Letters to the Editor: Can a fetus be an attacker? On abortion as self-defense

To the editor: Holly Todd’s advocacy for abortion was indeed a cartoon.

First, she tries to dehumanize the early stage of pregnancy by using the term embryo, when actually after eight weeks the term is fetus (which means prenatal offspring), with electrical activity in the brain and a formed heart.

Todd then states that a pregnant person should employ self-defense against “someone” threatening their safety. The so-called embryo is now an attacker.

There were between 750,000 and 1 million abortions annually in the U.S. in the years just before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. Yet Todd’s emphasis is on about 1,200 maternal deaths a year, of which 23% were related to drug overdose and suicide, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and an increasing number are due to more women having babies after age 35.

So, out of all pregnancies in 2022, about 3.7 million resulted in live births, and about 0.03% resulted in maternal deaths.

This truly was a comic strip filled with hyperbole. I might add also that pregnancy is not an illness.

Mary Curtius, Coronado

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To the editor: First impressions can be misleading. I applauded and cheered (internally) when I initially read the title, “What if abortion was self-defense?” It seemed like a brilliant and clever idea.

On second thought, I changed my mind. Self-defense is a legal principle. It must be proved in a court of law.

Making it necessary for a woman to prove her reason for seeking an abortion is just plain wrong. It flies in the face of what should be each woman’s legal right of autonomy over decisions about her reproductive organs.

Needing to provide, much less prove, the reasons for a purely personal decision such as an abortion is just another form of dictatorship over women’s bodies.

Obviously, there’s a second problem if the idea presented were to become a reality. What would happen if a woman alleged but failed to sufficiently prove self-defense?

Betty Rome, Culver City

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To the editor: To compare an unborn child to an unjust aggressor is shameful. Unborn children are not responsible for their conception, for sexual violence, for the health of the mother, for our poor healthcare system, for careless sexual behavior or for irresponsible parenting.

There are many people who should be held responsible in the abortion debate, but the unborn child is not one of them.

John Williams, Burbank

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To the editor: In her commentary, editorial writer Carla Hall wrote, “It would be taken for granted that men had an inalienable right to terminate a pregnancy.”

But it never had to be written, or even spoken. Men (not all men, to be sure) always get to “terminate a pregnancy” — by simply disappearing.

In fairness to many conservatives’ insistence that humans remain “chaste” until married, “chastity in singleness” was an attempt to hold men responsible for their children.

Alas, it hasn’t worked so far. Can it ever?

Until then, we women do need it written, and spoken, and taken for granted that we have control of our bodies.

Barbara Sophia Eurich-Rascoe, Pasadena