THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 5, 1994 TAG: 9408040242
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
Even when anti-abortionist extremists wage their battle as a shooting war, abortion is not Topic A in general conversation. In fact, most people seem to wish abortion would go away - both as an issue and as a necessity. Wishing won't make it so, nor will murder. So most people do see the availability of legal, safe abortion as a necessity. They also see women who avail themselves of it as having made a private decision the world needn't know about or assess.
But the subject will not go away, if for no reason other than the vociferousness with which abortion's opponents express their views and the viciousness with which a very few try to force their position.
A country unpersuaded by argument into outlawing abortion isn't likely to be persuaded by murder. But then persuasion isn't what Michael Griffin, convicted last year of the murder of Dr. David Gunn, and Paul Hill, accused last week of the murder of Dr. John Britton and his volunteer bodyguard, James Barrett, are about. Persuasion isn't the reason, either, that men prominent in the anti-abortion movement here at home signed on to Hill's petition urging that Griffin's use of ``lethal force'' be found ``justifiable.'' That is amazing, appalling - and frightening.
It's particularly frightening given the news that an abortion clinic will open in this city. A right to abortion without access to it is no right at all, but this news gets a mixed reception. Any clinic is an invitation to demonstrators whose notion of peaceful protest extends to harassment and trespass. Local police can't look forward to the prospect; but with federal clinic-protection legislation facing certain court review, local officials need to be prepared to balance the constitutional rights to abortion and to peaceful protest, and to deal firmly with the unpeaceful sort.
The record of this clinic's proprietor - clinics in North Carolina owned by him, and at one time his father, have repeatedly run afoul of authorities - raises another issue: the repugnance of treating abortion as a money-making industry. Proprietors are free to go into this business, under the ever-watchful eye of the regulators of health-care facilities. Clinics are just as free to go out of business if regulators or clients find their services unsatisfactory.
But there is in the end only one sure way to put abortionists out of business - lack of need - and nobody with sense foresees that, absent birth control in the water. But sensible folk can change the subject to the issue that underlies not just abortion but so many major ills in society today: sexual responsibility - male and female, teen and adult, abstinence and contraception.
KEYWORDS: ABORTION by CNB