Open Forum

The writers of the LA Times editorial reprinted on Jan. 22 clearly did not do their homework.

For example, they claim that partial birth abortions (PBAs) are most often performed to preserve the "health of the mother" with the implication that PBAs are medically necessary. However, the "health of the mother" exception for late term abortions as defined in Doe vs. Bolton is very liberal. In Doe vs. Bolton, the other landmark Supreme Court abortion decision, the court defined "health of the mother" as anything pertaining to the woman's social, emotional, or psychological well-being -- in other words -- any reason at all.

Furthermore, while some abortion proponents would have us believe that women have PBAs for only the direst health reasons, in 1993, Dr. Martin Haskell, the creator of the PBA technique, told the AMA News that some 80 percent of these abortions are "purely elective." In medical terms, this means the woman chooses the procedure not because of a medical necessity, but because she wants an abortion.

Dr. Haskell's statement is supported by statistics found on the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) website at www.agi-usa.org. According to AGI, the top four reasons that women have abortions after 16 weeks of gestation are: she didn't know she was pregnant (71 percent); she had trouble making arrangements (48 percent); she was afraid to tell her parents or partner (33 percent); she needed time to make a decision (24 percent). If any of the survey respondents had health problems that led them to seek a late term abortion, they must have been included under the "Other" category, because "Mothers Health" did not even rate its own category.

Since this information is all readily available to the public -- one has to wonder -- are the editors of the LA Times dishonest or simply incompetent?

Judith Muehlbauer

Brainerd

How do we back out now?

I am a retired federal employee and a retired Army lieutenant colonel. I have extensive experience doing nothing more than watching world events and trying to gauge what our government is really up to.

With the Iraq issue, I truly can not figure out what is going on. We (the US) have done absolutely everything we can to get ready for war, even to the extent of sending over a hundred thousand military to the gulf area. Now other countries appear set against military intervention. And rightfully so, in my opinion. The problem is we have gone so far down the road toward invading that we have no way to back out without looking silly.

What could we possibly do at this point? Say "Gee, I guess we were wrong" and back out? I don't think Bush would do that. So we invade -- the Iraqis get slammed (without their having used any weapons of mass destruction) and we look like idiots. All Iraq has done is to behave like a bunch of fools. Of course, so have we. So who wins? We will control the country, but to what end? Do we install another regime? Do we give them aid and money?

This thing has already cost so much and we don't even know for sure that it is actually tied to the disaster in New York and Washington (and Pennsylvania), which is what got us started in this mess.

Bush got us into this mainly because his father "lost face" there years ago. The WTC event of 2001 gave him the perfect platform to try to restore the Bush image. We, as a country, got swept up in the times and before we knew what had happened we end up in a mess we probably should not be in.

Poor us.

Harry Austin

Nisswa and Vicenza, Italy

Sound familiar?

Howard Zinn, in his book "War and Terrorism" published in 2002 says, You go to war because you want to do something fast. You use violence because you don't want to wait. You don't want to work conflicts out. You don't want to use your mind, your intelligence, your wit. Someone else said "Why of course the people don't want war...But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship... voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."

Spoken by Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II

Sound familiar??

Elizabeth Johnson

Pequot Lakes