Love Cruikshank, Love Notes

Had another of those little telephone inquiries last week. You know the ones where they sound out your views on political questions while being careful not to listen to what you say.

This was one about abortion. Some woman, rather, the recording of some woman, announced that she represented the Right to Life organization. &8220;For the last 29 years we have been fighting the murder of little babies&8221; was her second sentence.

I feel it is only right to respect every person’s right to hold his own opinion whether you agree with it or not. So I refrained from saying that if those against abortion had been fighting it for only the last 29 years they were getting a late start. Abortion didn’t start with the Roe v. Wade ruling.

There were those wonderful holy years when it was illegal. I listened to a documentary some months ago that revealed that hospitals in New York City &045; all hospitals in that city &045; received about 18 women a day, victims of unskilled abortionists. Many of the women died.

As I told the woman on the phone, before I realized she was not a woman, but a recording, I didn’t approve of abortion, but I didn’t feel the government should make decisions that are properly the concern of the family.

A president who gets all choked up about the death of unborn babies might remind himself of the equal grief occasioned by war.

The right-to-lifers are badly in need of a public relations chairman. If you want to discuss the question of abortion with someone on the other side, let the person talking to your adversary be a real person. A recording is an insult. The one dealing with me after I had voiced my misgiving about abortion and my even greater misgiving about the matter becoming a political argument at once asked me how much of a financial contribution I was willing to make to their cause.

I realize, of course, that a recording is in no position to hear what’s being said. It is unfortunate that the inability to listen seems to reflect an inability to think. So does the law that any physician performing an abortion should be imprisoned for five years.

Thanks to the insurance rates for malpractice costs being raised, fewer and fewer people are eager to enter the medical field. South Dakota, where the state Legislature has passed a bill to pretty much ban abortion, may find that the state has fewer doctors than it wants. The bill awaits the signature of Gov. Mike Rounds, who says he intends to sign.

Back in the era of Communism phobia everyone was alert for signs of leaning toward that party. Now, sometimes in the name of religion, there is a push toward outlawing family limitation.

How many times must we read in our newspaper of a mother who has drowned her children or poisoned them or otherwise disposed of them because she simply can’t cope.

A growing number of families have two bread-winners because it takes two to provide for children’s needs, even in a small family.

Scarcely a day passes that we don’t read of an abused child, sometimes a child who has been reported to those paid to protect children, but to no avail. The truth is that we have money for expensive wars, money to pay return taxes to the wealthy, money to subsidize corporations and other fat cats, but no great sums to educate children, or even to see that they have enough to eat.

Children need more than just the right to be born. To merely exist is not to live.

(Albert Lea resident Love Cruikshank’s column publishes on Thursday.)