Readers upset with decisions on abortion, gun rights

Second Amendment

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Abortion is a matter of religion, not Constitution

Abortion is not a 10th Amendment power, but a freedom of religion right. It’s a religious belief over when life begins, and that is subject to your beliefs and right. In what other country would the people in power impose their religious beliefs on the populace?

-Anna Hope, Iowa City

Dismayed by UI president’s weak message on abortion

As a University of Iowa alumna, born and raised in Iowa City, I am disturbed by the letter President Barbara Wilson circulated after the Dodd Supreme Court decision. Refusing to disclose her own views, she says the ruling “generates strong opinions and feelings” and asks everyone to have “open and respectful discussion of differences.”

Any fundamental right may be reasonably restricted, and so too with abortion. But that is not what is happening. Being forced to bear a child no matter the circumstance is involuntary servitude. The 13th Amendment was passed to prohibit that. Southern slave owners had quite sincerely held beliefs about slavery and it was morally abominable.

Imagine Wilson writing a letter saying “slavery generates strong opinions and feelings on both sides. … I ask you to have open and respectful discussion of differences.” No one would put up with that. She would be howled out of town and her presidency. 

It is exactly because people like her in privileged, impervious leadership and professional positions have long deferred to “both-siderism” that we are where we are. The professional class needs to summon a Ukrainian level of courage, take risks and make a giant sustained fuss instead of lying low. 

Iowa alumni, faculty and leaders who understand that this involuntary servitude is as criminal as slavery need to lead by taking risks to their own professional status. Alumni should withhold gifts; doctors and other health faculty and IT workers threaten slowdowns and walkouts; athletes refuse to play; executives take their jobs out of state. Only real economic consequences will persuade the Legislature and governor to prevent this new women’s bondage.

-Mary Robertson, Shelburne Falls, Mass.

Politicians taking wrong stance on guns, abortion

Our Iowa governor and our two senators have shown us they do not respect the wishes of their constituents. The great majority of Iowans, like the majority of citizens in our country, believe in the rights of a woman to make her own decision on abortion and the rights of our citizens to be protected from guns in public places.

I have written and called our senators regarding the slaughter of children in schools by AR-15 semiautomatic weapons and always get the answer regarding the Second Amendment to the Constitution. When between 60% and 70% of citizens believe we need to do something to change what is killing so many of our people, our Congress has to do something about it. 

Fortunately, after decades of doing nothing, Congress has passed a bipartisan bill, which is a start to making us safer. Too bad it took 19 innocent children and two teachers and the horrible description of the fact that the bullets did such terrible damage to the children that they were unrecognizable and decapitated. Sen. Chuck Grassley voted against this bill. He and Sen. Joni Ernst benefitted from hundreds of thousands of dollars they received from the National Rifle Association through the years.

The abortion issue is also important. The reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme

Court is a decision which once again between 60% and 70S% of Americans

believe is unjust. The justices took away a constitutional amendment which was precedent for almost half a century which gave women and girls the right to make

their own decisions regarding their health care. 

I have no problem with individuals choosing not to have an abortion because of their own personal beliefs, but I believe it is morally wrong for five men and one woman to decide what is best for all women in this country. Instead of saving lives, the lives of girls and women who have been raped or in cases of incest will be lost because they were too young to bear children or forever damaged by having to bear the child of their rapist.

In Iowa, our current governor talks of saving the unborn, but she has allowed the education of our children to decline from being one of the best in our country to being very mediocre. We need to pick leaders who will practice what democracy stands for — the will of the majority. Michael Franken and Deidre DeJear will bring democracy back to our state. We all need to vote and make sure our votes count.

-Patricia Levin, Iowa City

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