To the Editor:
Re “Trading Women’s Rights for Political Power” (Op-Ed, Nov. 12):
Regardless of what is right or wrong about abortion rights, it may be unfair for Kate Michelman and Frances Kissling to say that Democrats surrendering taxpayer-financed abortions in order to pass a game-changing health care bill are doing so for political power. For there can be wisdom, pragmatism and sensitivity in such a maneuver.
One trauma at a time is really quite enough to ask of the American people now. While I voted for our president and support a public health care option (and even more of what critics call “socialist”), there is just no promise in getting folks fearing an abandonment of some American Way also to abandon simultaneously their sense of what many feel, rightly or wrongly, is (state-financed) murder.
A retreat from James Madison is even harder when coupled with what for many is declension from eons of Judaism, Islam and Christianity (not mention [sic] the ancient Hippocratic oath).
And while the vulnerability of women pregnant and poor cannot be overemphasized, when Ms. Michelman and Ms. Kissling chide the president for announcing no federal financing for abortions “as if this happened to be a good and moral thing,” they have surely not established the contrary.
Democrats for the health care overhaul without financing abortions are in any event in touch with the majority of American voters, and this is not a bad way to serve the public through politics.
Thomas H. McFadden
Santa Barbara, Calif., Nov. 12, 2009
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 