Archbishop Mahony’s Letter and Abortion Issue

They’re ba-ack! Every time we as women stand up for ourselves and our own rights, some petulant man stamps his foot and calls us selfish. Cal Thomas (Op-Ed Page, April 13) simplistically reduces the abortion argument to one of right and wrong. Such clear vision apparently requires no proof; instead, he offers us his general displeasure expressed in the by now standard refrain of oooh, oooh, the country is going to hell.

If we wonder where in his either-or philosophy he places reproductive rights, we see them glowing through the fog under either men control them or they don’t exist at all. Men of Thomas’ ilk, while bemoaning the “repeal of a moral code” (which they often devised for their own convenience), cannot seem to recover from not being able to order women about. Talk about “emphasis on self.”

Men treat our reproductive rights as a weapon that has been taken away from them and must now be recovered only when they forget how they kept those rights from us in the first place and doled them out to suit their own souls. When we stand up for what is ours to begin with, we may not fit men’s fantasy of what they’d have us be, but let’s not confuse honesty with selfishness--or enforced dependence with morality.

KATE MCFADDEN

Glendora