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Letter: Abortion for health, welfare like self-defense
Op-Ed · August 27, 2015
An Iowa View newspaper piece (The Register 8/22/15) from former Republican Lt. Governor Joy Coning titled “Planned Parenthood attacks should concern Republicans” suggests that waning hope springs eternal when a compassionate person like Corning is still willing to offer good council to the peevish remnants of the little that remains of the Grand Old Party of Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
In her piece, Corning reflects an understanding that life comes with some hard choices in which a woman in great want of being loved and cherished needs it shown in defense of her very real being in place of a willingness to sacrifice her in holier-than-thou pretense of greater good coming someday from an incipient potential of other life.
Recognizing the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy in preservation of her health and welfare does not seem to be any different than recognizing anyone else’s right to self-defense. Resultant deathcollateral to self-defense of life, liberty and security has always been provided for in law and such defense is not a crime of any kind.
Beyond self-defense, our entire nation engages in national defense that results in the killing of both enemy combatants and those unfortunately killed as collateral damage of war as in the death of a non-combatant pregnant woman, the entire family and the neighbors.
And such is neither a crime committed by the troops in combat and their commanders, nor us at home that funded their being there.
Such intended and unintended death occurs in conflict of war, pregnancy from amour or just going out the door and does not make anyone criminally liable. Further, the very deliberate killing in capital punishment does not make either the judge that sentences or those that carry out the execution criminally liable within the law.
All such killing is thus accepted though no exceptions are mentioned in the Commandment “Thou salt not kill.” But situational ethics finds room for this, but not that, and such makes the pack of us hypocrites painted with whatever exceptions one finds morally unacceptable but washed clean away by another that considers it rightfully understandable.
We mentally take our pick and don’t mind letting others know where we stand. Until we are of one mind and are willing to give up everything from self-defense, to national defense, to communal vengeance maybe just thinking about it is as a matter of personal conscience is as far as we ought together go.
Sam Osborne, West Branch
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