LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Why advocate for clinic, not babies?

6/22/2014

Your June 2 editorial “Keep the clinic open” represents a declining opinion in Toledo. In 2012, abortions in Ohio increased slightly. But abortions declined in Toledo, even though both Capital Care and Center for Choice were still operating.

Now, members of the Toledo medical community are rejecting abortion — they are opting not to support the practice. This comes from the fact that Toledo area hospitals are not entering into a transfer agreement with Capital Care, which had to go outside of the state to Michigan to find a hospital that would enter into a transfer agreement with them. But this doesn’t seem to matter to the so-called “pro-choice” of Toledo who insist that Capital Care be exempted from Ohio law and stay open.

The whole point of a transfer agreement is to ensure a facility’s ability to adequately respond to life-threatening emergencies. We would hope that this would fit into The Blade’s standards of care. We would hope that such a respected news institution would advocate for the adherence to our laws, even those laws it disagrees with.

Your claim that Ohio’s new pro-life laws deny the “constitutional right to reproductive freedom” is fundamentally false. It is a practice that is neither “reproductive” nor “freedom,” especially for the life that it takes. Not a single one of 2013’s pro-life laws outlawed abortion.

As far as “constitutionality” is concerned, segregation was also once constitutional, as dictated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson. Yet decades later, the Supreme Court overturned that in Brown vs. Board of Education.

I hope that somewhere down the line, Americans also will reject the notion that aggressing against and killing another person is a human right.

Indeed, as your editorial stated, “abortion is a deeply personal issue”—especially for the child whose life it takes. It is odd that The Blade should advocate for an abortion clinic’s survival and not the survival of Ohio’s children.

KATHERINE McCANN

Public Relations Manager Ohio Right to Life Columbus