To the Editor:

I’m writing in regard to the letter [“Have we lost all human decency?”] and editorial [“Abortion is morally and legally complex. Inflamed rhetoric won’t get us closer to a solution.”] on abortion in last week’s Enterprise.

Consider the following quotation: “Abortion, at least in the last trimester, is something very close to murder.”

Putting aside the rather curious phrase “something very close to,” it would be easy to label this statement as the work of an anti-abortion extremist — straight, perhaps, out of the Bible Belt.

But, in fact, the quotation is from Carl Sagan in his book “Dragons of Eden.” Sagan was no Bible-thumper — he was, in fact, an agnostic, perhaps an atheist. But he was above all a scientist and humanist and it was clear that the implications of the Roe v. Wade ruling disturbed him greatly.

So-called “progressives” in this country love to describe Republicans and conservatives as “anti-science,” usually in reference to ‘human-caused climate change.” But consider: Roe v. Wade ruled that no scientific or medical evidence may be taken into account in the legalization of abortion or a “woman's choice.”

And this was in reference to such evidence as it existed in 1972 — clearly a great deal more is known about the state of a developing unborn child in the year 2019.

President Bill Clinton famously said that abortion should be safe, legal — and rare, and the procedure was then regarded as a sad if not tragic event for a woman.

Recently Andrew Cuomo signed a law that literally celebrates abortion and, in what must be one of the most disgraceful acts by any lawmaker in living memory, he ordered the Freedom Tower in New York City to be lighted to broadcast that celebration to the world. What a slap in the face to millions of tax-paying citizens of New York State.

And, of course, the New York State law goes beyond legalizing abortion at any stage — it permits the killing of a child who somehow survives a botched abortion. And, I’m sorry, but saying, “No the baby is just left to die” is precisely the same as killing it.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about what she called “the banality of evil” — that sometimes the most heinous acts are carried out in such a way that they appear to have no effect whatever on the consciences of the people who commit them.

As a prime example of her point, one might watch the video of Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia talking about the killing of a baby that has survived an abortion in the soft-spoken, Southern-accented, bland tone with which he might have been describing the proper way to prepare baking-powder biscuits.

In high-school courses in Western Civilization, many of us learned that in ancient Sparta in Greece, when a baby was born, it was examined by judges and, if the decision were made that it was not likely to grow into the paradigm of a Spartan citizen, it would be hurled from a cliff or left to die on a mountainside.

We recoiled when we heard that — how could any civilization be so heartless and brutal?

Clearly — Carl Sagan, drawing on his knowledge of science, was well aware of the terrifying road that the nation was walking down following Roe v. Wade.  How unfortunate that politicians such as Andrew Cuomo — “the former altar boy!” — and Ralph Northam have minds too closed to see what Sagan saw.

Michael Nardacci

Albany

Editor’s note: Michael Nardacci writes the “Backroads geology” column for The Altamont Enterprise.