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Readers React: Let women, not anti-choice zealots, make their own health decisions

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To the editor: The article clearly lays out the tactics that anti-choice organizations use in their attempts to make it nearly impossible for women to obtain an abortion. (“For abortion foes, a national strategy built at the state level,” Oct. 11)

Professional activists, lobbyists and well-funded right-wing think tanks are behind the recent spate of anti-choice legislation throughout state legislatures in the South and the Midwest. Money, religion and politics have formed an unholy trinity in which politicians are led to believe that they must support reckless, cruel and medically unnecessary anti-choice legislation if they want to be reelected to office.

These anti-choice laws will create a public health crisis and immeasurable heartache. While the anti-choice movement has created a mockery of our democratic system, organizations like the Trust Women Foundation are fighting back to ensure that all women — especially those living in the South and Midwest — can make their own healthcare decisions.

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Julie Burkhart, Wichita, Kan.

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To the editor: The writer, founder and chief executive of the Trust Women Foundation, was the late Dr. George Tiller’s spokeswoman.

In the article on the recent success of the pro-life movement on the state level, The Times refers to people as “anti-abortion” and never as “pro-life.”

Views are more nuanced than the article implies. Americans are truly schizophrenic on the matter.

While the article is correct that a majority of us accept laws making abortion legal, polls show that a clear majority believe that abortion is the taking of an innocent human life. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who in the 1970s provided thousands of legal abortions, had an epiphany upon seeing the ultrasound photos of the fetus and became an outspoken opponent.

The real question is how much support or opposition government should give in the matter.

Larry Walker, Canoga Park

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To the editor: When is the “right to life” movement going to realize that it will never get rid of abortion? All it can do is get rid of legal and safe abortion. Abortion will continue to exist as it always has, as desperate young women will be forced to do what they did before Roe vs. Wade in 1973. They’ll seek out unlicensed practitioners or worse.

Abortion has existed for thousands of years. It was only in the very recent past that women finally had a legal and safe alternative to the nightmare conditions that existed before legal abortion clinics. Sadly, the “right to life” has been trying to re-establish these conditions.

It should be acknowledged that this unraveling of women’s rights has as much to do with sexism as anything else. If men were the ones who got pregnant, you could bet that there would be no chance that abortion would ever be outlawed.

Matthew Singerman, Newbury Park

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion

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