To the Editor:
Re “What Professional-Lifers Misplaced and Received,” by Ross Douthat (column, Nov. 13):
Mr. Douthat’s column suffers from the identical downside that so many pro-life arguments do: the failure to take account of the myriad causes for ladies to wish or to need an abortion.
Legislators can by no means write a regulation that addresses all of the advanced well being care implications of abortion bans. Nor can pro-lifers ever sufficiently handle the social and financial burdens of girls compelled to hold a being pregnant to time period.
Even much less do they ever handle to handle the duties of males who trigger undesirable pregnancies. There isn’t any authorized effort to punish males in the best way that docs and ladies are punished. The injustice is obvious.
For these causes, and the American choice for liberty over non secular coercion, the pro-life trigger can by no means prevail on this nation.
Judith Grossman
Cambridge, Mass.
To the Editor:
Having celebrated the anticipated post-Roe arrival of 60,000 of different folks’s infants per 12 months, maybe Ross Douthat, the mathematical moralist, can subsequent inform us of his estimates of what number of additional ladies died in childbirth, what number of additional ladies fell into extreme despair, what number of additional youngsters dropped out of faculty, and what number of additional mother and father and siblings fell into poverty.
Dwight Grant
La Jolla, Calif.
To the Editor:
Ross Douthat calls his anti-abortion fellow vacationers a “ethical minority.” That’s not the case. We all know that as a result of they’ve had 50 years to craft legal guidelines that will not solely outlaw abortion, but additionally defend the lifetime of the lady carrying the fetus. But, regardless of a half-century to organize, they’ve solely been capable of craft bludgeons that can lead to maternal mortality rising dramatically, in line with research on the topic.
If Mr. Douthat and others in his camp had been truly “pro-life,” they’d be seeking to nations just like the Netherlands and Switzerland, the place abortion charges are half or one third that of the U.S. Not coincidentally, these nations have common well being care, quick access to abortion, intercourse ed beginning in elementary faculty, and beneficiant parental go away insurance policies together with a stronger social security internet.
If Mr. Douthat and others in his camp need to be ethical, the trail is clearly laid out.
J.P. Partland
New York
To the Editor:
I’m an 87-year-old mom and grandmother. I’m a lady who, in 1961, had an ectopic being pregnant. My husband and I had been making an attempt to start out a household for 3 years. We sought out a fertility specialist and subsequent therapies. I desperately wished a child. Life with out youngsters was not the long run I had imagined. I had a lot to provide and to show to my potential youngsters.
In these days if a lady had a deadly being pregnant through which her life was in danger, docs would do the whole lot they might for the well being and well-being of that lady, even in a Catholic hospital in Milwaukee. An ectopic being pregnant is when the fetus develops exterior the uterus, sometimes in a fallopian tube, and happens in about two out of each 100 pregnancies. It’s deadly to the fetus and threatens the mom’s life.
The docs saved my life, and though I misplaced my child, I used to be lucky that I lived in a time when the experience of my physician took priority over a politician’s ideology.
I went on to undertake two youngsters, my daughter and son, and I’ve seven caring grandchildren. I’ve lived an exquisite and full life with a loving household, a life I’ve devoted in service to my neighborhood for the higher good. Would our world be higher if governmental officers had the ability to reject my lifesaving surgical procedure due to their private pro-life beliefs?
I write this as somebody who survived a traumatic being pregnant, whose child couldn’t have lived and I may need died on the younger age of 26. I fervently hope that generations to come back may have the identical selection.
Marjorie Perlman Shafton
Chicago
To the Editor:
Re “The Dobbs Choice Revealed How Weak the Professional-Life Motion Actually Is,” by Matthew Walther (Opinion visitor essay, Nov. 5):
Mr. Walther ignores the heroic advocacy on behalf of the unborn exterior the authorized area. The professional-life motion consists of workers and volunteers at pro-life being pregnant useful resource facilities who selflessly accompany ladies in want throughout and after being pregnant.
It consists of adoption businesses to assist discover loving houses for kids. It consists of sidewalk counselors who pray for and converse with ladies who mistakenly assume abortion is their solely possibility.
The professional-life motion has at all times engaged in “questions of biology and metaphysics” that the creator says the “way forward for the trigger would require.”
Second, the creator insults the work of the originalist authorized motion and its constitutional philosophy. It’s the means by which our Structure is preserved. Originalism’s utility in Dobbs will save numerous unborn lives.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer
McLean, Va.
The author is director of the Conscience Mission and a fellow on the Institute for Human Ecology on the Catholic College of America.
To the Editor:
Re “I Write About Submit-Roe America Each Day. It’s Worse Than You Assume,” by Jessica Valenti (Opinion visitor essay, nytimes.com, Nov. 5):
I simply don’t get it: Why aren’t docs and different well being care staff, hospital chains and well being care organizations standing up en masse and saying to their state governments: “Hell no! We is not going to cooperate together with your dictatorial, inhumane manipulations”?
The spokesperson for one chain of hospitals says, “We merely can not put our clinicians able which may lead to legal prosecution.” However that’s precisely what they need to be doing. And they need to be standing behind these clinicians with all of their cash, and all of their political affect.
By not doing in order that they fail each themselves by compromising their integrity and abandoning their ethics, and their sufferers, by depriving them of the care they require, and deserve.
Jonathan P. Levin
Northampton, Mass.
Supply: NY Times