Freedoms

Sherry Jeffe in her column (“Children Unborn,” Opinion, Sept. 3) portrays the upcoming elections as a single-issue campaign dominated by abortion. True, women and men have responded to the heavy-handed attempts of the New Right to curtail freedoms with a backlash of their own. But the pro-choice debate reflects only one facet of that backlash.

One cannot hold an anti-choice view without embodying a repressive attitude toward freedom generally and women’s rights particularly. So a pro-choice vote chooses more than a pro-choice candidate and rejects more than back-alley abortions. It rejects the chest-pounding attitudes and self-congratulatory solutions of exclusion, curtailment, control, force, and domination responsible for seemingly unrelated decisions like funding cutbacks for health care and the arts and the erosion of civil rights. The issue of deteriorating freedoms provides much of the underlying strength of the pro-choice movement. Legislators who ignore that fact will misjudge its force--and we’ll be better off without them.

KATE McFADDEN

Arcadia