LETTERS

Re “Doctor at focus of abortion debate shot dead in church,” June 1

I doubt I will be the first to ask, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if I were the last to ask: How can someone who believes so fervently in the right to life so cavalierly take a life -- in a house of worship no less -- to demonstrate how passionately he is committed to his cause?

To me, every right-to-life advocate who does not vigorously denounce this cold-blooded murder is tantamount to an accomplice and surrenders any right to claim that he or she is staking out the higher moral ground in the abortion debate.

Floyd J. Siegal

Encino

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Fourteen years ago, I wrote an anonymous letter to one of my hometown newspapers expressing my gratitude to the physician who was able to perform my late second-trimester abortion.

I was relieved that he was well known in the ob/gyn community for the successful surgeries he provided that would still permit women to go on to sustain a pregnancy and have a safe delivery in spite of having undergone a midterm abortion.

Fast forward to 2009: I subsequently went on to have a successful second pregnancy and delivery, in middle age, and am the mother of a healthy child.

I still fervently believe that safe, high-quality abortion services should be available to women everywhere.

Margot Wellner

Rancho Santa Margarita

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Another doctor who performs abortions has been killed by a self-righteous, sanctimonious individual. As Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg has stated: “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil, but for good people to do evil -- that takes religion.”

I certainly wouldn’t call this murderer, who takes the law into his own hands, a good person.

David M. Keranen

Bakersfield

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It is reported that President Obama said he was shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller: “However profound our difference as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.”

Pray tell, if this was a heinous act of violence -- and it was -- then what exactly is the murder of thousands of viable, aborted late-term fetuses?

And what is so “profound” that makes these two examples different under “equal protection of the law”?

Donald A. Sellek

Manhattan Beach