ABORTION FUND

It is sickening to hear the suggestion made that funds from the Radcliffe women, and Mrs. Bunting's acceptance of the proposal. Abortion is murder. With conception a new human being has come into existence, with the genetic material to develop into a child and then an adult. Can one pick out a moment in the process and say that up until then it was not human? The fetus is not, as some claim, just a part of the mother's body. It is distinct from her genetically and physically. It may not yet exent all the human faculties that it could later, but then neither do babies after they are born, children, the mentally deficient, senile people, amputees, or paraplegics. Are we to decide that they, for their own welfare or others' are better off dead?

Even if one did not think it certain that a fetus is human, to destroy what might be human is to be willing to destroy what is human. It is exactly this notion that some are less human than others that led to the Nazis' slaughter of Jews, Slavs, and gypsies. Abortion is all the uglier a crime in that it is committed by a person who has, by his own free will, assumed a responsibility for the baby which might result from the act. What sort of love is there in this? The drive for abortion seems rather a selfish move of the middle class to rid themselves of their own inconvenient children or the inconvenient children of the poor and minorities, whom they would rather kill than pay taxes to support.

If abortion were paid for by funds collected by Radcliffe, what could one say of the hypocrisy of a university which protested the killing in Southeast Asia at the time of the Cambodia invasion, but now finances the killing of babies here? The money should be used instead to help the women to have the children and to decide whether to give them up for adoption or to raise them themselves.