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Letter: A woman’s right to kill?

A woman’s right to kill?

So The Aspen Times now publishes letters signed only by the author’s first name? I refer to the “No birth, no child” letter published on October 31 by a “Linelle,” who apparently is so uncomfortable with her assertions that she won’t risk disclosing her full identity.

To be sure, if I were to argue that a woman’s ultimate control over unwanted circumstances lies in her power to kill, I’d remain nameless too.



And if — after disparaging “religionists” — I rationalized my argument by pointing out that even “Mother Nature herself” kills by way of miscarriage, I’d choose to remain nameless. Mother Nature? This sounds like an appeal to the authority of a higher power to me. Since Linelle claims to know the difference between “the sanely religious” and “the absurdly religious,” I’d like to ask her which category she fits into. Since nature kills indiscriminately, she reasons, why can’t a “thoughtful” person kill purposefully? This is the thinking that characterizes those “angel of mercy” nurses who snuff out thirty of their patients or that leads to the creation of an Obamacare “death panel.”

And if I argued that “a child” doesn’t exist until it emerges naturally from the womb, I wouldn’t even reveal my first name. This is like saying that a butterfly doesn’t exist until it emerges from its chrysalis, but what was it while still in the chrysalis, and what was crawling across the backyard weeks or months before that — a non-butterfly? Its parents were butterflies, and it is animated by 100 percent butterfly DNA, but Mother Nature forbid that we consider a caterpillar a “baby” butterfly or a butterfly’s “child.” Clearly, a butterfly in its larval stage must be like a “zygote” or “embryo” or “fetus” or some such otherworldly word that converts a living, sentient being into dumb protoplasm.




Anyway, in her anonymity, Linelle is in good company — that of the 55 million aborted children in America over the past 40 years who also are nameless because they didn’t get a seat at the table during that “private” conversation between a woman and her doctor when their fate was being determined.

Chad Klinger

Basalt

Editor’s note: Linelle is the referenced letter-writer’s legal full name.