Editorials

...its usurpation of the political process in 1973 in favor of judicial fiat is indefensible...

...The fetus is something...

...CITIZEN KOOP Surgeon General C. Everett Koop put public service above personal, political, or religious ideology...

...That's the law...

...Moral agency entails a kind of autonomy, self-esteem, and responsibility in which women and men act instead of merely being acted upon...

...His other accomplishments are considerable: an effective war on cigarette smoking that has moved us a long way toward "a smoke-free society by the year 2000...

...Nor was the decision the woman's alone: "All these are factors [in the abortion decision] the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation...

...The law rests on the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which ruled that most state laws restricting abortion were a violation of the personal liberty protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment...

...Physicians and women are allowed greater latitude when it comes to the fetus...

...Most of us would offer a seat on a crowded train to a pregnant woman...

...Another and more distant starting point for building the conviction that the fetus deserves maternal consideration and protection lies with a fuller development of the feminist insight that women themselves must take responsibility for their lives, the choices they make, their relationships with others-parallel to the kind of responsibility men must also exercise...

...Responsible counseling would also offer viable alternatives to the woman if she cannot raise the child...

...recommendations for taxes and laws to discourage alcohol consumption and driving while intoxicated...

...The Court went on: "[T]he right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but...this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation...

...The best, but most difficult, place to begin is with the claim that the fetus is not nothing...

...This is not an ethic that fully expresses the Christian vision of human love, or the care that men and women should express toward one another...

...For eight years Koop was the health conscience of the nation--leading the fight against the medical neglect of children born with spina bifida and counteracting presidential indifference and public anxiety over AIDS with information and human kindness...

...our immediate sense is not of one human being deserving of protection, but two...

...Roe concluded that the fetus is not considered a "person" under the Fourteenth Amendment, and further on it declined to "resolve the difficult question of when life begins...

...The most immediate: apregnant woman considering abortion should receive counseling that fully describes for her what we now know about fetuses and their.development...

...It is not hard to find in these words justification for viability testing at twenty weeks as the Court did in upholding the Missouri law, or, for that matter, for upholding certain counseling and informed consent procedures that were not at issue in Webster...

...In most adult humans there arises a sound intuition that somewhere between the period of conception and implantation and a later period when the developing fetus has every aspect of a human being, this is a human being, a human being worthy of protection-and perhaps that sense is nowhere more fully developed than in the pregnant woman herself...

...Achange in law will mean little without a transformation of minds and hearts...

...if it is to be an abortion at eight weeks or at twelve weeks, she should see what such a fetus looks like and know its stage of development...

...It is indeed a struggle for the minds and hearts of women-and men...

...The high standards Koop has set are part of the Reagan legacy we are happy to applaud...

...If the coming political struggle can be built on the sense that there are too many abortions, that women and fetuses alike are victims of a shabby ethic, then it will be a struggle that will end not only in better laws, but in a more tolerable moral standard...

...Except in extreme cases, the decision to have an abortion can simply be the end point in a series of events in which a woman has failed to take responsibility for her sexual life and become pregnant in a situation in which no family life is possible, or she has allowed herself to be sexually exploited by a man who has no intention of sharing in the care of a child...

...many would offer help if she collapsed on a street or rush to her aid if she was endangered by a speeding car or threatened with a beating...

...First, the Court has not dismantled Roe...

...But we harbor an unhappy premonition that it is not...

...Almost without exception subsequent Court decisions offered the broadest possible interpretation favoring abortion and limiting restrictions...

...a model of compassion and tolerance in the fight against AIDS...

...But so is the woman...

...This starting point for stemming the number of abortions depends on women becoming reproductively responsible moral agents by either saying no to men who will not or cannot share the responsibilities of parenthood or by women becoming effective users of contraception...

...Prochoice and prolife advocates, at their best and most sensitive, recognize this: they see that along with the unborn no less victims of this dismal ethic are the women who have abortions...

...With this we do not agree...

...Feminist thought has generally treated the abortion decision as part and parcel of that exercise of autonomy, self-esteem, and responsibility, but the decision for abortion can be read in the opposite way...

...Now many people think the Court's latest abortion decision, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, will shift the balance in the opposite direction...

...Second, whatever the law, there is an abortion ethic so deeply rooted in our culture that overturning or narrowing Roe may have minimal effect on the number of abortions...

...Implanting and supporting this conviction has two possible starting points...

...While the Supreme Court teases the nation with a patchwork process of allowing some restrictions and turning down others, the acrimonious scramble for influence in fifty state houses and state legislatures by prolife and prochoice forces will be poisonous to our whole political system...

...And it is the woman contemplating an abortion who must be convinced that the fetus is something, indeed at a certain point becomes someone...

...But back in 1973, the Court wrote: "appellants...

...But it is a burden that the gravity of an abortion decision warrants...

...indeed a positive ethic of adoption and the ability of social workers to provide a woman with a serious adoption plan ought to be part of the counseling process...

...Does that unduly burden the abortion decision as the Court has previously ruled...

...We are not so sure...

...the promotion of reality and credibility in comprehensive, early sex education...

...The more obviously pregnant a women is, the more surely we draw that conclusion...

...But in rereading Roe, it is hard to find the hard-edged thinking or absolutist language that has come to characterize the way we now speak individually and as a polity on the subject...

...His impressive record during two terms in office should have qualified him as the ideal candidate for appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bush...

...Even worse, as we have suggested above, it is unlikely to help restore a moral perspective of a kind that will help actually to reduce the number of abortions, some of which, under the new dispensation, will be performed illegally...

...but it is not moral...

...Perhaps...

...We do not return to Roe in order to defend it...

...But it is a better ethic than the one now expressed in one-and-a-half million abortions...

...On July 13, he took a leave from his present post that will extend until his tenure officially ends at the close of September...

...This practice quickly made him a persona non grata among his early supporters on the conservative right-whose agenda Koop largely supported but refused to use his office to push...

...What was once unthinkable has become thinkable...

...Koop, however, was not selected...

...For example, "abortion on demand" and "the absolute right to privacy" are catchphrases we hear often and loudly, phrases prochoicers defend and against which prolifers rail...

...One might argue that Roe engendered this abortion ethic-this unique exception to our general prohibition of killing innocent others...

...And if Webster is the prelude to a full, rational, political consideration of abortion at the state level, it is indeed welcome...

...That much we allow the police, the courts, and the armed forces...

...indeed, as time passes, the abortion decision is increasingly treated as one almost not worth thinking about at all...

...It is not just her comfort or her life that is at stake, but the life of another...

...and the advancement of a public attitude toward abortion (Koop is morally opposed to it) that calls for safe medical procedures while correcting the social problems that make so many women think they have no better choice...

...argue that the woman's right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses...

...Most of these abortions fall outside even the broadest reading of our prevailing ethic that allows taking the life of an assailant in self-defense or the defense of another, that condemns to death individuals guilty of capital crimes, or that authorizes the killing of combatants in time of war or a just revolution...

...Surgeon General Koop has consistently exemplified personal integrity in public service and in that has promoted the health of the nation...