Editorial
CORRESPONDENCE Faetm o r Fancies? New Brunswick, N.J. To the Editors: The unabashedly simplistic report by Thomas Powers on the continuing investigation into the murder of President...
...Get back on the high wire and get those plates in the air, the right-wing-flap, so to speak, has seemed to be saying, and leave politics to those of us who understand the value of a whiff of grapeshot...
...WASHINGTON REPORT NOT REMABKABLY ENTERTAINING From those Hollywood anti-Franco parties during the Spanish Civil War all the way to Jane Fonda during the American War Against the Indochinese and Paul Newman on practically anything, conservatives and reactionaries in this country have grumpily denounced artists and entertainers who have political convictions and express them...
...The Church has a chance to make a more sophisticated, constructive and more radical response to this new situation...
...They allow for the moral ambiguities in the issue--they acknowledge that there may be individual instances in which it is better to tolerate the evil that results than to require the childbirth...
...The reason for Picasso's success and the total failure of a distinguished line of official brains from Dean Acheson's through and apparently beyond Henry Kissinger's is instructive: the official brains were concerned with what might be: if Soviet Communism swept through Europe, Spain would be a logical marshaling yard and jumping-off-point for the New World: hence, whatever peccadillos the Spanish dictator may have had on his record, he was obviously a friend of freedom, a bastion of the Free World, rally to him, give him arms, arms, arms, if he uses some of them to electrify the testicles of potential advocates of democracy, that's too bad 22 ]uly 1977:452...
...Commonweal Is ledezod In Reader's Guide to Periodical Llteratere, Catkellc Perled~ce/ lades, and leek Review Digest...
...Foreign $33...
...1924, to date available tkrewgJb UMvel~llt 7 M/trail/ms...
...It kills the unborn children of the poor...
...The I973 Roe vs...
...Richard John Neuhaus 470 ]DEATR AND TBERAPY: John Garvey 4TI JAMES O'GARA: /dffer JOHN DEEDY: Manna/rag |diter RAYMOND A. SGHROYH: Associate Editor ANNE M. ROBERTSOH, |diter/Id Assistant GOLIN L. WBST1ERRJECJ[, JR.: Movies JOHN PANDEL: Poetry PRANK GETLEIN: Washington BRIAN WICKER...
...But Justice Blackmun's claim that as a result of the majority decision "the cancer of poverty will continue to grow" misses the point...
...The killing of Orlando Letelier was not the first time planned violent death heightened the stakes of (Continued on page 478) NEWS & VIEWS: 458 CORRESPONDENCR: 451 EDITORIAL: 451 WASHINGTON REPORT: Not Remarkablw Enterl~dn|t~: Frank Getlein 4~2 MORE GOVERNIIIENT IPRESSI[IRE: Tom Heneghan 4[$4 TIlE POLITICS OF ABORTION: Peter Stein]els 4S8 TBE 'DEItlUgSTIFICATION' OF fiFE: Robert J. Henle 41g7 TBE REIGN IN SPAIN: Kenneth E. Moore 480 "ONE OF ]ffBE IAUCIKIER ONES': Robert Joe Stout 48S TBE PRESS: The Memory Thereof: Thomas Powers 485 T i t l e SCREEN: Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr...
...when does "medical necessity" shade into personal convenience...
...487 VERSE: Mary Oliver 455 A[ LIFE FAIID UP: George Abbott White 4811 BOOKS" Jean Bethke Elshtain, Stereo Kroll, Kevin G. O'Connell, James F. McCur Raymond A. Schroth...
...However, I hope Commonweal will provide for its readers future articles that bear less resemblance to press releases issued by the intelligence agencies that have been, in the very least, accessories after the fact in the assassinations of political leaders in the United States...
...The fear that this nation may have gone the way of a "banana republic" in 1963 with the assassination of President Kennedy, and later with the murder of his brother, is frightening~but it must be faced...
...how far the state should go to promote childbirth~what other economic and individual values will be sacrificed and who will do the sacrificing...
...Since the Church has given this moral issue so high a priority, until the government has assumed its full responsibility the Church should back up its preaching by shifting its own resources, limited as they may be, away from education and property and into grants for sex education, family planning and family support...
...PriBted In tke USA and pub/Is/pod b/-weo/dy by Commonweal Peb/hb/ng Co...
...At this point, the Carter-Califano policy to not subsidize abortion-on-demand and the Senate bill to restrict federal funds for abortion to cases when the mother's life is in danger, cases of rape or incest and other specific cases of medical necessity do several things...
...The Congress and state legislatures-in dialogue with philosophers and theologians, the medical profession, the media and the intellectual communityDthe "people" must frame laws that only partially answer unanswered questions: when human life begins...
...epyflght O 1977 Cemmenwe~s/ Po/i~/sAinf Co., Inc.-US aod Gaoade: $17 a year...
...Powers continues the seemingly unending apologia for the Warren Commission's "Lone Assassin" theory that Gerald Ford helped fashion over a decade ago...
...Besides, it seems incontestable that in one picture Picasso made a more penetrating analysis of Franco than about five generations of top State, Defense and White House officials ever quite managed or have managed yet...
...Commentary that assumes the posture of critique, but indulges itself with only the facile turn of a phrase, examines nothing...
...Micrdlms from Yel...
...SJecla~ two-]rear rate $29.S0...
...Foreign S|9...
...Great Britain ALAIN WOODROW: Paris HENRY TEN KORTENAAR: Rome DESMONO IqSHll: DaMIm EDWARD S, SKILLIN: Pub/taker Star: LIHDA P. KAYLRR, PAMELA J. FITZGERALD, HARRIBTT| BALSKY COMMONWEAL 2~ MADISON AYE., NRW YORK: N.Y...
...subsidized housing and more generous welfare payments for extended families where grandparents and aunts etc., live together and care for otherwise unwanted children...
...We can't escape the fact that this policy may inflict immediate hardship on the poor...
...Powers's piece belongs rather in the likes of Reader's Digest or the National Star, publications that assume their readers have suspended their critical intelligence and prefer escapes from complex and difficult realities...
...Wade decision which, on the basis of privacy, upheld the woman's right to choose abortion, virtually without restriction during the first six months of pregnancy, left open the possibility that the moderate elements on both sides of the controversy might, through dialogue, evolve some kind of compromise social policy: one that would both respect the fact that a large majority of Americans accept abortion in at least some circumstances and also confront the other fact that, in some way, every abortion~whether by the rich suburban socialite who doesn't want to be Commonweal: 451 inconvenienced by childbirth or by the welfare mother who fears she cannot feed another childmis a tragedy...
...a family allowance for food, clothing and education...
...Now there is an opportunity to work through the chaos toward a national family policy that would embody the values of both religious and secular humanism...
...Constitution nor federal Medicaid legislation requires the states to pay for abortions--coupled with the moves within both the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the Congress to cut off federal funds for abortions except in cases of "medical necessity"Dboth simplifies and complicates, for pro- and anti-abortionists like, the future of the abortion debate...
...The far deeper scandal is the disgusting inequitable distribution of wealth and public services in our society, where the poor are terrified to bring children into the world for fear that they cannot feed and clothe them, send them to school, watch them grow and prosper, marry happily, and have children and grandchildren of their own...
...and they put the brakes on the rush to abortion as if it were a morally indifferent alternative to birth control...
...Personally, I have always ascribed the right-wing grumps to sheer jealousy over the fact that if you educate yourself to corner the market in soybeans or make a fortune on cost overruns in arms sales, you probably aren't very graceful on the dance floor nor as good-looking as Paul Newman...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE NEW ABORTION DEBATE The recent decision by the United States Supreme Court that neither the U.S...
...R simplifies it in that we now know that the future debate will not take place in the courts...
...they admit that the state has some responsibility to protect the unborn...
...Second class postage pe/d at New 7ark, N,Y...
...a guaranteed job (Wasn't that in the Democratic platform...
...But exam season at law school leaves but a finite amount of time for study...
...S/If/e copy 7114...
...To the Editors: The unabashedly simplistic report by Thomas Powers on the continuing investigation into the murder of President Kennedy is a disgrace to a publication like Commonweal [May 271...
...Abortion can easily be a rich person's solution to a poor family's problem---one that spares the upper classes the burden of facing the social unrest generated by a multiplying poor, black populace...
...300 N. Z~b Read, Ann drh4w, Mlcb, 48106...
...10014 Telephone: (211) MU 3-204~ A review of Public Aflalrs, Literature and the Arts...
...Comments such as "Faced with discrepancies I tend to shrug" or "I do not know of any facts which the Oswald Alone theory does not explain" should invite an editor's red pencil...
...Rather than badger candidates over an anti-abortion Constitutional amendment, which we still do not think adequately resolves the problem in a pluralistic society, Catholic leaders might think harder about positive alternatives...
...This did not happen...
...I wish that the publication of this article had not come at a time which for me precludes a substantive response...
...They can begin by lobbying for: an enormous public and private investment, accepting the taxes involved, in health care programs to take care of all childbirth expenses...
...It should not automatically oppose a candidate who wants to use state or city funds for abortions when his other social policies might make abortions less desirable...
...It complicates the issue by ushering in what might well be transformed into a period of constructive chaos...
...Abortion doesn't cure poverty...
...Rather, one of the most complicated moral issues of our time, built around the tension between private moral judgment and public good, was reduced to a fruitless election-year fight over an antiabortion amendment to the Constitution...
...Natle~Nrl S~als ~ ProgNll No.: ISSN 00|0-3330...
...Powers's concern with "stories about awful possibilities" is that they be put to rest, not that the truth may be found...
...whether fetal life has more value in one growth stage than another...
...The just-announced Carter-Califano plan to subsidize the adoption of these children is excellent...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 15
