Letters to the Editor: Feb. 22, 2017

Charge ’em all

When I discuss abortion with “pro-life” folks, most say they oppose it because they believe that “life” begins at conception. Therefore, abortion is murder.

However, I find that most of them don’t believe that at all. Let’s say you are walking by a fertility clinic and you see it is on fire. You hear screams from inside. You rush in and see a tray labeled as containing 100 fertilized eggs. You also see a little 5-year-old girl screaming for help. You only have time to save the tray or the girl.

You know your answer. The girl is more precious than the eggs. You would be a monster if you saved the eggs instead of the girl. This would be true even if the tray contained 23-day-old embryos.

Here’s another way to look at it: A young woman in her first semester at college has unprotected sex. She finds she is pregnant, but abortion has been made completely illegal. She finds a doctor willing to perform one anyway, and they are caught and arrested.

If you believe that abortion is murder, then you must think the doctor should be charged with a capital crime. Beyond that, you surely must believe that the young woman should also be convicted of murder. If a mother paid someone to kill her 5-year-old child, she would certainly be charged with murder. The woman who paid for an abortion is no victim.

Continuing this logical progression, the mother who drove her to the clinic is guilty of being an accessory to murder and also should get life in prison. The student’s father, who knew of the plan but did not stop it, should also be charged. And her two friends, who find out afterward and did not call the authorities, should be charged as accessories after the fact.

If this sounds just to you, then you and I live by very different moral codes.

Being a man, I don’t believe I have much say in the difficult decisions some women must sometimes make concerning these things. And I am certain that if men were the ones with wombs, the right to choose would be enshrined in the Constitution.

Brooks Tower Oklahoma City

Same ol’ same ol’

The Oklahoma Legislature recently started its session with many serious issues to focus on, including a monumental budget crisis while trying to figure out how to give teachers a pay raise.

So how did our lawmakers spend their first week back?

They focused on abortions and want to find a way to get a Ten Commandments statue back on state property.

In other words, the same ol’ same ol’. Instead of focusing on issues that are important, once again, they’re working diligently to waste taxpayer money and time to pass bills that will eventually have to be defended (and ultimately lost) in court, spending millions more dollars that they don’t have in court costs.

Think of all the teacher raises that could be had with all that wasted money.

But what’s to be expected? As the old adage states, “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten.” As long as Oklahoma keeps voting in the same clowns into the state Legislature, nothing will change. I hope no one is holding their breaths for any real teacher raises from a party in control that’s trying to dismantle public education.

The Oklahoma Legislature has already proven where its priorities lie.

Paul Marek Oklahoma City

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