Letters to the Editor

Your coverage of the proposed new abortion law commented repeatedly on the "restrictions" it contained. It's interesting, and perhaps revealing, that the word "protective" was never part of your vocabulary.

The fact is: anti-pollution laws inevitably seem restrictive to some businesses, but protective to environmentalists; laws against the bait-and-switch tactic are restrictive to unscrupulous salesmen, but protective of consumers; laws against underage drinking seem restrictive to teenagers, but their parents see them as protective.

I guess whether something is "restrictive" or "protective" is determined by which side of the fence you're on. Protection for a victim is only viewed as "restrictive" by those who would victimize. From your insistence on calling a law that protects small children "restrictive," we can gather that you side with the abortionists.

In her op-ed piece yesterday, a spokeswoman from an abortion advocacy group wrote about how wonderful it is to have a state full of abortion mills. She made it sound as if her state is a veritable smorgasbord of options for pregnant women. However, she conveniently overlooked the fact that all the choices are the same choice: abortion.

I will believe the spokeswoman's rhetoric about supporting "choice" when I see her addressing the women who don't want abortion but feel they have no choice: those whose husbands, parents, boyfriends, bosses, and "options counselors" browbeat, threaten, or otherwise coerce them into unwanted abortions.

I came across an interesting quote lately. See if you can guess who said it.

"I am now speaking of rights under the Constitution, and not of moral or religious rights. I do not discuss the morals of the people favoring abortion, but let them settle that matter for themselves. I hold that the people who favor abortion are civilized, that they bear consciences, and that they are accountable to God and their posterity and not to us. It is for them to decide therefore the moral and religious right of the abortion question for themselves within their own limits."

Any ideas yet? Oh, by the way, I did make one small change in this quote. I substituted the word "abortion" wherever the word "slavery" used to be.

Give up? The speaker was Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln's pro-choice-on-slavery opponent in the presidential election of 1858.

Isn't it funny how the apologists for evil always sound alike, regardless of the issue they're trying to defend. I wonder what that means?

Letter 320

An abortion enthusiast's column yesterday dismissed the evidence of Post-Abortion Syndrome because the researchers who identified it are all opposed to abortion. He claims that if someone opposes abortion, their data must be bad. Couldn't it be just as true that these researchers oppose abortion because their data is good?

If hundreds of non-smoking researchers said that cigarettes were bad for you, would you dismiss them with a contemptuous, "Well, you're opposed to smoking so I'd expect you to say that?" Do we insist on getting data only from tobacco companies?

When Mothers Against Drunk Driving puts out statistics, do we dismiss them because, after all, these people oppose drunk driving? Do we claim that you can only get accurate data on the effects of drunk driving by those who actually drive drunk?

Why do we behave so stupidly with abortion? Why is it that the only data deemed trustworthy is data collected by people with a financial, personal, or political stake in abortion remaining legal and unregulated?

Maybe, just maybe, we don't have bad data because we oppose abortion. Maybe we oppose abortion because abortion is bad.