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ABORTION: A doctor’s view

| May 24, 2020 1:00 AM

A letter in the May 16 Press makes the point that the candidate whom the writer favors scored 97% on his anti-abortion questionnaire. Therefore he deserves your vote. My objections to this recommendation are twofold:

(1) To vote for a candidate based solely on his/her answers to a one-issue survey is never appropriate.

(2) To return to the “good old days” of illegal abortions would be tragic.

As a medical student in the days when all abortions were illegal, I had the wrenching experience of helping to care for a 16-year-old girl who was hospitalized with a severe infection after a botched procedure at home. She died in less than 24 hours.

The women who make the agonizing decision to abort are not nameless and faceless. They are our sisters, our daughters, our friends. Frequently the men in their lives are physically and/or emotionally absent. Do we really want to relegate them to back-alley incompetents if they have made a decision with which we disagree? Should they pay with their lives?

I hope the answer is a resounding “NO!”

JON CUTTING

Coeur d’Alene

Editor’s note: Dr. Cutting has delivered about 8,500 babies in the Coeur d’Alene area since 1975.