To the Editor:
In a recent letter to the editor James Brown correctly pointed out that inflation, illegal immigration, homelessness, crime, dope and gasoline prices are all major issues that politicians should be addressing.
He then points to the recent elections in which Democrats “used abortion” to get people to vote. “To them killing the unborn is more important than having bread and butter, fuel and safety?” Brown misses the point completely. What Democrats want is the God-given right of women to control their own bodies in every aspect of their lives.
I wonder how Brown would react to a law requiring all men over 30 to have a vasectomy or wear a beard? Would he feel that the government was interfering in areas of his life that are best left to him? There are real dangers when governments attempt to invade the personal rights of citizens.
The state of Virginia passed a law in 1924 that allowed state institutions to sterilize “inmates who are insane, idiotic, imbecile, feeble-minded and epileptic, and who by the laws of heredity are the probable parents of socially inadequate offspring.” In a case before the Supreme Court testing the Virginia law, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rendered the opinion upholding the law (Buck v Bell): “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”
Before the law was repealed in 1974, 8,000 women were involuntarily sterilized in Virginia and nationwide the number rose to nearly 70,000. Forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy for nine months and have a child she does not want, and sterilizing women against their will to prevent them from having children, are two issues cut from the same cloth.
Nobody likes abortion. Quoting former President Bill Clinton, “Abortions should be safe, legal, and rare.” The issue is one of protecting personal rights against the intrusion of big government.
I might also add that it has been Republicans who have ridden the abortion issue into office. They have done so against the will of a majority of citizens, as the votes in Kansas and Ohio have shown conclusively. For Brown and every American, the motto should be “my body, my choice.”
Jim Curry
Franklin
