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Ms. Ros-Lehtinen,
I cannot believe that this is the second time that you have sent a letter addressed to my house that began with “Dear Pro-Life Friend”. My husband and I are both registered Democrats, members of NOW (National Organization for Women), and Planned Parenthood. Surely your office has access to such information about its constituents. If your office does not have the political tendencies of its constituents in a database, and you sent these letters out blindly… how rude. How presumptuous. To automatically assume that the people you represent share your views on this matter is frankly quite stupid since the majority of the country supports a woman’s right to choose in poll after poll.
Sending this letter to our house, addressed in such a manner, leaves me deeply concerned about what kind of job you are doing on other things as well. As I have said, this letter was stupid. I am not intentionally trying to be rude; it is simply the best word for it. It tells me that either you are rude and presumptuous, or that your office has made the same mistake twice and isn’t very organized and isn’t doing a good job. What other issues, that I might even agree with you about, have been poorly effected by your callousness or your office’s ineptitude?
Obviously, I did not vote for you. And I obviously will not vote for you again. But this letter did have an effect on me. This letter pissed me off. I am going to become much more politically active this coming election. And I am going to volunteer my time, take time off of from work even, to support whoever runs against you.
Now I will address the actual contents of the letter. I knew you were a republican, and as a republican that you probably leaned towards the pro-life side. But I did not know to what degree. I cannot believe that you are one of those few republicans that actually agree with the president’s stance on stem cell research. I had a younger brother, Jimmy, who died of Brain Cancer. I’ve showed this letter to my parents, who are registered republicans, and I can tell you now that they will not be voting for you either next election.
I graduated FIU Cum Laude having majored in Religious Studies & Women’s Studies with a minor in History. I am a Christian. I am married and my husband and I plan to have children. And I’d like to tell you, as a Christian, that even Christ preached separation of Church and State. “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s” (Luke 20:25, King James Version).
He never forced his beliefs onto anyone, even sinners. He never tried to use the government, Jewish or Roman, to impose his morals onto others. You need to make an adult, conscious choice to follow Christ, and it is wrong to try to force others to live in accordance to his beliefs against their will. And by forcing them, all you do is make them resent Christianity and turn away from Christ’s message of love when the real mission of a true Christian is to be spreading that love. So obviously I am against the government trying to regulate any moral issue; for example: gay marriage and adoption, woman’s right to choose, prayer in school, prostitution, gambling.
I am arguing this from a Christian standpoint because obviously from a legal standpoint it is plainly wrong to try to legislate these moral issues. Not only because of the separation of church and state in the constitution, but because of the implicit right to privacy that is one of the many unmentioned rights that we as citizens reserved to ourselves in the 10th amendment. And to say it doesn’t exist, or to try to limit it, would be the realization of James Madison’s fear of the creation of the Bill of Rights in the first place. By naming out loud, those rights that we felt were so vital that they needed to be named aloud, did we put all those other rights that we also hold sacred in jeopardy by not naming them aloud as well? Would it have been better to have tried to write them all down… knowing we would forget one? Or would it have been better not to have mentioned any specific ones and stuck true to the sentiment that the government could only do what was explicitly stated and everything else was reserved for the people?
Do you realize the broader implications of what you are doing when you try to limit the extent of right to privacy? Have you thought about the other things, besides a woman’s right to choose that this will effect?
Now, scientifically, we could argue all day long about when life begins. I find it helpful to think about it from the other end. When a person is on life support, and a machine is doing all the work for them to keep them alive… are they still alive? The question for me is whether or not they are brain dead. Anybody else, like a coma victim for example, has a chance of coming back. But a person who is brain dead, is dead. There is no magical waking up, they isn’t even any dreaming or brain function at all while they are lying there. All you are doing is keeping a dead person’s body fresh. I had another little brother, Billy, who drowned in the pool and was pronounced brain dead at the hospital. He died of complications while on life support, sparing my parent’s that awful decision some families have to make.
Now for those people who like to talk about the “sanctity of life”, I ask are they a vegetarian? If not, they need to change their catch phrase. I believe they mean to say that all HUMAN life is sacred. And when does a bunch of cells become human? For me, I believe it is when brain waves develop. Because a body without a brain is dead, an embryo without brain waves is not alive. I know that a lot of these right-to-lifers eschew logic, but that seems logical to me.
Those that claim that life begins at conception are living in a very dark and depressing world. To think of all the fertilized eggs, all the embryos, that regularly get flushed away during a menstrual cycle and then flushed down the toilet, to think of them as babies is to constantly think of death…all around us. And that’s without a women being on birth control. Because at least when a woman is on birth control (oral contraceptive), her body will, most of the time, not release an egg in the first place because it already thinks it is pregnant. Someone who believes that life starts at conception must think of the pill as God’s greatest gift… all those deaths avoided.
And of course, when we talk about when life begins and when a fetus or embryo should be considered a baby, we should never forget that a woman’s health comes first. Even if she is at the end of her pregnancy, if it is threatening her health, then of course she and her doctor have the right, I would say the responsibility, to do whatever is necessary for her health. To hold a fetus’s supposed right to life above an already living woman’s right to stay alive and in good health is absolutely ludicrous.
Honestly, I would agree with some limits on abortions. No one has “abortions” in the third trimester anyways, unless the mother’s life is at risk. I also think that limiting second trimester abortions to those that risk the mother’s health would be understandable. A woman should have made a decision long before then on whether or not she wants to have a baby. I would, however, want it to remain open for a woman to go to a judge for special exceptions, like cases of incest, rape or extremely young age. She honestly might not have known she was pregnant… especially is she “spotted” through the beginning of the pregnancy.
But first trimester abortions should be left completely unrestricted, including for underage teens. The rights of a parent do not extend so far, that they can determine whether or not their daughter should be a mother. A parent that has a child in a situation of having an unwanted pregnancy (assuming she was not raped) has already failed as a parent by letting her become pregnant in the first place. Either they failed to instill in her the proper values, failed to provide her with contraceptives to protect her, or failed to instill in her enough self-esteem or self respect that she felt comfortable saying no. That she does not feel like she can go to them in her time of need, also says enough, just on its own.
Even though I think that the limits I mention above would be understandable, I would never actually vote for such limitations, or support anyone who would. I could never trust hard-core pro-lifers to stop at just that. It would just be the beginning of a slippery slope that would end in a woman being stripped of the right to control her own body.
I do not know where you stand on other important issues like saving our environment, healthcare and welfare reform, public school funding, and the war in Iraq. We might even agree on some of these issues. But then again, that does not seem to matter. The letter you sent to my home focused on your devotion to the pro-life cause; I’ve never received a letter informing me about what you have done or accomplished in other fields. From that, I take it that this is what matters most to you. And since it is my second most important issue (saving the environment is my number one concern) it makes me care less where you stand on the other issues because I already know that I can never support you. Have you thought about how many other voters, both republican and democrat, who might share your views on all the other issues, whom you have alienated now by sharing with them your radical belief in the hard-core pro-life movement?
Please do not send any more letters to our home. We don’t like hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Michelle Craven & Mark Meyers
