THE BELL CURVE:

Sixty-four years ago, I showed up in Columbia, Mo., with a wife, a child and an ancient, battered Studebaker that had coughed its way across the country. I was in Columbia to resume my education, which had been interrupted four years earlier by a war. I was in the middle of my junior year in the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism when I enlisted and when I returned.

I needed a job, but first I needed a degree that would allow me access to the publications that turned to Missouri to fill staff openings. Problem was, even with back military pay, I didn’t have enough money either to pay an out-of-state tuition or to support my family while I finished my degree.

Then, into this fix I shared with millions of other returning citizen-soldiers, came — like a post-war angel — the GI Bill of Rights, offering to pick up the tab for my education and even providing 90 bucks a month for living expenses. And so I gratefully accepted, graduated, had a choice of three jobs, and started a lifelong connection with the field I had coveted since boyhood. God knows when, if at all, any of this would have happened without the GI Bill of Rights.

Now history is repeating itself. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans who have been fighting a miserable war full of broken promises from which they will hopefully be relieved soon are being told by their president — who sat out his war in the security of a Texas Air National Guard unit that he refuses to discuss — that he will veto efforts in Congress to provide them the same benefits veterans of my war were given. And our Rep. John Campbell, who has never served in the military, tells us he also opposes a new GI bill and offered six reasons for this position recently in the Pilot (“Do you back GI Bill changes,” That’s Debatable, May 29).

Campbell calls the veterans’ educational benefits “counterproductive” with an explanation that doesn’t even come close to making up in tough reasoning what it lacks in heart. A veteran seeking help to finish school after surviving the agonies of Iraq is not looking for a handout from his country. He’s looking for a chance. You might want to remember Campbell’s views in this matter in November.

Planned Parenthood has been taking a terrific drubbing in this newspaper over the past couple of weeks, and it’s time that someone steps up and turns over the coin. The vitriol directed at Planned Parenthood is both wrongheaded and ironic, especially considering the fact that Planned Parenthood has, for nearly a century, been dedicated to the same ends as most of its critics, the reduction or elimination of unwanted pregnancies which, after all, are responsible for virtually all abortions.

When nurse Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, American women couldn’t vote, sign contracts, have bank accounts, divorce abusive husbands or control the number of children they might have. Nor could they obtain information about birth control because the Comstock Law passed in 1873 made contraception illegal and information about family planning obscene. When Sanger tried to pass along such information to desperately poor families in New York who — like Sanger’s mother — cranked out children they couldn’t clothe or feed, she was jailed for creating a public nuisance.

But she persisted through a whole series of arrests and prosecutions until doctors could legally give birth control advice and she could open her own birth control clinic. Since that time, the organization she founded has been dedicated to increasing the legal options for women in a society where not so long ago they didn’t have options.

An in-house family planning study of recent years shows that services provided by Planned Parenthood prevents some 280,000 abortions each year by preventing unintended pregnancies. This in a nation where half of all pregnancies are unintended, and half of those end in abortion. The suggestion by critics that somehow Planned Parenthood encouraged rather than worked tirelessly to prevent these abortions does a great disservice to the real work they do.

That work includes legal abortions, which are among the options from which women with unwanted pregnancies may choose. But long before that crisis evolves, it provides young people with medically accurate sexuality education that discusses both contraception and abstinence. Although Planned Parenthood supports abstinence as a goal for young people, it takes issue with abstinence when it is the only means offered to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

Planned Parenthood talks tough, which sometimes comes off as arrogance. But it has to keep its voice above the anti-choice organizations and such politicized groups as Operation Rescue and the Christian Coalition in order to be heard. And heard it surely should be. It has earned its place in this debate with almost a century of dedication to the specific causes of women’s rights and family planning.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.