Letters to the EditorThe MaroonLoyola University In her column criticizing the anti-abortion demonstration, Kaitlin Ketchum engages in emotional name calling. She expressed outrage at being “obliged to witness a large, offensive anti-choice ?protest.?” She does not say who obliged her to witness the protest, which she characterizes as a so-called protest by putting the word in quotation marks. The “protesters” (as she labeled them) were protesting against abortion on demand. She said that they were protesting against choice. People who are in favor of abortion on demand say they are pro-choice and do not mention what they are for having the right to choose. In asserting that not all students were free to voice their opinions because the administration is unwilling to grant that kind of voice, she ignores the demonstrations of pro-choice-abortion students described in a letter by Aaron Walker in the same edition of The Maroon. She calls abortion a complicated issue. So were the issues of slavery and segregation complicated issues. Was Martin Luther Jr.’s March on Washington in protest of segregation “a big, un-intellectual splash aimed at producing guilt and intimidation” as Ms Ketchum characterized the anti-abortion demonstration? Does she wonder why Dr. King could not find “a more adult way to handle such a politically loaded issue”? Why could he not, she might wonder, express his opinion in “an appropriate, and hopefully, and intellectually challenging fashion”? The men who wrote “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” owned slaves. That must have been a complex political issue. What is a greater political and moral evil, enslaving an innocent human being or killing an innocent human being? (When a pro-choice-abortion woman said to me that a fetus is not a human being, I asked her if it were not human or not a being. She turned and walked away saying we just have different opinions on the issue of abortion.) If the United States Supreme Court were to declare the emancipation proclamation unconstitutional and men again were to have the constitutional right to make the private and possibly emotionally difficult choice to own slaves, I expect that Ms. Ketchum would be anti-slavery. Those who would call themselves pro-choice (like abortion rights advocates, they would not mention what it is they are in favor of being able to choose) would label the opposition as being anti-choice. In the thirties, there were people in Germany who spoke out against the euthanasia of retarded children and hopelessly insane old people. Their objections were met with the same rhetoric as are anti-abortion objections in our country. The legal killing of unwanted peoples did not stop with children and burdensome old people. It was not just morally evil, but politically disastrous for Germany and was instrumental in the country being reduced to rubble. Do you imagine that the legality of killing unwanted human beings in their mothers? wombs will have no adverse or disastrous effect on our country? L. Mulry Tetlow, Ph.DLicensed Clinical [email protected] 866-2123 I am a former associate professor of psychology at Loyola’s City College.