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Wednesday, July 5, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Limits set on Roe v. Wade
There were no winners or losers in Monday's Supreme Court decision upholding Roe vs. Wade. Setbacks for pro-choice advocates, ves. But not defeat.
Although the court upheld many of the provisions in the Missouri case, Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, the justices are not ready to impose their morality upon the nation. So they legitimized a state's authority to impose certain restrictions that will make it more difficult for a woman to get an abortion, restrictions that take away a woman's control over her own body.
The Missouri law banned the use of federal or state money for elective abortions and the use of public facilities to perform abortions.
Unwanted children, many of whom will be born into poverty in a society that does not want to take responsibility for them, will be the result of those bans.
Justice Harry Blackman said, "The result, as we know from experience . . . would be that, every year, hundreds of thousands of women, in despair, would defy the law and place their health and safety in the unclean and unsympathetic hands of back-alley abortionists, or they would attempt to perform abortions upon themselves, with disastrous results."
But until the predominantly male, conservative court recovenes for its 1989-90 term with more cases questioning the legality of abortion, the battle over abortion will be fought on the floors of state legislatures, an arena unbefitting for deciding the destiny of a person's morality, an arena where the participants play for re-election.
Kathy Walsh for the editorial board
it's a disgrace to our intelligence to think that people would support a candidate because of the position he or she takes on this one issue. Especially since it's an issue of conscience as well as an issue of a woman's right over her body.
Don't murder the children
Discussion of the death penalty stirs strong emotions in many people.
people. But while those emotions are natural, they must not be used in forming an opinion about whether it's appropriate to apply the death penalty to criminals who are younger than 18 years of age.
Last Monday the Supreme Court upheld two decisions to execute teens who had committed murder. One was 16 at the time he committed his crime, the other 17. The Court had ruled last year that sentencing a 15-year-old to death was cruel and unusual punishment.
punishment. The number of heinous crimes committed in this country by children is increasing at a shocking rate. For many, the first reaction when a minor commits a crime is that he should be tried as an adult. When we try to decide what we think about applying the death penalty to 16- and 17-year-olds, we naturally consider how we would feel if someone we cared about were killed by a minor.
It may sound legalistic and inhuman, but how any one of us would feel is beside the point. If every person who had suffered a loss at the hands of a criminal did what he felt like doing, then lynching and approval of it would be far more common than it is. Laws are made so society won't be ruled by people's emotions
Individual states must establish a minimum age for the death penalty. The judicial system must draw the line for the death penalty somewhere. As some death penalty opponents have said, the Supreme Court's actions suggest that it feels the proper age is 15
Such a precedent casts a dark shadow on the argument that executions of minors will be rare.
excellent all violent crime warrants heavy penalties and maximum security incarceration for the protection of society. And the violent nature of some crimes recently committed by minors is an obvious indicator of failure somewhere in our culture.
No matter how we feel, we can't correct the problem by treating_minors as if they were adults. They are not.
Putting some young criminals to death and locking the rest away with adult criminals won't solve anything. The situation calls for separate maximum-security facilities in which the focus is constructive and rehabilitative.
is if rehabilitation of criminals is possible, it must certainly be so with our children.
Kirsten Bosnak for the editorial board
The editorials in this column are the opinion of the editorial board. The editorial board consists of Jill Jess, Ric Brack, Kirsten Bosnak and Kathy Walsh.
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Sometimes you have to take out the trash...
Abortion issue divides nation Rhetoric and abstractions of controversy fill the vicious void
Here, now, is a woman with child. About her swirls a controversy that is no closer to resolution for the plurality of opinions that issued Monday from the U.S. Supreme Court.
The decision in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services limited rather than overturned Roe vs. Wade. It continued the Court's interpretation of federal law since 1973 so as to restrict the biological, economic and institutional circumstances which a woman may legally obtain an abortion.
The court rejected the trimester criterion for determining fetal viability, adopting a case-by-case determination. The court also dismissed as moot the contention of the Missouri statute that life begins at conception. The justices did not clarify the constitutional status of the assumed right to privacy which grounded the Roe vs. Wade decision.
These points are vitally important to all who are
involved. Here though, right now, they are finally irrelevant.
Outside the court, two groups of people apparently concerned with these two human beings argue for the rights of the woman and the child, as though one of them were pressing a claim against the other. Ironically, although all the arguments spring from common premises of the sanctity of life and the moral sovereignty of individual human beings, the groups find themselves suckeried by abscess.
There can be no bridge across it. The very nature of initiation means that no com-
bines will exist between the conflicting parties.
There are no categories, nor words with which to frame them, that affirm in common the conclusions reached by both sides.
Stuart Beals
Staff columnist
One group dismisses language such as "fetal viability," "full term pregnancy" and "abortion" as semantic conceit. They look at ova and sperm cells and know that "life" doesn't begin at conception, that an abstract regress is of little use when life is at stake. They know that the fetus they would protect is human, and doesn't become so at any particular single generation of cell division (could it be non-human before then bovine or mammal) to survive until then living become a non-living thing kills that being. They know that life is beyond the sphere of jurisprudence, beyond value.
These are abstractions,however,and here,right now,they are finally irrelevant.
The other group dismisses any claims that one person may make on another. They know that one's life is one's own, if nothing else is. They know that no other can undertake responsibility for one's life, one's self. They know that lawmakers and others who would, for whatever reasons, force one to maintain a pregnancy until a child is delivered invade one's self as well as one's body. They know that life is beyond the sphere of jurisprudence, beyond value.
These, too, are abstractions, and here, now, they are finally irrelevant.
Irrelevant are the acts of civil disobedience by which one group will provide thousands of abortions under circumstances in which these abortions will be illegal.
Also irrelevant at this moment are the related cases yet undecided, as well as the attempts to enact new laws that will surely follow Monday's decision.
Irrelevant are the acts of civil disobedience which the other group will carry out against women who seek legal abortions and against those who will provide the abortions.
Irrelevant at this moment are the concerns of the relatives of these two human beings, including the father. Irrelevant are the concerns of physicians, judges, attorneys and, most of all, columnists.
All is finally irrelevant because, in a given set of circumstances, a woman pregnant by an act of love, or indifference or brutality will believe that she must end the life within her body to save her own. In the same set of circumstances another woman is prepared to die to preserve the life within her body.
Here there are no abstractions. Here is a woman, a human being. Within her becomes another human being. They are beyond value, they are worth of jurisprudence. They are real, if nothing else is.
Each is destiny to the other, destined by the other.
They dwell together without the realm of categories and words. Who presumes to dwell there with them?
- Stuart Beals is a Lawrence graduate student in journalism.
Utopia is no place for free speech
It must be obvious that intellectual freedom in this country is most threatened on campus, and most threatened there by the Left. By now even the good, gray and slightly myopic New York Times seems to have noticed. ("Friday's National Review," "At Stanford, Leftists Become Consensus.")
One prestigious university after another considers adopting a gag rule — though all make certain to call it an anti-harassment rule. (Euphemism is the first sign of a deed of which one is ashamed.) Schools where conventional values are shaken so shocked at attacks on their own unconventional ones that they resort to censorship by some milder name. The polite rationalizations offered for censorship on campus always remind me of a line from Ring Lardner: " 'Shut up,' he explained." It would all be amusing if it weren't to pathetic and dangerous. Censorship is surely most ominous in centers of learning.
Paul Greenberg Syndicated columnist
Too late, various spokesmen for freedom try to explain why it's wrong to gag those one disagrees with, even when what they say is offensive or rude or disgusting. Charles Evans Hughes and Oliver Wendell Holmes are much quoted. Various truisms are repeated ("The best remedy for offensive speech is painterly repeated." "When you pass a rule which represses speech, you are avoiding dealing with the underlying problem and you're passing a rule whose sweep is going to be broader than the things you're trying to contain."
All this time-tested counsel seems to have little effect. One faculty after another is provoked by some incident or insult on campus into abridging their students' freedom. Places like Yale and Dartmouth set the pattern some time ago by trying to punish students who would not toe the accept-
ideal biological line; now Stanford has taken the lead. That figures. A school that would whittle down its readings in Western Culture is not likely to use such data, one of that culture's essentials: freedom of speech.
Perhaps the most revealing defense of suppression on campus came from Canetta Ivy, a member of the Council of Student Presidents at Stanford. Debating an imposition on free speech, she said, "What we are proposing is not completely in line with the First Amendment, and it should be what we are trying to set a standard different from what society at large is trying to accomplish."
Perhaps that's why all the lectures about freedom of speech aren't working; freedom is for the rest of us, not for a place with different and presumably higher standards — a kind of ideal society. Once again utopianism proves the richest soil for repression. Plato's "Republic" did not put much store by him in terms of freedom. Maybe writing arguments from Milton or Jefferson isn't very effective; they were concerned with a real society — not a perfect, protected enclave.
What we have here is the Omelas Syndrome, named for the mythical city of "Omelas, brightly powered by a fierce storm," in short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas." It is a city where life is perfect joy
as imagined by each individual reader: religion without clergy, courage without soldiers, art without labor, triumph without any defeated. The only sacrifice asked in return is one small inconvenience that all must agree to tolerate: "In a basement under one of the beautiful buildings of our city, one and one and one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window . . ." and in this foul place, which is described as intensely as the beauties of Omelas, there is a neglected, abandoned, feeble-minded, starved child whom all must agree to leave so. "Those are the terms." This may be the only terms on whose Utopia is possible perfection in exchange for repression.
Some will not accept those terms and leave. "They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates, says the writer of the story. "... they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go toward is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the one who walk away from Omelas."
The story can be read many ways but one way is to ask whether one would accept such perfection at the cost of just one little, abandoned, neglected, abused freedom: freedom of speech, with all its potential for pain, disagreement, uncertainty and offensiveness. In the end the question being decided at university after university is: Should we walk away from Omelas?
Literature might make the choice clearer. Recommended reading: "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," by Ursula K. Le Guin. The best novelist and columnist who writes for the Pine Belt (Abr.) Gazette.
Other Voices
There is clearly a need for better student housing in Marshan. Construction of apartment complexes is needed.
There are already enough rental properties for the current student population, but some of the
Manhattan has no systematic process to inspect rental property to ensure it complies with the housing code.
ing code.
A procedure to inspect and enforce the housing code regulations could reduce the number of sub-
standard rental units. . .
Students, frequently first time renters, are rarely informed on housing codes or aware of what constitutes a health hazard or safety violation. Unfortunately, some landlords take advantage of this
situation and rent unsafe or poorly maintained apartments to students. Not only is this situation implausent and perhaps even dangerous to the teacher, but hurts the reputation of the city and the university.
The Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury