THE MAIL

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Mr. Michael Gooen's editorial "Real Life" (December 5), in seeking to convince those opposed to abortion to abandon their political and legal efforts, has both completely misunderstood the pro-life movement and has failed to examine carefully the political and ethical dimensions of the abortion tragedy.

First Mr. Gooen suggests that the majority of state laws banning abortion before Roe were intended not to safeguard the life of the fetus, but rather to protect the mother from dangerous proceedings. The only evidence he offers in support of this is the fact that most of these statutes criminalized only the abortionist and not the would-be mother. This proves only that those outraged by abortion, then as now, understood that abortion was a crime in which often the woman would be victimized almost as much as the unborn child. Also, since 36 of the states had abortion laws that were "strict," allowing exceptions only in the most dire life-threatening circumstances, and sometimes not at all, it is hard to make the case that these old statutes were not motivated by concern for the fetus. Even Justice Blackman, in his decision overturning these, laws, conceded the states' interest in preserving prenatal life, although he said that for some reason I cannot understand that it is only compelling enough after the rather arbitrary dividing line of the beginning of the seventh month.

Mr. Gooen's argument about the distinctions between quickened and pre-quickened fetuses is quite irrelevant. First, such locomotion, coming along with the development of EEG waves and other undeniably human qualities, comes as early as the sixth week of pregnancy, but even under conservative interpretations of Roe abortions are routinely performed up until the 24th week. Second, of course, Roe is not conservatively interpreted: the part of the decision that bars state prohibitions even in the third trimester in cases where the health of the mother is endangered has been so liberally construed as to include such open-ended absurdities as "economic" and "psychological" health, which essentially means that a woman can complain of the impact of having a child on her future income stream in order to get it "terminated."

Next, Mr. Gooen tries to make us shy away from any attempt to use the law to save life by presenting us with a number of alleged difficulties, none of which appear very compelling to me. The first difficulty lies with whether abortion would be treated as first degree murder, and if so who would be prosecuted. The act that most old abortion statutes, by the author's own charge, criminalized the doctor, seems to answer that question. The mother, in-most cases, is so traumatized and exploited by the abortionist, and often by the fetus's father, that she is under enough mental duress to exculpate her from a large degree of the guilt, even under conventional insanity law. That is why the law must stop the abortion from happening in the first place. As for the abortionist, there is an easy answer to that question, YES. He is knowingly taking human life, often on an enormous scale, for profit. The question for me is not whether he should be tried for murder but whether the whole abortion community should be tried for war crimes against a generation, which I think they should. They exploit for profit (those $150 fees add up) women at perhaps one of the most vulnerable times in their life, violate them in the most vicious way, kill what they know to be human life, and recently, there is evidence, conduct painful experimentation on fetuses and even sell their parts commercially. As for whether the father should be prosecuted, the common law answers that rather easily: if he is aided and abetted by harassing the woman into having an abortion, he should be tried as an accomplice. If he urged against it, then obviously not. At some point the woman must take some responsibility for her decision actually to have the abortion.

Next, Mr. Gooen brings up the old rape exception. It strikes me as funny because often I hear the charge that pro-lifers do not really care about the fetus, they just want to punish the woman. Actually, that type of twisted logic is exactly what is behind the rape exception. It says that the law will make an exception for this woman because she was not responsible for getting pregnant, implying that we will punish this other woman who had intercourse consensually because she is guilty. Pro-lifers, on the other hand, are not so concerned with laying guilt on the woman as with saving the little child. We say, as guiltless as the mother is, we cannot accept that this child, by being conceived through rape, is somehow less entitled to its right to life than this other child.

Next Mr. Gooen argues that laws against abortion will be unenforceable. I respond, first, that we should not make our laws on the basis of what is easily enforceable, rather we should employ the resources to enforce them to the extent necessary. We cannot abandon laws against murder because people will do it anyway, we should hire the police to stop as many of them as we can. But second, empirically, legal abortions, since 1973, have taken a 120-fold increase, while illegal abortions have taken a four-fold decrease. On balance, there are 40 times the number of abortions now as before Roe, 1.5 million per year.

Mr. Gooen's conclusion, that pro-lifers should sit by and try only to persuade people not to have abortions is silly on its face. It suggests that people convinced that genocide is going on in America should restrain themselves to mere talk, instead of trying to use the law for what it is intended to be used for after all: securing the rights of the week. How hypocritical. Would Mr. Gooen tell those pushing desegregation through the courts that they are wrong and that they should only sit on the sidelines and write editorials? And with abortion, it is not just the right to an equal education that is at stake, it is the right to life.

I object to his caricaturing of the Religious Right. His implication that the pro-life movement does not care to make it easy on pregnant women is false. The latest issue of the Moral Majority Report carries an article calling on all pro-lifers to remember their duty to help the pregnant mother through her time of troubles with outreaches of charity and compassion. Mr. Gooen should visit the number of pro-life clinics here in the Boston area, such as Daybreak, or at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, to see the compassion that is offered to women undergoing the pain of an unwanted pregnancy. His insulting reference to Archibishop O'Connor of New York as "arrogant" is completely uncalled for. I would only hope that this nation could be as "arrogant" in the defense of innocent life as the Archbishop is.

Finally, I must disagree with Mr. Gooen's political philosophy, which tells him that translating moral questions into concrete legal doctrines is too difficult even to attempt. The law is not here just to keep us from killing people (although in the fetus's case it does not even do that). It is here to enshrine as well the principles that make us a good society. We all know there is disagreement on what is "good" in many areas, but to suggest that this translation should not be attempted is to restrict our Constitution to being an instrument of the barest self-preservation, one I am sure Mr. Gooen would not like if he looked at it closely enough.