Cross symbolism

inappropriate

About your January 23 article “Fight for their lives,” on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, thank goodness the so-called “pro-life” protestors do not represent the Stanford community or the country at large. And we’re glad to hear students quoted, who recognize the misuse of a Christian symbol and the contempt for pregnant women implied by placing crosses as in a cemetery.

Both of us are teaching courses on the Holocaust at Stanford this year. This display made a cemetery for “victims of Roe,” but as we know from the Nazis, victims have perpetrators. Do the organizers mean to brand women, who have many life-cherishing reasons to undertake a legal abortion, as killers?

Of course anyone has the right to organize a demonstration on this issue. Unfortunately, one student who found this display “a very respectful way to make your point” because “It reminds me of a war memorial,” seems not to grasp an absolute difference. A peaceful green field pierced with white crosses evokes military cemeteries harboring soldiers actually killed while serving their country-like the 3056 Americans killed in Iraq. The offensive equation, for the third year in a row, of those deaths with legally-terminated pregnancies brings tears of anger and desperation.

John Felstiner

Professor of English

Mary Felstiner

Visiting Professor of History

Banning abortion would

be disastrous

Every year, the same display: hundreds of crosses, as if in a gopher graveyard, commemorate the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling finding a constitutional right to access to abortion.

In El Salvador, where abortion is entirely illegal, one hundred women each year are prosecuted for aborting their babies. World Health Organization estimates suggest that thirty out of every thousand woman in Central America received abortions, all illegal, in 1995. Rich women have access to safe abortions; poor women die from coat hangers and in back alleys. Do the Stanford Students For Life hope to criminalize poverty with a death sentence?

Perhaps a compromise is appropriate: contraception prevents abortion, homosexuality even more so.

Theo Johnson-Freyd

Senior, Mathematics