Letters to the Editor

In response to May 27 editorial, “Abortion bill is unethical.”

Women are being told lies when they enter abortion clinics.

Less than a year ago, a Planned Parenthood staffer in Milwaukee allegedly told Lila Rose that she was six to eight weeks pregnant and nothing was developed at all. “There’s no legs, no arms, no head, no brain, no heart,” the Planned Parenthood staff member said in an undercover video recording.

To understand the absurdity of that statement, Google the word “fetus,” find an embryologist or view an ultrasound.

When Dr. Lillie Epps was in her 20s, she had two abortions in a Planned Parenthood facility in Washington, D.C. While protesting in front of the clinic in April 2008, she said the organization lies to its patients.

Why lie? According to Abby Johnson, former director of the Bryan, Texas, Planned Parenthood, abortion is the most lucrative part of Planned Parenthood’s operations.

With the family planning corporation really suffering, it depends on abortion to balance the budget, to help get them out of the hole and to make income for the company.

Ultrasounds reveal a truth against which there is no debate. If your plan is to conceal the unborn child from a woman who is considering an abortion, what is your plan for her when, later on, she decides that she wants a baby and an ultrasound is required as a part of proper prenatal care?

Do you think that she won’t be able to figure out the child that she aborted was just like the one that is currently in her uterus?

Truth is the motivation. Supporters of the bill want to spare women the pain that  Epps experienced when she learned of the lies that she was told. We also want to defend a woman’s right to be born.

Yes, abortion is a painful and difficult decision. Painful decisions are part of being an adult. Another reality is that sex has consequences.

What really bothers me about this editorial is that the campus newspaper of USF, a top public research university, has taken the position that ignorance and the suppression of information is superior to knowledge and making an informed choice, that an indisputable truth that is so anathema to your position should be silenced and that people who disagree with your position will be publicly scorned as “twisted.” Truth is not twisted.

Richard Eldridge is a senior majoring in biology.