RE: All abort!
The CommuterFriday, May 29, 2009
Dear Mr. Dewar: I read with interest your intense and earnest opinion piece about abortion, and wanted to share a bit of clarification regarding the matter of those who oppose abortion. As a former classroom speaker for Oregon Right to Life, I can summarize our position on the matter of choices to destroy life: we are opposed to the willful, wanton destruction of innocent human life at any stage. We oppose abortion as birth control, we oppose “selective reduction,” we oppose infanticide, and we oppose physician-controlled euthanasia, because we value human life at every stage, and the persons targeted by the above-referenced decisions are not able to choose on their own behalf. We do NOT bomb abortion clinics, because that would not square with our beliefs; persons who bomb the clinics do not represent us, but are, unfortunately, routinely confused with genuine pro-life people simply because too little is known about what we REALLY believe, thanks in part to obfuscation. You speak of the horrors of war, and you are right; my late step-father suffered from mental anguish for decades, after WWII. I lost classmates in Viet Nam; some of my students served in the Gulf War. It is all beyond hideous. Yet you make light of the horrors of the abortion clinic: dismembering an unanesthetized and helpless human being, vacuuming up his/her remains, and disposing of all of it in a dumpster is equally hideous. Deliberately presenting disinformation, telling frightened young women that the life they are carrying is merely a “mass of tissue” is also hideous, and incredibly inaccurate! No one, in this day of highly-refined ultrasound technology, should be ignorant of the fact that as early as 17 days after conception, that life has a beating heart, and a circulatory system, and a nervous system, not to mention all the other wondrous things that are developing. Not too bad, for a “mass of tissue”! And what of all the aching hearts of the couples unable to have their own biological offspring? Has no one heard of ADOPTION? As for considerations of the health of the mother as justification for abortion, the one issue that comes up most often is the case of ectopic pregnancy: this requires a life-saving procedure, and as such, is not the same as an abortion, because if left to continue developing, an ectopic will lead to the death of both mother and child: therefore, you save the life you can save. Without exception, the women I know who have suffered ectopics were devastated by their loss, because they earnestly wanted their babies. It is a complex matter, this business of choices, as so much of it no longer seems to have any roots in a genuine regard for our fellow human beings; too much is focused on what is expedient, or what is pleasing at the moment, or what will preserve the “bottom line”… a set of values sure to result in loving things and using people. There is a deep tragedy in the deliberate destruction of over 50 MILLION unborn American citizens; we have lost all those potential writers and scientists and doctors and researchers and teachers and pro football players and ranchers and librarians and millwrights and bricklayers and musicians and… we have lost them all! No nation moves forward by deliberately destroying its resources! Thank you for opening the discussion by pointing out the discrepancies you have observed, and thank you for allowing me to respond.
Sincerely,
Donna Trask, adjunct faculty, English
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