In response to “Great Abortion Battle is Upon Us” which ran in the Jan. 9-15 issue of North Country This Week: If anti-choicers worry so much about "life," where is their fight for universal pre-natal care, -- essential to increasing babies' survival rates? Where is the single-payer system guaranteeing healthcare for the babies already born?

Arguing about "when life starts," distorts how the "abortion battle" is de facto about controlling women's bodies and sexuality. "Life begins" with a live ovum. "Life starts" with a living sperm. To argue that it starts only at conception conveniently ignores that a fetus is also co-dependent. Without gestation, fetuses die.

The high rates of child poverty show how too few people care about "life" after birth. Capitalism invests in war and policing, ensuring upper-class privilege and Wall-Street tax loopholes. It prioritizes profits over life, over infrastructure, over education, and the resulting systemic poverty, inequality, pollution, and racism kills children. How is that "pro-life?" Anti-abortionists advocate for a patriarchal state that pre-empts women's autonomy and healthcare choices, obsessing about life only while it's inside of women's bodies.

Wealthy people have always been able to get abortions, and they always will, -- regardless of what laws are on the books. Therefore anti-abortion = anti-healthcare, and the poor will always suffer the most. Women will die. That's neither "pro-life" nor "pro-family."

I don't identify with either the Dems or Repubs. It's important to remember that Roe v. Wade passed despite a Repub-dominated Supreme Court and White House because of the activism of those who cared about justice and understood the long history of misogyny and poverty.

Laura Fair-Schulz

Potsdam