I wish to respond to William Lincoln’s Nov. 14 letter, “Irresponsible people are also parasites.” His letter seems to imply abortion is murder and has been illegal since the beginning of time.

I quote from “The Reader’s Companion to American History.”

“Abortion has been practiced in the United States since the founding of the Republic, but both its social character and its legal status have varied considerably. Through the early decades of the nineteenth century, Americans regarded abortion primarily as the recourse of women wronged by duplicitous suitors or pregnant as the result of illicit relationships, though records exist of married women having abortions.

“Americans tolerated the practice, which had long been legal under colonial common law and remained legal under American common law, provided the pregnancy was terminated before quickening: the first perception of fetal movement by the woman. Quickening generally occurs near the midpoint of gestation.

“As married women moved to lower their fertility rates after 1830, abortion became a widespread practice in the United States. Abortionists advertised in the daily press and pharmaceutical firms competed in a lucrative market of purported abortifacients. Women spoke to each other and to their doctors in straightforward terms about their abortions.

“When physicians estimated American abortion rates in the 1860s and 1870s, they used figures strikingly close to those of the 1960s and 1970s: approximately one abortion for every four live births.”

Declaring abortion “murder” is the statement of opinion, intended to inflame the issue as opposed to informing people on it.

No one, let alone the federal government, has the right to tell me what I can do with or to my body or the body of any citizen of a free country. Our country was founded on such freedoms.

Brad Lucht

Alumnus