022074 Letter re-Birth Control
Dear Long John,
On a program such as the one on which Barbara Meara, Vice Chaff., N.Y. State RTL, appeared it would seem that the object would be to develop or spread
truth. This was not your (and your wife's) objective during the first hour and a half of the program to which I listened. You used techniques to confuse and ridicule rather than to clarify the basic issue. Since the basic issue is protecting the lives of human beings from being terminated by their mothers, arriving at truths is of great importance.
At one point you chided Barbara for saying that when a mother undergoes an abortion, the life of her child is terminated. You inferred that she (Barbara) was hung up on the point that the pre-natal object was a "child".
You implied she was stubbornly close-minded on this point. You harped frequently on this point during the program*
Might it not be that it is you who are stubbornly close-minded? The life of an individual begins at the moment of fertilization and is a continuum until death. Blastula, zygote, fetus,, infant, bay, adolescent, youth, young adult, adult, senior citizen are simply terms which in a general way note the approximate age of the individual. They do not denote the degree of or lack of humanness.
You were doing a disservice to some of your listeners by insisting that a fetus is not a child. The opposite is the truth. Some of those favoring abortion are more honest and acknowledge that when a woman aborts, her child is killed. They justify the killing as a means of* population control, nuking available more natural resources to fewer people, reducing welfare coats, enabling women to enter the market place, etc.
You pressed Barbara into talking about birth control. Birth control is 0 K if the method used is self control; if copulation is confined to those intervals in the woman's cycle when she is infertile, about 22 days out of the 28. The "safe period" method is ridiculed by anti.-lifers. No money is to be made selling the various protective devices which frequently don't protect.
You made statements replying that opposition to abortion stems primarily or largely from peculiar/absurd religious teachings of Catholics and Orthodox Jews which they am intent on imposing on others. This is not so, The opposition to abortion transcends the membership of these groups.
You implied that it is criminal:/inhuman to urge a women who is pregnant to carry her child to term, She should be free to decide whether to do so or not.
An analogy - A woman is free to borrow money from a finance company to cover the cost of a cruise to the test Indies. She is free to choose the particular class of accommodation she wishes, the activities in which she will participate - the fun/pleasure. Does she have the freedom, legal or moral, to elect to avoid the consequences of her action? Is she free to refuse to repay the loan?
A woman is free to choose whether or not to conceive a child. ?Morally she is not free to destroy the child that results from her sexual activity,
The time to make the decision is before beginning the series of actions that lead to pregnancy*
Treating other points - rape, incest, capital punishment, etc., that were touched upon during the interval that I was listening would require writing several times.
A couple of parting remarks: You designed the program to spread the anti-life euphemisms rather than to get at the truth. You came over as an egoist, wrapped up in your own self-importance, willing to kill your own unborn child to avoid having to share yourself or your possessions with him.
Cordially
Patrick H. McHUGH