Barnett Slepian

Shame on you. Michael Ramirez’s Oct. 28 cartoon seems to be saying that Dr. Barnett Slepian deserved what he got. How can you equate fetuses that are not alive with a man who was not only married but had four sons of his own? A man who, according to your Oct. 27 article, brought many children into the world? A compassionate and brave man. If Slepian performed late-term abortions, he was doing it for the health and welfare of the mother and in most cases because the fetuses had severe, possibly life-threatening medical problems. Don’t you dare confuse murder with abortion.

After two days of articles where you showed us a man, Dr. Slepian, who was a stand-up guy in his community, you come out with this cartoon. Slepian and his family deserve better.

JOHN NEWBY

Los Angeles

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I find the Ramirez cartoon sick: He implies that the abortion doctor was a killer and scatters those little baby fetuses around, like letters in alphabet soup, to show the pathos of the killing by the doctor. Then he shows the outline of the dead doctor’s body, the implication being that murder begets murder, which is a sick equation of the doctor’s ministering to women in great plight and the willful shooting of the doctor.

Ramirez salts the wound and justifies the doctor’s murder.

ROBERT PETERS

Huntington Beach

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I am getting sick and tired of the press telling us that abortionists are heroes and/or martyrs. In your Oct. 27 editorial, you compare the shooting of Slepian to the assassination of a president. Other writers have described Slepian as “courageous.” How much courage does it take to murder an innocent human being?

Regardless of what some Supreme Court judges have decided, a fetus, as science has shown us, is a living human being in the womb. How can there be a woman’s right to choose to murder a human being? How can the moral climate of this country be so skewed that we condemn a couple who throw their baby into a dumpster, and yet accept as perfectly legal that a doctor can perform a partial-birth abortion where the baby’s brain is sucked out? Condemn the sniper all you want; I agree it was a cowardly, illegal murder, but don’t tell me how brave an abortionist was!

BERNARD A. ZUBER

Pasadena