Open Letter to Ms. Meghan McKain

Ms. McCain, I love watching The View and listening to the different viewpoints, including yours. I don't often agree with you but I support your right to express yourself. This letter was inspired by your expression of disapproval of President Biden's reversing restrictions on federal government funding of reproductive health care organizations providing sanitary medical abortions to women in foreign countries. You implied that Joe is not sincere about uniting the country because you believe abortion is murder. It sounds like you are saying the country can not come together unless and until public policy is aligned with the religious beliefs with which you were reared. If that is the case, unity is a pipe dream. Maybe the president thinks of unity as people with different beliefs coming together to peacefully and calmly try to understand each other's views. That would be challenging for me as I tend to get excited when expressing my beliefs verbally. I don't understand, Ms. McCain, how you can justify depriving women and girls in third world countries of the civil right to a sanitary medically competant abortion, a civil right the females of this country possess. Also a right that any of those foriegn females could exercise by coming to this country if they had the means. Should public policy be determined by anyone's personal religious beliefs? Do you beieve that pubic policy and laws should conform to the tenets of the religion to which the numerical majority of a population professes to belong? In that case, if, at some point, the majority of Americans were Moslem, we would all have to live in conformance to Sharia law. Wouldn't that be nice? I don't know how the Christian Bible could be used as a model for public policy as there are so many prohibitions in the O.T. that are reversed in the N.T. and vice versa. Divorce for example. Acceptable in tne Old. Frowned upon in the New. Speaking of the Bible, I wonder why God did not come rght out and say "abortion is murder"? Seems that would have bolstered the so-called "pro-life" stance. Did you know that abortion, while the word does not appear in the Bible, was a common lawful practice in the Roman Empire? Strange that Jesus did not condemn abortion. "And I say unto you, abortion is murder". Does not require a lot of time or effort. Maybe he knew that the soul does not enter a viable fetus until it is being born. Perhaps we are supposed to believe the 5th commandment covers abortion. Why? It evidently does not refer to killing the fatted calf, nor the Caananites, nor Jacob, nor the first born of the Egyptians. So why do some Christians believe abortion is murder? I beieve the answer is tradition for Catholics. What is tradition? An influential person comes up with an idea which catches on and is repeated long enough that it eventually is regarded as irrefutable truth. So, several years after the crucifixtion a church leader decided abortion was a sin. Repeated so often, it became true for Catholics. It wasn't until the 1820s that some states passed laws regulating abortions. And it wasn't until 1979 that evangelicals siezed on the abortion issue as a rallying cry to try to keep Carter from being reelected according to the on-line article, Real Origins of the Religious Right. Although this may not apply to you, Ms. McCain, I get the impression that some anti-abortion rights people believe that pro-rights folk either don't realize that the fetus is an autonomous human being with its own soul or that they know it and don't care. If I believed, as some anti- abortionists do, that a soul (not the mother's) enters the zygote at the moment of conception, I would have to love the unborn and care about them as much as I care about the mothers. Fortunately, my religious belief, that a separate soul does not enter the viable fetus before it is born, allows me to be more concerned with the mother and her rights than with the non-existent rights of a non- viable fetus. I am in favor of the state prohibiting abortion during the final trimester unless the mother's health is threatened. That is because forcing a living viable fetus from the womb would result in it recieving an autonomous soul and with it, the right to life. While there is no scientific evidence to support my belief, there is also no evidence that proves the soul enters the fetus before birth. As far as reversing /i>, thus depriving females of the right to a clean medically induced abortion, that would result in more hardship and death. Can you imagine being 14, pregnant and too scared and desperate to turn to your family for help? Desperate enough to pay a non-scrupulous person $100 to push a dirty coat hanger up b/w your legs? Can you imagine subsequently bleeding to death in a dark back alley? Did you know that 39 women died in 1972 from the effects of ilegal abortion? In my opinion, even one would have been too many. In my opinion the earth has problems as a result of too many people. So I don't feel sorry that some of the hundreds of thousands of terminated fetuses might have become the scientific geniuses we need. If Curie had not discovered radium, someone else would have. And if not, the Radium Girls might have lived longer. And how many of those terminated fetuses might have become serial killers responsible for murdering my family or yours? As I said, you have a right to your opinion. But acting as if your opinion and beliefs matter more than those of people who disagree with you feels condescending to me. Sincerely, Richard w. Geiger rgphilo1@gmail.com