Article Published: Thursday, April 22, 2004 - 2:34:37 PM PST

Abortion is wrong
 

The letter ''Right of abortion'' is wrong. A woman has a right over her own body -- but a fetus is not technically her own body. It has its own DNA code at conception. By 24 days it has its own heartbeat and blood type. By the seventh week it has its own brain waves. By the ninth week it has its own fingerprints. By the tenth week it can feel pain.

We should always protect women's rights. But babies' rights are just as important. As abortion becomes an issue of "fetus rights,' its legal days are numbered.

Michael Barber

Covina

Chilling thought

Re Your View, "Right of abortion,' Billy Wong's letter concludes with the statement that abortion is done, in many cases, for the good of the fetus as well.

How beneficent of Wong. And just what are the other cases? Convenience? But since those little ones have no self- awareness (Wong graciously reminds us that none of us can remember our time in the womb), it's the merciful thing to do. How chilling.

Michael Allan

West Covina

Live and let live

Several recent stories reported in the Tribune have shown homeowners throughout the East San Gabriel Valley at their worst.

Heedless of constitutional rights, and brazenly disregarding elementary values of neighborliness, these adult men and women have demonstrated levels of isolationist intolerance staggering and shameful in both the actual harm caused and the desired adverse consequences.

In Glendora, which only has had nine hate crimes since 2002, an African-American family's residence was vandalized because of anti-black racial bigotry. In unincorporated Covina, neighbors resent the construction of a Coptic Christian Church, which has services on Sunday, one day of the week. In Azusa, part of the political establishment has aligned itself with NIMBYs desiring to eliminate a gun club whose half-century existence long predates the arrival of the vociferous Johnnies-come-lately.

If you live anywhere in America, you should learn to live and let live, and if you cannot abide residing near peaceful people of other races or religions or individuals exercising their Second Amendment liberties, then move to Falloujah, Iraq, another community seething in acrimony and turpitude.

Maurice Kane

San Dimas

Sickened and angry

When I read about the hate crime and vandalism of the beautiful new home under construction in Glendora, I was sickened and angry. I hope the family knows that there are people in town who won't tolerate this stupid behavior. I want the criminals who did it, to know that they have disrupted many families and school children of all races, not just their target.

I also think the city of Glendora ought to be a little more vocal in their denunciation of this embarrassing, immoral, behavior.

Elizabeth Glover

Glendora

Who cares?

Dangers of old age. I left my HMO because I felt they were not responding in my best interest.

Now after waiting for a prescription that I have been taking for several years and that several doctors have prescribed, another HMO has sent me this memo:

"I understand that you are experiencing difficulties with obtaining a medication that was prescribed by your doctor. Member Services Department has reviewed your concerns. You will receive a letter about this issue shortly and a decision will be made within 30 days.'

I've been waiting five months. I had to order from out of the country. A good thing it is not life threatening ... yet. Huh? Once you become a senior citizen, no one cares.

Bill Noyes

Walnut

Wrong road to empire

Senior administration official Richard Clarke testified, "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed.'

He continued: "And for that failure, I would ask once all the facts are out for your understanding and for your forgiveness.'

At long last an apology from our establishment for their inexplicable incompetence for failing to protect Americans from foreign invasion, the single most important responsibility of the federal government.

Just why the Serbo-Croat word, "bojinka' is not the focus of our discourse on the subject 9/11 can only be understood by its dearth of usage in any public media discussion of the terrorist conspiracy uncovered by authorities in the Philippines.

"Bojinka' (loud bang), the code name bin Laden operatives had given to an audacious plan to hijack 11 U.S. airliners simultaneously and fly them into various targets in the U.S., was known to the FBI and other federal agencies as early as 1995, but the intelligence did not result in any heightened alert affecting U.S. commercial aviation. Why?

What we should be asking before we continue to entangle ourselves in a perpetual war against terror is, why doesn't the U.S. government stop arming and training foreign terrorists and the dictators who support them? From the end of World War II through the early 1990s, from Nikita Khrushchev to Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden, the U.S. has now committed our sons and daughters to 135 countries around the world; countries whose governments are generally despised by their own people.

Consider the admonishment of George Washington's Farewell Address, Sept. 17, 1796:

"It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world... As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot... There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard...'

The financial cost of our "any enemy of my enemy is my friend' policy has charged the U.S. taxpayer more than $950 billion in foreign or military aid to more than 100 nations, according to the Cato Institute.

Hard as it may be to believe, early in 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave $43 million to Afghanistan in exchange for declaring that growing opium is "against the will of God.' That was just part of $125 million in foreign aid the U.S. gave the Taliban that year, making the U.S. the biggest sponsor of that virulently terrorist regime.

Waving the flag has come to mean something other than what the framers intended. Simply translated, the Stars and Stripes now represent the architecture of the American Empire.

"The New World Order,' as invoked by fellow travelers of the Council on Foreign Relations, actually means the United Nations. The voting citizen of the American Republic must elect citizen-legislators that will no longer impose its will on any portion of the foreign world.

The citizen must resolve to return to the peaceful foreign policy that America followed for its first century until President McKinley took the country into the Spanish-American War and down the road to empire.

Leland Faegre

West Covina