THE BOULDER DAILY CAMERA - Guest Opinion
Friday, May 8 1981
Millions of American voters harboring a long-standing conservative predilection, allied perhaps with an even larger number of disenchanted liberals and middle-of-the-road-ers, last fall swept into office a very conservative president and a similarly inclined Congress. This event proceeded from origins rooted in the twin dilemma of the economic chaos that engulfed the nation and the international crises that seemed to threaten world peace.
The vast majority of these voters did not bargain for, did not want, a regression into a kind of medieval fundamentalism that is now assailing the country at every level of government. For example, on January 22, the so-called Human Life Amendment was introduced in the House of Representatives. The Senate produce a similar bill. This amendment to the Constitution of the United States would, if passed, prohibit medically safe abortions for all American women, excepted only where the mother's life is endangered. Furthermore, it would prevent the use of effective and safe birth control methods because they technically prevent the implantation of the fertilized egg. This is a monstrous intrusion of government into the private lives of people, perpetrated by an administration whose ringing theme has been "to get the government off the backs of the American people."
Observing that there may be insufficient support to pass the HLA per se in the Congress, the authors are now trying to redefine the beginning of life as the moment of conception in order to make abortion in any form tantamount to murder even without the HLA. These men are acting out of their own spiritual convictions when they decree that a fertilized egg is suddenly a person. They obviously have little or no regard for the real living persons involved in the pregnancy.
The same mentality is now active in current attempts to persuade state legislatures everywhere that the biblical version of creation deserves an equal status with the teaching of cosmic and biological evolution in the public schools. They consider evolution just another theory. Biologic evolution is an established fact no less than the fact that the Earth is round or that the Sun is the center of the solar system. Scientists and laymen alike are incredulous at this absurd assault on firmly established physical principles.
Our conservative president and his minions in the Congress are not acting in behalf of their constituents in these matters. They are taking an unfair advantage of the present political climate and of the electorate who put them into office to solve some nagging economic problems and to restore the United States to international pre-eminence. They were not elected to bludgeon us with their own narrow interpretation of morality.
Howard Garcia