VERSE

...We concluded that a complex set of other, traditional values were probably exercising a predominating influence...

...This was at a time when the President was under intense and world-wide critical attack for escalating the bombing in Indochina...

...Someone, say, who is far away, asleep Or merely mute...

...The impersonal, automated warfare employed in Vietnam, with "free-fire zones" and high-level bombing, should have been anathema to those focusing on the probable victimization of innocents, including fetuses (many of which were destroyed inside pregnant female bodies incinerated in bombing raids or shot down at Mylai and elsewhere...

...Then who is not Reminded of other friends he's tried to reach...

...This is a matter that we partly bypassed, and still do, on the ground that many anti-abortionists rest their case on the sanctity of all human life, not on the innocence of particular forms...

...What now...

...Devenney nor Cardinal Krol chose to repudiate this explicit expression of moral solidarity...

...His appearance at this moment before the Association was a political act, an expression of solidarity, that could not have occurred if Cardinal Krol had thought President Nixon's accelerated destruction of Indochinese was morally unacceptable...

...Neither Mr...

...Our critics stress the unique innocence of the fetus as the basis for a sharp distinction between pre- and postnatal life...

...The requests Are too mechanical...

...If this were the controlling principle, it should spill over to attitudes toward post-fetal life and welfare...

...The grequent lack of concern for these innocents cannot be explained, as Father Steeman suggests, by the fact that the problems involved in these instances are too complex...

...ROBERT EDELSTEIN EDWARD $. HERMAN MARY W. HERMAN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ROBERT PAWLOWSKI VOICES Voices always come out of bedroom walls...

...ReplF Our critics either did not understand or refuse to accept the limited purpose of our investigation, which was to test the consistency of views of anti-abortionists based on the hypothesis that the principle of the "right to life" could explain their position on abortion...

...17 May 1974:264...

...they ask, until it sounds As though people I know are living inside Them, breathing, rustling about, waiting for me To work myself in...

...Devenney makes one minor substantive point...

...on the contrary, the principle of the "sanctity of human life" appears to be simply overwhelmed by nationalism and antiCommunist ideology...

...We slipped in saying that the Cardinal himself invited Nixon to speak before the National Catholic Education Association...

...Furthermore, innocence is a matter of degree, and would not appear a sufficient basis for explaining the marked differences in voting patterns shown on anti-abortion legislation and that dealing with war and human welfare which we found...

...But who can trust This way of saying things and take the leap To getting lost in dry vaults...

...But the President was invited, and his remarks (on educational policy) were lauded without qualifications by Cardinal Krol...

...Sometimes from walls I've never slept beside: What now...

...We were quite explicit that inconsistencies might well be found on the same range of topics for pro-abortionists, but what legitimates our more restricted analysis is precisely the frequent assertion by anti-abortionists that the sanctity of human life determines their attitudes toward abortion...

...On the eve of the 1972 Republican Convention, a conservative Philadelphia Bulletin columnist, Adrian Lee, quoted Cardinal Krol as saying that "we [he and Richard Nixon] share a common concern over the depletion . . . of the religious and moral convictions which govgrn human behavior" ("Cardinal Krol . . . and the Right to Life," August 23, 1972...

...Finally, as regards attitudes toward war, war has shown an accelerating tendency to victimize increasing numbers of innocent bystanders...

...Devenney's criticism of our claim that Cardinal Krol had exhibited a steadfast moral solidarity with President Nixon is disingenuous...

...Our test of the voting of Pennsylvania legislators indicates an inverse relationship between support for fetal and post-fetal life on the part of antiabortionist legislators, which would seem to call into question the "right to life" as the value and principle controlling their attitudes toward fetal life itself...

...like love, their language speaks Itself and dies under the touch of hands, Leaving my fingers opened at the cracks And holes of air, holding nothing--the last Sound already by...

...such friends who understand But for these reasons of their own, leave Me empty caves to search, wherein I've called And called out names until I was assured I was a lonely man who must remain Apart from himself, and wait for his hands To change the sounds of this life...