April 13, 2000

Chris L. Pierce '02 and Lisa J. Wilde '02 are co-chairs of the Interfaith Committee of the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Students Association. Matt S. Vogel '01 is president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Students Association.

UHS Abortion Refund is Ethical

To the editors:

The Crimson's staff editorial, "Eliminate the Abortion Refund" (Editorial, April 13) is a masterpiece of muddled thinking and deceptive rhetoric. The editors claim to recognize the "strong moral objections to abortion," but then proceed to the dubious argument that such objections must take a back seat to the decisions of the nebulous "experts" who allocate UHS funding. These experts are apparently infallible, since we are informed, without evidence, that their decisions cannot be subjected to an "external moral, political, or religious debate." For The Crimson, apparently, ethics have a place in the sweatshop debate, but must never be applied to medicine.

The editors then proceed to equate opposition to abortion with the beliefs of Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses concerning the morality of receiving medical care. This argument obscures the fact that for pro-lifers, abortion is not merely a private sin (as, say, eating meat on Fridays in Lent is for Catholics) but a public crime: the deliberate taking of human life. And opposition to abortion is not a peculiar tenet of a single Denomination--rather, it is common to nearly all orthodox western religions, ranging from Missouri Synod Lutheranism to Shi'ite and Sunni Islam, and from Russian Orthodoxy to Orthodox Judaism. In suggesting that subsidizing abortion is morally unimportant, The Crimson is effectively offering a slap in the face to the entire western religious tradition.

By cavalierly dismissing abortion as just another "medical procedure"--an unscientific and illogical canard of the pro-choice movement for decades--and capping their intolerant argument with a pat, predictable appeal to "diversity," the Crimson does a grave disservice both to intellectual rigor and to the journalistic standards that it claims to uphold.