killing the already born. If there were reports of women injuring themselves while trying to kill their already born children, would we demand child abuse or infanticide be made safe and legal?
Persons concerned about a return to “back-alley” abortions if abortion were made illegal again should first read Aborting America by Dr. Bernard Nathanson. 1983 data from the Bureau of Vital Statistics show one would have to go back to the pre-penicillin era to find more than 1,000 maternal deaths per year.
During 1965 to 1966, the period right before states began to legalize abortion, the number of total deaths were down to 120 per year. In 1970, the figure was 128 per year. A Kinsey study in 1960 showed that 84 to 87 percent of all illegal abortions were performed by reputable physicians.
Dr. Mary Calderone of Planned Parenthood once stated, “Ninety percent of all illegal abortions are presently done by physicians.”
The majority of pro-life activists also regard the mother seeking abortion as a victim and not a criminal. Looking back on over two hundred years of legal history, the American Center for Bioethics concluded that women have never been prosecuted for abortion; only the abortionists. This is analogous to our current laws which arrest drug dealers and prostitutes rather than their clientele. If we continue to imperfectly enforce laws like these against what are arguably victimless crimes, why can’t we take steps towards protecting the unborn?
Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of NARAL, who changed sides on the abortion issue, wrote in his 1979 book, Aborting America, on the subject of “back-alley” abortions:
“How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In NARAL we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always ‘5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.” I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too, if they stopped to think of it. But in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? The overriding concern was to get the laws eliminated, and anything within reason that had to be done was permissible.
“…the actual total was probably closer to 500. The death of 500 women, or even 39, is a matter of the most serious concern, but this is hardly an overwhelming death rate among the millions of women of childbearing age. Depending upon the value that is placed upon (the unborn), it might be lopsided for a society to consider only the 500 women and ignore the 1,000,000 (unborn) that are legally extinguished every year.”
Feminists, free love advocates and civil libertarians from the 19th into the mid-20th century all opposed abortion as an injustice to women, rather than seeing it as a means to their emancipation.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton classified abortion along with the killing of newborns as “infanticide.” (The Revolution, February 5, 1868) According to Stanton: “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.” (Letter to Julia Ward Howe, October 16, 1873)
Stanton not only opposed abortion, but recognized the social factors causing women to seek it: “There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as this,” she wrote. “But where shall it be found, at least where begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women?” (The Revolution, March 12, 1868)
Pro-life feminist Daphne De Jong notes:
“The earliest feminist battles were fought against the legal chattel status of women. Many feminists were among those who overturned the U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1857, that a black slave was ‘property’ and not entitled to the protection of the Constitution.
“Feminism totally rejected the concept of ownership in regard to human beings. Yet when the Court ruled in 1973 that the fetus was the property of its mother, and not entitled to the protection of the Constitution, ‘liberated’ women danced in the streets.”
In a 1989 opinion editorial on the subject of abortion entitled “The Bitter Price of Choice,” pro-life feminist Frederica Matthewes-Green, wrote: “It is a cruel joke to call this a woman’s ‘choice.’ We may choose to sacrifice our life and career plans, or choose to undergo humiliating invasive surgery and sacrifice our offspring. How fortunate we are—we have a choice! Perhaps it’s time to amend the slogan—‘Abortion: a woman’s right to capitulate.’”
“I am struck by how knee-jerk the liberal/progressive community is on the necessity of legal abortions,” writes Timothy Shipe in the June 2003 issue of The Progressive. “On every other issue, the progressive community looks at the parties involved, assesses the humanity, the vulnerability, the justice, the balance of power, and then weighs in on the side of the underdog. Every issue, that is, except for abortion.
“The day I accept as ‘progressive’ the anti-human practice of willful abortion is the day I say OK to unjust war, unfettered capitalist exploitation of people and the environment, capital punishment, ethnic cleansing, and so forth.”
Opposition to abortion can be found across the political spectrum. A national poll by Wirthlin Worldwide on the evening of the 1998 elections found that 38 percent of all Democrats (and 40 percent of Democrat women) oppose abortion. A national poll released by the Center for Gender Equality, in January 1999, found that a majority of American women do not support legalized abortion on demand. 53 percent of female respondents to the poll said abortion should be allowed only in cases of rape, incest, to save a mother’s life or not at all, up from 45 percent in 1996.
The abortion controversy is analogous to the Vietnam War. By the end of the 1960s, both the right and the left came to agree the war was wrong--they merely advocated different strategies for ending it. On secular, human rights grounds, the American Left should take a stand against abortion.