Letter to the Editor by Bob Erickson
To the Editor:
Should a man ever have a right to publicly state their opinion on abortion? I don’t know. I’ve struggled with that for a long time and the lack of an answer has prevented me from writing this editorial sooner. Maybe it is a valid argument that a man has no right to an opinion on abortion because: he is not a woman; cannot bear a child; never had a child; or more poignantly, never has had an abortion.
I finally arrived at the conclusion that writing the editorial is one thing, but forcing someone to read it is another. At this point, if your answer to the question in the first sentence is a resounding “no”, simply do not read further. It is your choice.
It’s interesting, just within this week I was placed in a conversation with someone who had an abortion when she was younger. Something she said has been haunting me since we talked. She explained that the abortion had all happened so fast and that she had no one there to explain that she had a choice. There was no one to talk to about the alternative of having the child. There was only the one side pushing for her to have the abortion.
We know that what she went through of being rushed to abort her child without proper counseling and time to consider all the options still happens today. Perhaps the main reason is that the abortion industry does not want a woman who is considering abortion to choose not to have the abortion.
What a paradox - that an organization whose marketing label is “Pro-Choice” does everything they can, (including financial contributions to politicians) to keep a woman from having an informed choice. Isn’t that the antithesis of pro-choice? How can you have a choice when you don’t know what the choices are?
The bottom line is that if the goal is to give a woman a choice, shouldn’t both the Pro-Choice people and the Right-to-Life people be working together to give a woman all of the options? In essence, shouldn’t she have an informed choice?
If you have read up to this point, you may want to stop here. Again, you have a choice. The last part of this editorial is not about a person. It is about my concerns for our country.
The fact is that we now have lawmakers that want to legalize, by law, abortion in every state in our land. What is so concerning is that they seem to be more concerned about making sure that abortions are performed than they are about being sure that women: 1) know their choices; 2) have time to think over their decision; and 3) have alternatives to abortion. Doesn’t the logical question become, why?
Years ago I read about how, after the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals, the chief investigator responsible for evidence against Nazi war criminals did an investigation on his own. He wanted to determine how Germany came to the point that they could systematically murder their own citizens. When he was through, he believed he had the answer. He concluded that it had begun with allowing abortion.
It then “progressed” to killing the physically and mentally disabled, Roma (gypsies), Poles and other Slavic peoples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and members of political opposition groups, and then the Jews. What he described was a classic Pandora’s Box scenario.
Our concern as American citizens must be the big question... are we going down the same Pandora’s Box path? If we are, to what will it lead? Will we, too, conclude that certain citizens no longer have a right to live? Will the legal choice to the right to live be dependent upon: race (Caucasians, Blacks, Asians, and others), health, age, religious views, and others?
Bob Erickson
Waukon
