
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 17, 1994                    TAG: 9406170012 
SECTION: FRONT                     PAGE: A18    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: Short 
DATELINE: 940617                                 LENGTH:

DOLLARS FOR ABORTION

{LEAD} A recent survey on public funding for abortion reports that 73 percent of the respondents oppose their tax dollars being allocated for that purpose.

This finding invokes the adage ``Penny wise and pound foolish.'' A pregnant teenager or adult, not already on welfare, will generally end up on welfare if denied a tax-paid abortion.

{REST} The result should make the reluctant taxpayer cringe when one considers that the cost of the abortion would amount to, at most, the equivalent of two months of welfare benefits, added to which are the continuing years and multiple births. We should come to understand from this scenario how inextricably related welfare reform is to publicly funded abortion.

Moreover, welfare reform will become less of a problem when we learn to prevent people from getting on welfare in the first instance.

In the late 1950s, a clergyman in Britain conducted a survey of inmates in British prisons. After hundreds of personal interviews, he concluded that 90 percent of the inmates resulted from being unwanted, unloved and uncared-for children. Let those, therefore, who would not contribute $1 of tax money for an abortion reflect how many times more of those dollars must be devoted to cope with the consequences of that myopic outlook.

JULES E. BERNFELD

Virginia Beach, June 2, 1994 by CNB