Letters

By Our Readers & David Cole

This article appeared in the March 13, 2006 edition of The Nation.

February 22, 2006

ABORTION: A HUMAN RIGHT

New York City

In "Prochoice Puritans" ["Subject to Debate," Feb. 13] Katha Pollitt quotes my New York Times Magazine article in which I explained why my father, an OB-GYN, grew increasingly committed to serving as an abortion provider even as he and his patients were subjected to harassment in the late 1980s. I noted that my father's reaction might have been different had the women who came to him seeking abortions been "free love advocates for whom the procedure seemed a mere matter of convenience," language that prompts Katha to insinuate that I (and implicitly my father) am unwittingly doing the work of antichoicers. Would Katha prefer that I re-invent my father?

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About David Cole

David Cole (cole@law.georgetown.edu), The Nation's legal affairs correspondent and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is the author of Justice at War: The Men and Ideas That Shaped America's War on Terror, just out from New York Review Books, as well as No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New Press) and Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism (New Press). He is also co-author, with James X. Dempsey, of Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties for National Security (New Press), and, with Jules Lobel, of Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror (New Press). more...
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