Noonan and the Dark Consequences of Abortion Law - The Wall Street Journal

Regarding Peggy Noonan’s “Will the Justices Let Go of Abortion?” (Declarations, Dec. 4): I was a nurse in the 1960s, before Roe v. Wade (1973). Women who were desperate for abortions got them. Those who could afford it flew to countries where it was safe and legal. Those who couldn’t afford it went to underground abortionists, where many died. Others suffered complications so severe that they required hospital treatment. Overturning Roe would only hurt poor women.

Elise L. Lev

The Villages, Fla.

Viability is not the right lens for deciding abortion law. To see why, imagine the mirror opposite—a viability argument for the end of life. It might go like this: Folks who live to a certain age can have their lives ended because they have reached the end of viability and would die anyway without someone caring for them.

Roe sits on a lofty but teetering pedestal. The best the court can do is to either right the pedestal or knock it over, once and for all. Roe was built on a foundation of sand, a shifting timeline. My sympathies lie with the Supreme Court justices. They are in a very difficult position.

Patricia Morgan

Inverness, Fla.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor commented that while a fetus may react to prodding, so does a brain-dead person. If this observation has probative value, it is the opposite of the justice’s purpose.

Consider a brain-dead patient for whom the plug might be pulled. If the natural history of this patient’s condition were such that the patient had a 90% chance of full recovery within 24 weeks, no responsible physician would pull that plug. It would be monstrous. In the situation of the fetus, the natural history is that if the current ”life support” is continued, it will in all likelihood result in a fully functioning human being. Justice Sotomayor has suggested a valuable analogy.

Donn D. Lobdell

Camas, Wash.

Late in her column, Ms. Noonan asks, “Why has abortion so roiled this country for half a century?” One of her earlier columns, from Jan. 20, 2003 (“A Tough Roe,” Declarations), provides a good answer:

“I believe we haven’t begun to appreciate the effect on our children and their developing understanding of life that they are told every day, on television and in magazines, in advertisements and news stories, that we allow the killing of children. It’s not good for them to know that, not good for them to be told over and over that they live in a place where life is not necessarily respected and inconvenient life can be whisked away. Knowledge like that has a chilling effect on the soul.”

Is there any doubt, now, about that chilling effect? As Ms. Noonan said on a panel a few years later, in 2006: “Abortion is either OK or it’s not.”

Jim Mayhall

Lake Bluff, Ill.

Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/peggy-noonan-roe-v-wade-abortion-dobbs-women-children-11639088747

Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.