Editorials
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
Abortion laws archaic?
"In school the children count ten on their fingers. I have no fingers, but I count on my fingers in my mind."
The little boy speaking has been deformed since birth.
Rebecca, now three years old, can brush her own hair. Sometimes she has some difficulty holding the brush, because all four of her limbs are artificial. When she was born she had only a head and the trunk of her body.
A mother-to-be spends most of her time working. The doctor has told her that she has less than a 50 per cent chance of having a normal child. Perhaps her baby will have short arms, deformed ears, or be totally limbless as Rebecca. Some die.
"I COULDN'T LOOK at my baby at first. I felt as though my own arms had been cut off." Some mothers require psychiatric treatment after they bear deformed children. Others commit suicide.
Other mothers do not worry. They are unaware of the dangers their unborn children may face. Some were shocked with horror when they learned their babies were deformed.
Cases such as these above and thousands more like them in the United States, Germany and England occurred several years ago when many expectant women took thalidomide, the drug which is dangerous during pregnancy even if only two tablets are taken at the wrong time.
The thousands of deformed children were a heavy price to pay to learn that drugmakers and doctors are not infallible. By the time the last thalidomide baby was born in 1963 to mothers who had taken the sedatives during the second month of pregnancy, the toll was about 6,000 in West Germany, where the drug was developed, and another 1,000 in England, not counting those cases in America.
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German measles or Rubella contacted by a woman during pregnancy can have much the same effects on the unborn child. A woman has a 50 per cent chance of having a normal child.
Some people argue that such cases are unfair
to the parents involved as well as other healthy children in the family. If the mother is not well adjusted, she may need psychiatric treatment. Yet is it fair to the unborn?
THERAPEUTIC ABORTIONS are permitted now in 45 of the 50 states only when the life of the mother is endangered. The five others recognize endangering the health. There are no provisions for the rights of the unborn babies.
In a national movement, physicians, lawyers and laymen have organized the Association for the Study of Abortion. A mailed survey to New York State doctors showed that 87 per cent or 1,372 of the respondents were in favor of modification of the abortion laws.
IT WAS REPORTED recently that several state legislatures may tackle the abortion problem in January. The impetus is coming from doctors who know best how the present laws are being skirted. Some doctors feel that the patient alone, with her physician's counsel, should have the right to determine whether to continue the pregnancy and to assume the responsibility for raising her offspring.
If a woman wants an abortion bad enough she can always find illegal ones, but they are often expensive and dangerous. Criminal abortions will continue to be a serious medical-legal disease.
National attention was focused on the question of abortion three years ago when Sherri Finkbine made a trip to Sweden for an abortion of a fetus she feared was deformed because of thalidomide. She argued that it was not fair to the rest of her family to bring a deformed child into the world.
The recent German measles epidemic in many cities has refocused attention on the problem. Some doctors are speaking out because of the afflicted infants born. Among the defects are deafness, blindness, heart malformations, and heads under-developed in size.
It is time to dust some of the cobwebs off the present abortion laws in all states.
— Suzy Black
The People Say...
To the Editor:
RE: "UNIVERSITY FORUM," Thursday, Dec. 2. I would like to make very clear at the outset that contrary to the growing war hysteria, none of us here are in favor of more Americans dying in Viet Nam—that you should know. Also, the fact that we oppose present U.S. policy in Viet Nam does not mean that we, on the march in Washington, support an NLF victory. We don't. Protesting a war policy which we feel is wrong, in terms of the Vietnamese people and of real American interests, does not constitute treason unless you feel that term applies to anyone who dares to question a governmental decision. We might well understand Diedrich Bonhoeffer in
World War II Germany. To have remained silent in Germany was branded complicity by the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg trials. Perhaps you don't realize that demonstrations are a result of public apathy, not apathy the result of demonstrations. Inquire into the civil rights movement.
You seize upon a couple of people carrying NLF flags out of the 40,000 marchers in Washington and generalize not only for the march but for the whole anti-war movement, seeing only the actions of a fringe few. Well, there was a counter-demonstra-tion across the street from the White House led by the Ku Klux Klan, the Hell's Angels and the American Nazi Party. I wouldn't
apply the same reasoning you evidence to group you with these "patriots."
For myself, had I been eligible in 1942, I would have fought along with the others against facism and genocide. In 1965, I do not wish to fight for General Ky of Saigon who seeks to emulate Hitler, nor do I wish to be a party to the subjugation of the Vietnamese people by American troops.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
YOUR LETTER INDICATES a strange unconcern for why there is a war in Viet Nam. Are there no doubts in your mind concerning the official reason for American involvement there? Is the sacrifice of life there any justification for your stand? If so, then your place might well be in Viet Nam now, defending what you believe.
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The advisability of military solutions to socio-economic problems is always dubious. Unless one's game is brinkmanship.
Many Americans supported the stand of Jean-Paul Sartre and other French intellectuals against the Algerian war, and many more supported the Hungarian fighters against Russian domination. The lessons in both cases are not so easily forgotten.
Richard Hill
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Richard Hill Lawrence junior
The editors welcome letters of opinion from all Kansan readers. We reserve the right to edit all letters for style, content and unreasonable length. All letters must be signed. Opinions expressed in letters do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors.
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Daily Kansan
Tuesday, December 7, 1965
Books comment on recent history
THE MULE ON THE MINARET, by Alec Waugh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $6.95).
As you read "The Mule on the Minaret" you get the impression that Alec Waugh was under some compulsion to tell about his own life in an earlier time. It is not an autobiographical novel, strictly speaking, and it comes many years after a number of somewhat sensational publishing successes, notably "Island in the Sun."
The title is over-provocative, to start with, for it comes from, he says, an Arabian proverb: "A man who takes his mule to the top of a minaret must bring it down himself." We may suppose that this relates to the life of the hero, Noel Reid, an English professor engaged in espionage in Beirut, Baghdad and Cairo, who gets involved with a younger woman, is himself divorced—only temporarily—by his wife back home, and returns to England, and years later to the Middle East, a man made wise by experience.
But it does carry the reader, and Waugh himself, back to World War II and the political and military atmosphere in the Middle East at that time. Waugh tells us in an afterword that he lived a life similar to that lived by some of his central characters. As you read, you wait impatiently for something to happen, and nothing ever happens.
The book is thoughtful, and maybe Waugh might even be trying to write more in the vein of that much better writer, Evelyn Waugh. One cannot see this book becoming a Hollywood movie, unless someone is able to jazz it up a bit. It is long, ponderous, and ultimately pointless, even though Waugh is philosophizing on the ways of espionage and the end-justifies-the-means approaches necessary to win wars and the minds of peoples.
★ ★ ★
THE BIT BETWEEN MY TEETH, by Edmund Wilson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $7.50).
No contemporary critic is better than Edmund Wilson at evoking the spirit of an era. The era depicted in this collection is that of 1950-1965, our own times. Too soon, perhaps, to be autholized, but these essays may be added to the earlier writings that Wilson has done to capture the feeling of other years in America.
It is a diverse set of writings found in this volume, things that you may have read in such publications as the New Yorker. This amazing man has the capacity to understand so many things that he drives the reader to an almost jealous kind of frustration.
The topics are varied. Wilson discourses on Bernard Shaw in the last years of the great man's life. He writes perceptively of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his affair with Hollywood's Sheilah Graham, which led to the book "Beloved Infidel." Theodore Roeveit's pre-presidential letters are treated; so is the amazing correspondence between Justice Holmes and Harold Laski.
What this means is that much of the subject matter is not quite as contemporary as the book's subtitle would suggest. Swinburne, the Marquis de Sade and James Branch Cabell are scarcely figures of the fifties. Yet their writings and their ideas were part of our times.
He is always a man of extraordinary prejudices, this Edmund Wilson; that is why he is good reading and always fun. He is one figure from our present literary criticism likely to survive.