Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 17, 1994 TAG: 9403170140
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAULA F. WILLIAMS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``Women'' poignantly described oppressive conditions that diminish and impoverish women's lives worldwide and, quite rightly, pointed to education as a primary means to improve the quality of life for women - and the planet, since educated women generally have fewer children.
I've always been led to believe that one of the purposes of education was to enable women and men to make their own choices - moral and otherwise. Why does the writer of the second editorial cast so much vitriol at a workshop intended to educate those who want to protect and keep legal a set of choices concerning reproductive options?
Surely, abortion-rights advocates need all the help they can get if abortion-rights opponents share the sentiments and tactics of Ralph Reed, executive director of The Christian Coalition. Reed has stated, ``I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night.'' The "Imposing morals" editorial conveniently failed to quote this, which was printed on the workshop's brochure that your writer so hysterically maligned.
Reed and other abortion-rights opponents would do well to keep in mind that not every religion in every era has deemed abortions as immoral. Not until 1869 did the Catholic Church adopt the doctrine that the soul enters the body at conception. Until the l9th century, the Catholic Church maintained the doctrine of passive conception, which held that the soul arrives in the fifth month of pregnancy to quicken the fetus that's previously soulless. Likewise, according to Brahman texts, abortions were perfectly acceptable before the fifth month of pregnancy.
Many argue these were ideas of a less enlightened time. But considering the gross misuses made in this century of science and technology - for which we're now reaping a tragic harvest in stockpiles of dangerous nuclear weapons and waste, environmental damage and pollution, the potential for epidemics caused by anti-biotic resistant microbes (over which contemporary medicine is currently powerless) - I hardly think we in the 20th century can claim to be more enlightened than those of a less technological era.
Of course politics determines whose morals are imposed on the rest of us. But if it's ``OK to work to alter state or federal law to conform with [one's] beliefs,'' then it should be equally as proper for abortion-rights advocates to have their beliefs legislated as it is for abortion-rights opponents to have theirs enacted. Anything less would be undemocratic, right?
Paula F. Williams of New Castle is a health-information manager at a local health-care facility.
by CNB