Letters to the Editor
vasumurti
Published Letters: 108 Editor's Choice: 2
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some forms of birth control DO function as abortifacients!
[Read the article: Bush: Birth control = abortion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]“Is birth control an abortion?”
“Definitely not. An abortion kills the life of a baby after it has begun.”
---Planned Parenthood pamphlet
August 1963
Writer and activist Jay Sykes, who led Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 antiwar campaign in Wisconsin and later served as head of the state’s American Civil Liberties Union, wrote a "Farewell to Liberalism." Sykes cited several areas of disagreement and disillusionment, then added, "It is on the abortion issue that the moral bankruptcy of contemporary liberalism is most clearly exposed." He said that liberals’ arguments in support of abortion "could, without much refinement, be used to justify the legalization of infanticide.”
Past president of Feminists For Life, Rosemary Bottcher, criticized the American Left for its failure to take a stand against abortion:
“The same people who wax hysterical at the thought of executing, after countless appeals, a criminal convicted of some revolting crime would have insisted on his mother’s unconditional right to have him killed while he was still innocent.
“The same people who organized a boycott of the Nestle Company for its marketing of infant formula in underdeveloped lands would have approved of the killing of those exploited infants only a few months before.
“The same people who talk incessantly of human rights are willing to deny the most helpless and vulnerable of all human beings the most important right of all.
“Apparently these people do not understand the difference between contraception and abortion,” concluded Bottcher. “Their arguments defending abortion would be perfectly reasonable if they were talking about contraception. When they insist upon ‘reproductive freedom’ and ‘motherhood by choice’ they forget that ‘pregnant’ means ‘being with child.’ A pregnant woman has already reproduced; she is already a mother.”
According to Dr. And Mrs. J.C. Willke’s 1988 Handbook on Abortion, a poll was conducted at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, CA, asking: “Should there be a Constitutional Amendment outlawing abortion?” It was found that only nine percent of all delegates to the Convention supported such an Amendment, even though it was supported by 46 percent of all Democrats nationwide.
In an article appearing in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Are Black Leaders Listening to Black America?”, J. Perkins wrote: “Black leaders react in traditional, knee-jerk liberal fashion to issues across the board, even though, in general, black Americans are decidedly conservative on a number of issues. The Black Caucus, for example, advocates a ‘right’ to abort, whereas 62% of blacks oppose abortion (National Opinion Research Center, 1984).”
According to Mary Meehan, “...abortion is a civil rights issue. Dick Gregory and many other blacks view abortion as a type of genocide.” For every white baby killed by abortion, for example, two minority children die.
A pamphlet distributed by Milwaukee SOUL (Save Our Unwanted Lives) points out that under current U.S. law, corporations are considered legal persons, while humans in prenatal development are denied this moral status.
In her essay, “Life and Peace,” Juli Loesch wrote: “In a revealing article published in Seven Days, Michelle Magar suggests that the New Right’s relationship with Right to Life has been ‘more a marriage of convenience than true love.’ She suggests that the anti-abortion position adds ‘a certain moral luster’ to the New Right, which otherwise has a distinctly different set of priorities (threatening war for the possession of Persian Gulf oil, and so forth). Magar points out that, in a practical sense, the New Right’s concern for the unborn gives it access to the ‘grassroots anti-abortion network of the Catholic Church—a ready-made constituency which they had so far never been able to win.’”
“The press has been cautioned about its bent toward stereotyping pro-lifers,” noted columnist Nat Hentoff, a liberal Jewish atheist, in 1992. “...many readers and viewers have a decidedly limited sense of the diversity of pro-lifers. Feminists For Life of America, for example, includes women who came out of the civil rights and anti-war movements and now work for what they call ‘a consistent ethic of life.’...(then Feminists For Life president) Rachel MacNair has been arrested at least 17 times—for protesting against nuclear plants and nuclear weapons...”
Gays Against Abortion (now known as PLAGAL, or the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians) was formed in 1991. They issued a statement:
“We acknowledge that, from conception, the fetus is a human being entitled to basic rights, including the right to life. We hold that abortion denies that right and destroys that human being. We know first hand, from homophobia, what it is to have our rights denied...Like homophobia, abortion tries to get rid of the persons who are considered undesirable...We volunteer time and energy to pro-life pregnancy centers and pro-life agencies...”
Similarly, in the May 1992 issue of Harmony: Voices for a Just Future, in an article entitled, “Coming Out of the Closet for Life,” Donna Marie Kearney wrote: “It is difficult to understand why so many gay and lesbian people can support the so-called ‘woman’s right’ to abortion. While living as oppressed people, they are blind to the subversion of the rights of the unborn, the weakest and most powerless among us.”
Kearney is a lesbian Christian peace activist, a member of the Faith and Resistance Community, and has been arrested in protest against nuclear weapons storage, and arrested along with Daniel Berrigan and others for trespassing at a Planned Parenthood building.
In These Times, a progressive political newspaper in Chicago observed in the late 1980s: “Our reaction to scenes of anti-abortion activists engaging in civil disobedience outside of clinics is similar to that of many on the Left: ‘What are THEY doing using OUR tactics? One major factor may be uncomfortable for many of us to admit: that many of them ARE us.’”