On Abortion

In the Editors of The Crimson:

Toba Spitzer (letter, May 3) is simply mistaken in saying that no Radcliffe Union of Students-sponsored speaker at their April 14 "teach-in" "openly admitted that an abortion kills a human being." Panelist Vilma DiBiase, director of counseling at the Crittendon Clinic, said: "Everyone knows that an abortion kills a human being." This sentiment was also echoed and repeated by various pro-choice people in the audience. It is after all, not surprising that this statement was made, because everyone knows that it is true.

There was indeed no discussion at that "teach-in," because RUS adhered strictly to its format, which allowed audience members only to ask the panelists questions, not state contrary views or conflicting facts. Moreover, it is quite strange that, when 80 percent of Americans favor abortion only in the cases of rape, incest and threat to the mother's life, and when more women than men oppose abortion (as Gallup polls have consistently shown over the last 10 years), all three RUS panelists supported abortion-on-demand. Spitzer admits that there is a lack of consensus and disagreement in our society about abortion--wherefore, then, this ideologically monolithic panel? When groups like Feminists for Life and Women Exploited by abortion are making a very strong case that the pro-abortion philosophy is anti-woman, whence RUS's presumption that their, "teach-in" is giving us the women's view?

It should be noted how pernicious is Spitzer's view that only if women can abort their children can they "overcome restrictive gender roles and gain the ability to face life with the same options men take for granted." This view assumes that women are biologically inferior because they bear children, that pregnancy and childbearing are a liability, that women can become equal to men only if they nullify their womanhood and become like men.

It is this superficial view that leads employers to say to young career women who have children: "You can't work with us, because you could have had an abortion," father than to restructure the work environment so women can be mothers and keep their jobs. It is this superficial view that encourages men to be even more sexually irresponsible, since non boyfriends say: "Here's $200-get rid of it or else I'm leaving."

Please let us not have any of this nonsense that, as Spitzer says, "being pro-choice is being pro-life." Forty percent of the women having abortions at Ms. DiBiase's clinic are there for the second time; the majority of abortions in this country are done on white, middle-and upper-class women 18-25 years old; "pro-choice" advocates like Spitzer urge abortion as a back-up to contraception. All of this bespeaks a rather low regard for human life. Let's do away with the self-deception and avoidance of reality fostered by such euphemisms as "termination of pregnancy" and "removal of products of conception."

How many women, I wonder, would have abortions if they had to do it themselves, confronting the reality? How many women, if their tiny, living, little son or daughter were before their eyes, could tear off his or her limbs one-by-one and then the head (as in a suction abortion) or cut the little one to pieces with a knife (as in a D&C)? And how could anyone do this--or who makes the preposterous claim that any human being has a right to do this--say that he or she is pro-life? Michael Pakaluk '79   Philosophy Teaching Fellow