Supreme Court on Abortion

In your editorial, The Times (May 24) stands atop mount justice and proclaims that it abhors a “cruel ruling” that “is part of a slow erosion of the federal right to a legal abortion.” Paul Conrad, your accomplished political cartoonist, has drawn us a picture of justice (May 26) who is visibly, and according to the caption, “blind . . . and now, deaf and dumb,” because of the ruling from the Supreme Court that federally funded family-planning clinics cannot engage in the discussion of abortion with women.

The justice that The Times defends would surely be a lady, who with clear vision and ears open to the advice of Planned Parenthood, could say, “I know that the scales of justice demand that we vigilantly protect the right to terminate the life of a human being when it is most vulnerable to effective assault.” This lady with steely gaze could further say, “Yes, the fetus is a being, for it is not nothing. And it is human, for it is genetically coded with all the possibilities for normal childhood and adult behavior, and can never change into a spotted owl or a whale. But since this human being is nameless and voiceless, it should have no rights, not even the right to life.”

Let us have this lady justice on a float in our victory parades, as we go about proclaiming that our nation is the most just on the face of the Earth.

CARROLL C. KEARLEY, Professor of Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University