By Jennifer Finger
Arizona Daily Wildcat
October 29, 1997

Don't limit right to choose

Editor:

In regards to Jennifer McKean's commentary on abortion: How dare you make the issue of abortion as trivial as a "mere inconvenience"? I noticed you told the reader to forget their own beliefs on the issue, but you certainty did not. You even claimed that you could not "pretend to know what goes on in other people's minds", but later make a terrible generalization that "a parent loves and cherishes the innocence they have created". It really would be a wonderful world if that were true. Instead there are more than two million reported cases of child abuse each year, and about 1,300 children die a year due to abuse and or neglect.

When you place the blame solely on these women who choose to have abortions you can easily ignore and forget the many other dangers facing the children outside of the womb, such as poverty, abuse, neglect, and inadequate health-care. One in five pregnant women do not have access to any pre-natal care and 53% of all female headed households are poor.

The highest percentage of abortions are committed in females "between the ages of 20-24". This seems to be the target age of many women attending college. You later assert that these same women are having abortions for "essentially no reason at all." Getting an education to better yourself and your future earnings in the workforce is an enduring task for many people. Many of us do not have the time or money to take care of ourselves, much less a growing fetus. And yet you have the gall to tell me, "If now isn't the right time, maybe the time will never be right for that woman. Maybe that shouldn't be her choice."

In Washington D.C., the same place you marched against my choice, a judge ordered a seriously ill pregnant woman who had cancer to undergo surgery in order to save her 25-week old fetus. This surgery was done against her will and those of the rest of her family and her doctor before her lawyers could appeal. Both died.

I even personally know four other "special circumstances" but have yet to meet a track and field athlete who artificially inseminates herself to improve performance or a woman who wants to look good in her new bathing suit, which by the way was probably sentiments of her husband.

Women are not baby-making machines. When you put limitations on our reproductive organs you also put limitations on our autonomy, well-being, and social mobility.

Jennifer Finger
Sociology sophomore