Abortion Clinic Killings
How can supposedly religious people cheer the deaths of two women in the Brookline reproductive services clinics (Jan. 2)? Whether you are personally for or against abortion, all citizens must demand that the violence and harassment of clinic workers and doctors be stopped.
Planned Parenthood offers many services in addition to abortion. Couples who are being “personally responsible” and trying to prevent an unwanted pregnancy go to Planned Parenthood to obtain birth control. Surely the best way to reduce abortions is to prevent pregnancy in the first place.
Yet the religious zealots make any clinic entrance difficult and now dangerous. What about the low-income women who go there for gynecological exams and cancer screenings such as Pap smears? There is no moral issue with cancer; why should these women and the clinic workers who serve their clients face death for doing so? Please, please demand the madness be stopped.
If your church is opposed to abortions and/or birth control, then don’t use them. But don’t kill people who have a legal right to choose. Write your legislators and demand protection for the clinics and enforcement of the laws.
JOYCE KERLEY
Cypress
While I do not condone the murders of abortion clinic employees, nevertheless it is morally wrong to crush the lives of unborn babies, thus preventing them to come to full term and being born. Just compare approximately a dozen abortion advocates’ lives being snuffed out as opposed to millions of unborn babies crushed to death and then thrown away.
I would like abortionists to remember that they were once a fetus who were given the privilege of coming to full term and being born. There is no doubt that abortion is murder. Let’s never forget that we have an unseen soul and have to answer to Almighty God on the day of judgment.
MARIE DAVIES
Los Angeles
Susan Carpenter McMillan’s Commentary (Jan. 5) makes me very angry. Like so many other hypocritical religious zealots, her ramblings do little to further her cause--other than to incite the unstable to rally behind other fanatics. McMillan herself had an abortion as a young woman. Her “do as I say, not as I do” philosophy is proven in her statement, “Those of us who believe in the sanctity of human life from the moment of conception,” that certainly was not her belief when she was confronted with an unwanted pregnancy. No, Ms. McMillan, the place for the pro-lifers to pass out their literature is not in front of a women’s clinic; they should do their praying and propagandizing in their churches. Doctors performing abortions at women’s health clinics are doing a legal procedure and if the pro-lifers don’t like the law, then they should be picketing and petitioning their state legislatures to have the law changed and stay away from places where legal procedures are being performed.
How dare McMillan describe doctors who perform a legal medical procedure as “murderers.” Get your head out of the sand and your followers back into their churches and off to their state capitals. Pro-lifers killing medical professionals are the true “murderers.”
BOB SHERMAN
Glendale
Re “Suspect in Killings Seized after Attack on Virginia Clinic,” Jan. 1:
After reading about the murders allegedly committed by John Salvi and realizing their similarity to those committed by Paul Hill, I think we have ample cause to temper the assembly rights of pro-lifers. The assemblies staged in close proximity to clinics that provide abortions create an unreasonable threat for women and doctors involved in operations sanctioned by the law.
The rights of any individual have been mediated by the rights of others since the Constitution first came into effect; for example, shouting “Fire!” at a theater places the occupants of the theater in danger, so the individual right to speech defers to the occupants’ right to safety. The history of violence aimed at abortion clinics and the abundance of support for the assailants justify limited assembly rights for pro-lifers, as this particular assembly more often only precedes and lends support to the crime of murder.
MICHELLE KARNES
Berkeley
“Egypt Executes Militant in Ongoing Bid to Crush Extremists” (Jan. 1) referred to “Muslim militants” and fundamentalist “extremists.” Meanwhile, the story on page one of the same section never once referred to Salvi, the suspect in the Massachusetts abortion clinic rampage, as a “Christian extremist” or a “Catholic militant.” Why the double standard?
JON NELSON
Panorama City
