To the editor:

We’ve reached an odd point in public life, when a topic as benign as a charity to help expected mothers has local officials immediately descending to schoolyard-level taunts against each other. Of course, the locals are only echoing national-level behavior: Our own Sen. Schumer just threatened Supreme Court justices with unspecified retribution over “reproductive rights.”

You politely kept the real, uglier name for the issue off the front page, but it is what it is: abortion. The battle to end abortion — or at least to prevent it from becoming a universally accepted, dare-not-be-mentioned, let alone challenged, “right” — is the defining moral issue of our time, and in many ways this century’s parallel to the 18th and 19th centuries’ fight against slavery. In both cases, opponents to the institution were characterized as out of touch, humorless, judgmental bigots, and told to mind their own business. In both cases, proponents — sincerely — found inventive ways to twist everything from scripture to science to human rights to justify the unjustifiable, and to avoid looking straight at the main issue. In both cases, the continued advance of genuine science makes it gradually ever clearer that the victim is a human being, trumping all other considerations.

And unfortunately, in both cases the final victory over an evil institution will come only at the end of a century or so of consciousness-raising. The moral level of civilization does rise over the centuries, even if in a horrifyingly two-steps-forward, one-step-back manner. But rise it does. Legalized abortion, like legalized slavery, will one day be not only history but embarrassing, seemingly inexplicable history, and a mark of shame on the age that allowed it to exist.

Joseph Kimpflen

Tupper Lake