To the Editor:
“A Pregnant Pause” (Week in Review, Nov. 29) gives an incredibly accurate picture of the generation gap on abortion rights, one that I had trouble understanding until I read your article.
I am nearing 70. In 1962, as a married lady of 20 with one more year of college to go for my degree, our birth control failed. I was pregnant. We were frantic. My husband and I were barely surviving financially, and we were struggling to support ourselves. If we could have supported a child, we would not have been using birth control.
We had a friend, a veterinarian, who offered to help us. I climbed onto the dog table, weeping, my husband holding my hand. After the procedure I hemorrhaged and we rushed to the emergency room. I told them the story, just leaving out how the hemorrhaging started, and they classified it as a “spontaneous abortion.”
Our lives went on, we’re still happily married, and we have two successful adult children. But as I watch the assault on reproductive rights, my heart is still filled with dread, and my memory returns to that morning on the dog table.
I hope no young woman ever has to handle her reproductive choice as I was forced to. They can make any law they want to make, but they can never make a woman have a baby. We will do what we have to do, and for today’s young, access to abortion must remain safe, affordable and legal.
Barbara Russakov
Anaheim Hills, Calif., Nov. 29, 2009
To the Editor:
I guess folks in the 19th century thought slavery was a personal choice, not a political issue. But those people were proved very wrong. Just because someone is a different color or from a different culture or is just beginning to form a life, that someone has a right to live and grow in freedom with all the dignity of a human being.
Abortion is a social issue, as well as a moral issue. No one religion can claim it as its own.
Embarrassment from an unplanned pregnancy or economic hardship—are these really reasons to choose to end a life?
Maureen Spieth
Brooklyn, Nov. 29, 2009
Note from KBJ: If financial hardship justifes abortion, then it justifies infanticide. Think about it.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 