Abortion: ‘A Major March’

Your editorial “A Major March” (April 11), in which you support the continuation of abortion on demand in our country, is surely unfortunate.

Your support of Roe vs. Wade, allowing virtually unlimited abortions, is based on three false premises.

First, you claim that “privacy” is the key issue for the 1.6 million women who terminate the lives of 1.6 million unborn children every year. That is not the key issue; the protection of every human life, from conception to natural death, is the moral principle upon which our country was so firmly founded.

Second, you point to abortion as a “symbol of the rights of women.” Yet, you make no reference to the absolute rights of the unborn human beings who are disposed of without further thought.

If women’s rights are to be secured upon the illogical, indiscriminate murder of 1.6 million unborn human beings each year, then we are in deep trouble as a nation.

And third, you state that the Supreme Court “must look beyond legal principle to tenable social policy and good sense” to terminate pregnancy. The only role of the Supreme Court is to uphold legal principle and the full spectrum of constitutional guarantees--the right to life being the bedrock of those guarantees. The realm of social policy belongs to the state and national legislatures, not to the courts.

After 23 million abortions since 1973, have we not all begun to realize that the killing of our unborn has become the major moral scandal of our country’s heritage? And we wonder why our national moral fiber weakens by the day, and why we are not taken seriously in the international community when we attempt to take the “moral high road” in international affairs.

MOST REV. ROGER MAHONY

Archbishop of Los Angeles