I have to hand it to Catherine White (July 8 “Puppy death bad, abortions even worse”).  Not many people would have the temerity to link the brutality mentioned in the letter she referenced with abortions, with the implication that the latter was responsible for the former, even if only in part. 

I don’t have a problem with her opinion on abortion. My problem is the narrow and misleading way she presented it, as if she were trying to show a causal relationship between the two.  To claim that the practice of abortion contributes to the belief that “life is expendable” is an opinion, and one I believe is wrong.

Similar opinions are presented by people who try to point to a correlation between violent video games and violent crimes, yet I doubt that the millions of people who have played games such as the Halo trilogy use that as an excuse to go out and shoot people.

Freedom is the birthright of all intelligent beings. People like White may believe that women who choose to have abortions are “sold a lie” or deluded or whatever, but it is still their choice to make, and nobody should take that away from them, certainly not in the belief that their actions are “just” or “good.”  A tyranny of the just is still a tyranny, and when you have one group taking the rights of another, it is tyranny, in fact if not in name.

The Kansas study that White quoted also found that a reduced number of abortion clinics did not correlate with a reduced number of abortions, and that residents of counties with an abortion clinic were less likely to get an abortion. It also cited factors such as low unemployment, Head Start clinics, and health insurance coverage as reducing the number of abortions performed. 

So if people like White truly wish to reduce the number of abortions, there are better ways to do it than to support pro-life candidates. Making abortions illegal will not prevent them from happening. It will merely push the problem underground.

I would prefer to reduce or eliminate the factors which contribute to the prevalence of abortions and thus reduce the number of abortions that need to be performed than to make them illegal in the vain belief that it will end the problem.

Jeffrey “Jaime” Ehlers

Tahlequah