An open letter to Scott Brown

Scott Brown for United States Senate

337 Summer Street

Boston, MA 02210

(857) 263-8346

September 26, 2012 

Dear Senator Brown:

In Steven Ertelt’s article, “Scott Brown Says He Supports Abortion, Limits, And Opposes Health Care Bill,” you acknowledged Roe v. Wade as “the law of the land.” This is true, yet nearly fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote from Birmingham City Jail, "We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal.'"

You also said, “I feel this issue is best handled between a woman and her doctor and her family.” In 1975, my mother was forty-five years old and pregnant. Roe v. Wade and a woman’s “right to choose” had been the “law of the land” for two years. Doctors, friends, and family members advised her to have an abortion in case I was born with Down Syndrome. She resisted, and on June 10, 1976, I was born--perfectly healthy.

You are my Senator. You wrote the Chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2012 about “a woman’s right to choose”; if you had been my Senator in 1975, would you have fought against laws that would have violated my right to live?

I commend you for your stance against partial-birth abortions, federal funding, your support of parental consent notification and your desire to reduce the number of abortions. I realize that abortion is a complicated issue and it is very unlikely that Roe v. Wade will ever be overturned, but like the Civil Rights Activists before you, I would hope that you would do everything in your power to fight for the rights of the most easily marginalized members of our society: the unborn.

Sincerely,

Carilyn Flynn

An Open Letter to Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth for MA
PO Box 290568
Boston, MA 02129
(617)-286-6715

September 19, 2012

Dear Ms. Warren:

In one recent campaign ad, you said, "We're still fighting to protect a woman's right to choose." You are a good person, so I am assuming that rather than advocating for this right at the expense of human lives, you must honestly believe that an unborn child is not a human being. Do you realize that it was this kind of thinking that persuaded the proponents of slavery and the Holocaust?

In John Ensor's book, Answering the Call: Saving Innocent Lives, One Woman at a Time, and I was struck by this comparison:

          "Abortion simply cannot involve the murder of a living
          human being. Our self-image precludes it. This is why
          it took hundreds of years and a civil war to face what
          is now clear to everyone. The people who defended
          slavery saw themselves as good people who would
          never hurt or abuse another person. Therefore, their
          slaves must not be persons, or at least not 'full'
          persons as they are."

You also stated, "We're still fighting to protect a woman's right to choose nearly forty years after Roe v. Wade, and we could be just one Supreme Court justice away from losing it." Yet Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote nearly fifty years ago from Birmingham City Jail, "We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal.'"

Finally, you asked, "How could this be happening in 2012?"

Indeed, Ms. Warren, indeed.

Sincerely,

Carilyn Flynn