Abortion and Overpopulation

In her Sept. 6 commentary, “The Ultimate Sexual Degradation,” Katherine Dowling comes tantalizingly close, but doesn’t quite grasp the whole truth about abortion and its implications for mankind.

I’ll borrow her words as she discusses China’s practices of female infanticide and death for female fetuses identified by ultrasound. “Is there any real difference, morally, between killing your little daughter in or out of the womb? Once a sex is dehumanized, slated for death because of its biology, where that death takes place is of little moment.”

Eliminate references to sex and speak only of human beings and Dowling has raised the very question which we as a nation should be asking ourselves. Is there any real difference, morally, between killing your little baby in or out of the womb?

A mother murders her newborn or leaves it to die in the alley behind her home. We’re outraged, but why? She simply did not “choose” to kill it while it still lived inside of her. Instead, she “chose” to kill it after it was born.

Abortion is much more than a “women’s issue,” here and in China. Certainly we Americans should concern ourselves with saving first and foremost our own nation’s future before trying to change the ways of the rest of the world. Let’s stop the devaluation of all mankind here at home.

MARIA L. HEDGES

Balboa

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* Dowling passes quickly over the idea of the U.S. delegate equating female feticide with the benefit of reducing world population, as if such a consideration were unworthy of serious comment. With one-fifth of Earth’s people being Chinese, authorities there may feel themselves in a population crisis.

Female feticide is a potentially effective, if cruel, solution to further future overpopulation.

Add Hillary Clinton’s remarks (in your editorial of the same day) to the stew, wherein she advocates no governmental controls of family size, and it looks like women and their biologic need to procreate need to be more effectively confronted if we intend to ever get a handle on overpopulation, the predictable consequences of which are frightening and rampant.

One may imagine even more Draconian official interventions if and when the human population of Earth grows from 6 billion to 7 or 8 billion. Overpopulation is not a sexist problem, it is a survival one.

HOWARD CAPLAN

Manhattan Beach

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* China spent the better part of the 20th Century struggling with its severe overpopulation problem. After voluntary efforts to curtail family size failed, the government instituted its mandatory “one-child-per-couple” policy. Some Americans may regard this as government intrusion but it was absolutely essential that China get its population problem under control. Mrs. Clinton should not criticize China for this policy. At the women’s conference she suggested that government should not “intrude” on family planning decisions and she advocated that couples be allowed to make their own decisions. But if couples in China were able to make their own decisions, they would revert to having four, five or six children. Is this progress?

What needs to be denounced is the sex selectivity that is a cultural tradition that has been practiced in Chinese families for centuries. Infanticide regarding girl babies must be roundly condemned by all nations. Sex-selective abortions should be ended, although abortion as a general birth-control method should be preserved.

When population pressures reach a state of emergency, the U.S. should not critique the methods other countries use to control their problem.

JENNIFER MARKS

Irvine