Calling for a moratorium on 'verbal warfare' over abortion, the Rev. Roger Johnson fires at a 3-year old letter of Cardinal Cooke that cannot go unchecked (Focus April 19). For purposes of de-escalation, Rev. Johnson urges seven points: no name-calling; dialogue; keep cool; listen to opponents; give credit where due: acknowledge own fallibility; be of good cheer and hope especially in controversy.

I accept these guidelines, but does he who issued them? No sooner are the points for peaceful rather than verbal warfare stated than we have a breach of the peace asking that pro-abortion and anti-abortion be replaced by prochoice and anti-choice.

In effect, let's agree not to mention what we are talking about. Free choice, in itself, is something good and desirable. Being pro-choice, in itself, is something good and desirable. Being pro-choice in general is a generality. But legalizing free choice in general is not the issue. It is the specific choice to end, terminate, kill, finish a human life that is at issue. After all, you pay medical fees for abortion, not for choices, and there is payment because they are not free.

Being pro-choice in general sounds very democratic and progressive, but when that choice is actualized and applied to some specific choice we should examine the specifics, not revert to generalities. Surely all sorts of people are personally opposed to homicide, rape, arson and kidnapping, but I have never heard anyone argue pro-choice in these matters when we discuss laws against homicide, rape, arson or kidnapping.

In the area of human rights, the principle of freedom is 'paramount. And it is precisely here, on the 'human,' that the right, wrong and freedom of the issue are joined.

Point 6 of the focus is clearly stated: "No one can know for sure when a fetus becomes a human being, a person with a soul." No need here to get entangled with ensoulment, no Legislature could ever legislate that anyhow.

But, "No one can know for sure when a fetus becomes a human being." That for sure we can know, it is known. I will not risk heightening suspicions by quoting a past or present ecclesiastical source. Allow me to cite instead a pro-abortion editorial from a medical journal three years before the Supreme Court ruled:

"Since the old ethic has not yet been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been the curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices." California Medicine 11:3, Sept.'70, _P. 68)

By all means, lay down the guns of 'verbal warfare' and pick up the tools of modern genetics so that we keep to the facts: human life. If it (he or she) is living then it is alive. (If dead, abortion will not be the question.) Now, life does not exist in undifferentiated form, so we ask: Of what biological species is this life'! Answer: human species. Put these two facts together and we do know the answer - human life.

Externally, we are all of human parents, human origin: intrinsically, our genetic constitution is normally 16 chromosomes: 2:3 from our mother, 23 from our father. Every diploid cell in our body has the same 16 chromosomes, the same 16 we started with at conception in the then single cell zygote.

Think of it personally but backwards. Every adult reading this article was once an adolescent, before that a child, before that an infant, before birth a fetus, before that an embryo, before that blastocyst, before that a morula, before that a zygote or fertilized ovum, before that, you were not, nor was 1.

You and I were never little gametes. Our distinct individual lives began at fertilization with nothing more added from outside except nourishment - which is still the case.

We know for certain when human life begins. The Del Zio trial last summer, the Federal hearings on test-tube baby funding this winter, obviously these scientific efforts know not only when human life begins but aim to arrange how, where, and under what laboratory conditions.

In the above. I cite not Catholic facts, nor Mormon facts, nor the facts of Orthodox Judaism, nor the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. I quote no Pope nor Ayatollah. I cite what modern genetics teaches. If in medical school, one said: "I do not know," to the question "When does human life begin?" he would fail the test in embryology.

Now, of course, where we really do disagree is not on biology but on value. This is human life, but is it valuable human life? I think this innocent, individual human life is valuable and has value, and that it needs and deserves the protection of law. Clearly, other citizens do not share that conviction, Rev. Johnson among them, that this human life is valuable enough to protect by civil law.

No doubt, almost all agree that this is a tragic, painful and tortuous subject, admitting of different value-perceptions, but many Americans share my conviction that freedom of thought should not take precedence over the right to life.

Genuinely, I would like to dismantle 'verbal warfare' over abortion, but I am frankly dismayed that so many abortion proponents argue not the merits or demerits of abortion but against the words, motives and choices of abortion opponents.

I am further dismayed by the steady and studied effort to make and keep this a "Catholic Issue." I have read Luther, Calvin, Barth, Thielicke, Bonhoeffer, Gustafson, Neuhaus and Ramsey on abortion so I know this is not so. I have met Mormons, Lutherans, Baptists, Moslems and Jews whose conviction I share. I have dialogued with them and with others who do not agree.

The Planned Parenthood slogan = 'Free choice in proposition; Catholic Church in opposition' - has been all. too successful. It is not an invitation to dialogue. In the words and writings of some, it is not the old nativist bait - that Catholics are not really as American or as 'mainstream' as those who agree with me.

Why always shoot at a cardinal when any number of Baptist elders, rabbis, Mormon bishops, Lutheran Ministers, or just plain former altar boys like me are available? Dialogue? Yes, by all means, at any time, on any aspect of this issue, provided we do mention what it is we're really talking about - abortion.