Abortion: Aid Cut, Roe Anniversary

Re “Bush Bans Aid to Abortion Support Groups Overseas,” Jan. 23:

Having just returned from a trip to India, I am appalled that President Bush’s first action has been to cut government grants to international family planning groups that pay (with their own money) for abortion counseling. Maybe he should go and take a look at the millions of children living in incredible conditions of destitution and squalor throughout the world.

CHIARA R. NAPPI

Pasadena

* Re “A ‘Choice’ That Defines Our Inhumanity,” Commentary, Jan. 22: Brad Stetson seems to believe abortions were invented in 1972 after the Roe vs. Wade decision. Abortion techniques were described in medical textbooks over 2,000 years ago. Fortunately, I am too young to have to have attended to the wards of young women who were hospitalized after submitting to back-alley butchers prior to Roe vs. Wade. Many women died, and many others survived to suffer the mental and physical scars that were the result of illegal abortions. Roe vs. Wade allowed these procedures to be performed safely and legally.

I feel despondent but not surprised by President Bush’s first major official act. With the misogynistic stroke of his presidential pen he eliminated funding to family planning programs that offer full services, including abortion, around the globe, sentencing many poor women to misery and even death. I guess he feels it is more compassionate to have babies suffer and die from malnutrition and disease than it is to offer adequate contraception and safe and legal abortion.

BEVERLY A. SANSONE MD

Huntington Beach

* Stetson’s anti-abortion argument is passionate and persuasive. But it requires acceptance of his set of selected ethics over the ethics of others who can argue as convincingly that a fetus that is incapable of surviving outside the womb is not a life in a legal or social sense.

There is no doubt that to most people abortion is ethically and morally repugnant. But in a free society, women can make ethical or moral choices and then live with the consequences. It’s their right.

Stetson notes that in the past 28 years there have been 39 million abortions. He does not mention the social consequences there would have been with an increase in our population of children born to social situations in which they were not wanted and in which they would not be properly cared for.

JOHN M. FRETER

Yucca Valley