Debate Over Abortion

In your letters on abortion (Dec. 29) two writers made the standard and crucial assertion that abortion takes the life of a human being. Lawyers like to be precise in their definitions and few seem to know that the Rehnquist Supreme Court justices in the court’s anti-abortion decision of 1989 supported a contrary view: that the fetus is only potentially a human being. When the justices were using their own words and not citing the nomenclature of other parties, none wrote of the fetus as a human being. All, except Justice Antonin Scalia, characterized it a total of 22 times as “potential” human life and Scalia made no characterization.

A typical abortion is done in the first three months. Then, the potential human life is less than an inch long, weighs less than an ounce and cannot survive outside the womb. It deserves our respect, but to exaggerate its status beyond that of potential human life is both untruthful and turns a blind eye on the often desperate predicament of women and families when abstinence or contraception fails. Are we not unduly vain and narcissistic about our own species when we force every grower of the one-inch acorn of human life to let it become an unwanted tree, bringing misery to the grower, quite possibly to the tree, and when carried to the extreme, to all life on Earth?

Your columnists Robert Bellah and Chris Adams (Commentary, Jan. 8) call for rebuilding “our moral and ethical foundations.” What profound morality and precision should we look for on the subject of abortion?

MILES H. ROBINSON MD, Santa Barbara