Dear Editor:

I am a parishioner of St. Stephen’s Church on Napoleon Avenue and I have followed The Maroon for twenty years as the local Catholic university paper. I am not a student and this is too long for a letter to the editor, but I wonder if you might consider this as an article for publication since it deals with one of the burning issues of our day, and it relates to the pro-abortion views of a writer who asserts that she is Catholic.

If you will not publish it, could you please advise me to which other publications, local or not, I may submit it? I have just emailed it to Newsweek and to the Clarion Herald. I ask you to please consider it’s publication since it involves issues which a Catholic institution is bound to address.

Yours in Christ,Luis F. Interiano

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Heart, not Womb, Needed

I have just read, with jaw-dropping disbelief, secular feminist columnist Anna Quindlen’s chillingly heartless piece, Not a Womb in the House, in the current (Nov. 17, 2003) issue of Newsweek. I have never heard the question of the death of a human being discussed so coldly as an issue of economics and of politics, in total ignorance of the fact that abortion ends a HUMAN life.

Quindlen is one of those women who masquerade as Catholic while distorting the words of God and rejecting utterly the basic beliefs that make the Catholic Church a united community of love and concern for men, women, and children, born or unborn. She accuses pro-life activists of distortion while pronouncing the death sentence, as the powerful secular feminist matriarch that she is, that : “Something dies when an abortion is performed, It is not yet a baby. It is not remotely anyone else’s business. But something does die.”

If that is not an blindly evil distortion of the definition of humanity, I don’t know what is. The echoes I hear in that denial of an unborn child’s humanity are the icy voices of the Nazis calling Jews “subhuman,” the harsh, godless voices of the Communists (Lenin) calling non-Communists “insects,” and the arrogant voices of the Klansmen calling African-Americans “animals.” The influence of the Father of Lies, Satan himself, is impossible to conceal in those people who, in their rebellion, condemn other human beings to death because they do not recognize their humanity and because they have the current legal power to kill. That is the deadly truth about abortion. It is not about empowerment and rights but about legally taking the life of a human child and calling it “freedom”.

As a former fetus I can testify, Ms. Quindlen, that I was never an IT. I was always ME- from fertilized egg to my forty-two year old body today. In the sacred spectrum of human life, there was never a point where I was a blob of tissue whose fate could be decided upon unilaterally by a secular feminist judge and her medical executioner. If you are truly Catholic, Ms. Quindlen, I ask you to put down your dog-eared copy of The Feminine Mystique and pull out your dusty Bible to the words of God to the Prophet Jeremiah, Chapter 1, Verse 5, where God clearly tells him, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born I dedicated you; a prophet to the nations I appointed you.” You have forgotten, Ms. Quindlen, and all of your secular feminist sisters with you, that there is a third person involved in the creation of a human being- the mother, the father, and God, who provides the living spirit that inhabits the fertilized egg. That is why sex is proper only for married people, and why a woman’s only true choice lies at the point where she agrees to sex. If sex is successful in its appointed biological role, the spirit of a sacred human child has started developing in the fertilized egg, and may not be murdered. But it takes love to see that rather than aloof intellect.

I find it so incredible that someone with Quindlen’s obvious education has failed to make the connection between the “blob” of tissue and the bright-eyed, smiling baby that will be born in nine months. And what if the baby is going to be deformed? Do we have the right to kill him or her (not IT!) ? Is a deformed child “an incubus, a nightmare, and a curse” as Quindlen says? The human answer is a resounding NO! I know what it is to struggle with illness since my own mother was ill for twenty years with an illness that eventually killed her, and though she was often to weak to move by herself, and it caused us great hardship in time, money, and effort, we never considered her a “nightmare” or a “curse.” We loved her despite the hardship.

So you are tired of abortion, Ms. Quindlen? You should be, since more than forty million human children have been executed in America, and millions more around the world with the collusion of the United Nations, since the Nazi law called Roe v. Wade was created: one of the most dark and shameful of days in human history.

The solution is not killing but social justice, a fair wage, equal opportunity for women in the workplace, and equal sharing of child-raising (and housework) by men. That is what a Catholic feminist believes and I am proud to be one. I even plan to take my wife’s name when I get married, and I hope that she takes mine since, in Catholic marriage, we will be one indissoluble whole until one of us passes on.

Equality for women need not be achieved through the bloodshed of abortion but through prayer, peaceful civil disobedience, and activism for Life, which includes teaching our young people to control their sexuality through the development of their spirits by prayer, not through latex and chemicals. I have had a difficult time of it but I am still a virgin by choice at age forty- two, despite a healthy body, a strong sex drive, much temptation, and plenty of opportunity, simply because I’ve been too poor to get married, and because so many of the girls I have dated believed that they had the right to sex outside of marriage and to the easy solution of abortion if the baby inconvenienced them. But I still hope for the future. I am not a superman, just someone who listened, eagerly, in Church, and everyone else has the same capability. To listen and to accept graciously the wisdom of God is the greater freedom of choice.

And as for the dumbfounding notion that abortion is nobody else’s business, I can’t believe I have to say this but the death of a human child by abortion most certainly IS our business, and that of any other living being who calls her or himself human, just as much as the death of a child by starvation in Africa or the death of a child by a land mine in Cambodia is our business. The fact that the execution takes place in an antiseptic doctor’s office does not make it less of a crime. Dr. Mengele’s office was just as well scrubbed when he experimented on living Jews.

You say that men will never understand because we cannot bear children. That is an arrogant sec-fem fiction. Any man with a heart loves an innocent child and will fight to protect her. The lack of a womb does not make men less human or women more human and it is crassly sexist to think so. Men are equally capable of vibrant love. It is the spirit which does that. And it is you, Ms. Quindlen, and your sec-fem sisters, who will never understand the incredible value of an unborn human life unless you accept that there is a God who created you (yes, fashioned, molded, planned, using the tool of evolution) and who expects you to act out of love not economic selfishness or political arrogance.

As the Catholic Church teaches us (and you too, my sister in the Church), all human beings, perfect or deformed, or economically inconvenient, have the Right to Life. And though I do not have a womb, I have a heart and a faith in God which assures me of this basic truth. I have a strong back and I am willing to do my share to help the desperate girl who is pregnant and abandoned. And I think most Americans will too for we are a country with a big heart. But the first thing we must do is to teach that girl – and that boy –
while they are still very young that sex is an adult responsibility belongs strictly inside of marriage and that abortion, wether self-induced or “medically safe,” is a crime against humanity. When the killing stops, we can work out the rest.

The Birthright is the First Right- all others stem from it. I pray for God to touch your heart, sister Quindlen, and all my brothers and sister around the world who currently are blind to the holiness and innocence of a developing human child.

Yours in Christ,Luis F. Interiano