An abortion response

To the Editor:

Bernard and David Anderson present a fundamentally flawed and factually inaccurate argument in their Letter to the Editor ("The case against `Roe v. Wade' and abortion" [2/20/98, YH]). Allow me to respond to the Andersons' justifications for making abortion illegal point by point.

In regard to their suggestion that Roe v. Wade did not play a role in causing the subsequent drops in abortion rates, I refer to Leslie J. Reagan's book, When Abortion was a Crime.

She writes that city officials reported that in New York in 1971, "The legalization of abortion represented an improvement in maternal mortality that ranks with the invention of antiseptics and antibiotics."

Janet Hadley corroborates in Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity that Romania's "maternal death rate plummeted [with] a 60 percent drop in abortion-related deaths" with the legalization of abortion.

The Andersons disregard the accepted distinction between "fetus" and "baby," as though pro-choicers randomly assign the start of life "when the only difference in the child's status is her location." But from a legal perspective alone, this change in location is crucial.

According to Mary Warren in Gendercide: The Implications of Sex-selection, one cannot grant equal rights to a fetus without denying women those same rights. "Birth makes it possible [to grant the infant rights] without violating anyone else's basic rights. Inside a single human skin `there is only one being with full and equal rights.'"

The Andersons insinuate that the "tragedy of abortion" existed solely after the Roe v. Wade ruling. But the true tragedy of abortion is illegal abortion.

The Andersons' letter succinctly supports the idea that cultural myths and political amnesia endanger rights as fundamental as a woman's right to an abortion. I firmly believe abortion is my natural right and that Roe v. Wade is the strongest legal construct to protect that right.

--Dominique Hara Sherman, ES '00

Back to Opinion...