Readers React: Just as easily as the Supreme Court gave us the right to an abortion, Trump’s justices can take it away

To the editor: While the L.A. Times editorial board is right to warn readers that the “constitutional right to abortion” is constantly under attack, no such right is stated explicitly in the Constitution. It was devised by Supreme Court majorities in Roe vs. Wade (1973) and was reformulated in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992).

Few believe President Trump’s two Supreme Court appointees have sufficient regard for precedent to uphold those two applications of constitutional limitations on government action to abortion. Almost certainly, if Trump fills one more vacancy on the Supreme Court, there would soon be no “constitutional right to abortion” at all, and some states would completely outlaw the procedure.

It should be acknowledged that abortion does concern the substantial interests of more than just the pregnant woman. Abortion is not persuasively dismissed as the preoccupation of only the religious or the misguided. I, for one, am glad to have not been aborted.

Gary Wesley, Mountain View, Calif.

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To the editor: I strongly support Roe vs. Wade. I do not have the right to make a major life-changing decision for any woman; however, during my 45-year career as a physician, I was never willing to preform an abortion but never felt any disrespect for a provider who did.

If the rabid antiabortion legislatures and activists had any concern for women, they would try to reduce abortions by also ensuring the availability of effective birth control. But it seems clear that this is not acceptable to the antiabortion cabal.

As such, and since raising a child is very expensive even for low-income families, perhaps those very bitter foes of abortion would be willing to financially support or otherwise help women with children because of a lack of access to birth control or abortion.

Abstention, as most parents have discovered, is not an effective solution, so I suggest to the antiabortionists that they need to offer alternatives. Oh, and making intimacy between unmarried humans or limited-income married people illegal would probably not work.

David Haberman, Woodland Hills

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