Gloucester Daily Times Debate on Abortion (17), December 24, 1985

Many Attempts at Male Domination

Last week I wrote a letter to the Gloucester Times which somehow either found its way into the shredder, or went astray in the plethora of pro-life mail. I was responding to Mr. Boland who takes issue with Sandy Parsons, since he was the first in what has become a long string of men of again exercise their opinions of domination  over women. How strange it is that men are so totally involved in abortion since they will never have to face this issue.

Historically, men have ruled women, and all these men who are writing in are committed to continue. Mr. Boland glides so glibly over the fact that Hitler was a man, responsible for conceiving and executing the greatest atrocities in the history of man-mad atrocities. He brings up South Africa, where he probably doe snot know that a lone woman in the government fights apartheid. Men will not recognize that our own male dominated government which was elected with the promise of “less” government in the affairs of people, is trying to increase its domination over so personal an issue as a woman’s right of choice, but perversely, wants to cut funds to support and keep viable the infants resulting from their imposition. It begins to sound like the Victorian’s mother’s advice to her daughter on her wedding night … “lie still and think of England.” Unfortunately, “thinking of England” will return women with unwanted pregnancies back to the back-alley illegal practitioners: that’s murder!

The issue of murder of the fetus cannot be as blithely determined as these men would wish, since greater scientific and medical opinions than theirs or mine are unable to make this judgment. Because men say it is so, does not make it so. The issue should be the fetus if it is considered along with freedom, choice, and reason of the people concerned. I wonder if the pro-life woman extolling the virtues of sharing one’s bounty is aware that she is espousing the Socialist manifesto; excepting Bloomingdale’s, of course. Her credos seem to have gone astray.

Harriet Rothstein, Whale Cove, Rockport