THE BOULDER DAILY CAMERA - Guest Opinion
January 17, 1980
As we begin 1980 and approach the general elections in November, one issue appears to be emerging from former obscurity to dominance in the minds of many voters, and may in some cases decide the outcome of particular contests. It concerns the right of a woman to choose a safe, legal abortion when compelling reasons in her life make the prospect of a full term pregnancy and an unwanted birth an insuperable burden for what may be emotional, physical or financial reasons.
Despite the fact that national polls repeatedly (and with increasingly lopsided margins) show that Americans support the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 decision that legalized the right of a woman to obtain an abortion, the U.S. Congress and various state legislatures have been steadily eroding that decision with evermore restrictive and punitive bills. How does one explain this in a democratic country? It no doubt has to do with the intensity of the anti-abortionist campaigns that are driven by small but highly organized and vocal organizations whose single-mindedness virtually rules out any other qualifications for office outside of the abortion issue. In polarized communities absolutist candidates gain office on the basis of this single issue against an unorganized majority who favor legalized abortion (60 percent of all Americans and growing) because the majority of voters place most other issues above the abortion issue when considering the candidates.
When one studies the actions and pronouncements of anti-abortion lawmakers and their supporters, it becomes abundantly clear that they are not really prolife as they claim but profetus. They are profetus for reasons of religious dogma or their own personal concepts of morality which they intend to impose on everyone else. It apparently matters not to them what happens to the unwanted child after birth, or its mother and other affected persons, only that embryo from the moment of conception is sacred and inviolable. As an example of this callous disregard for living persons, ten adamantly anti-abortionist U.S. Congressmen voted no (the only opposition) to an emergency measure to aid starving and diseased Cambodians against an overwhelming majority of 362 approving votes in the House.
Absolutists, and other anti-abortionists to varying degrees, would deny an abortion on strictly (their) moral grounds even if the mother's life were threatened as a result of the prolonged pregnancy, even if malformation or retardation were indicated, even if the pregnancy resulted from incest or rape, even if the mother to be is an unmarried teenager, even if the family is desperately poor, even in the face of large numbers of abused and often brutalized unwanted children.
One letter to the Open Forum not long ago had the insensitivity to suggest that the unwanted pregnancy was, after all, the fault of the woman and she, therefore, was in effect undeserving of sympathy, and must bear the consequences. Another more recent writer twists the argument end for end. He states that abortion is "hatred of woman and hatred of life". I submit that the converse is true when desperate people must come to grips with real life situations. He further says that legalized abortion "is the first step toward state control of reproduction." I submit that the restrictive laws that are being enacted to circumvent the U.S. Supreme Court decision are an attempt at state control and suppression of reproductive free choice.
HOWARD A. GARCIA