VIEWPOINTS EDITORIALS OPINIONS LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Sacred Heart growth lowers abortion access ■ OUR OPINION: Making legal medical practices unavailable inhibits everyone's freedom Th« abortion debate arises in the most interesting places. Rather than being restrict ed to the forums of when life begins and if it should be legal, this emotional ami personal argument surfaced during a funding proposal for PeaceHualth, the compa ny that owns Sacred Heart Hospital. At issue for state authori ties was whether to approve a request from the Catholic Church-affiliated company for $lfi million in tax exempt bonds. Nov. 13. the company got what it want ed. The $230,000 in savings will Imj used by Peace Health to expand and improve services in Eugene and Florence. essential services should lx* allowed to get. Clearly. Sacred Heart and its satellites provide the community with quality medical cart? and make the most of modern technology. However, as that care spreads through the city, it squeezes out facilities that used to provide services that Peace!fealth rejects. Little by little, a legal pro cedure is made impossible to find. Smaller companies that provide abortions but rely on other services to sur vivo cannot compote with hi-t*M h, convenient as a 7 Llevon Sacred Heart. This trend is nothing new. Across every field larger corporations are gobbling up and edging out small, inde pendent operations As such, fewer peuple begin to control what we see. read, eat and do with our bodies That is to say, all servit os oxcopt abortion. PeaceHealth bans all med it oi procedures and coun seling involving pregnancy tnrmination. This is all well and g(K)d. Private compa nies should have the right to determine what practices meet with their moral or ethical beliefs. The bone of contention for pro-choice activists is that PeacoHnalth keeps growing, making a legal medical practice increasing ly inaccessible. Regardless of individual beliefs on the rights and wrongs of abortion, Puaco I health's continuing expan sion (the company recently bought and renamed the for merly independent Eugene Clinic) raises difficult ques tions about how big a pri vate company that provides Anti abortion activists may applaud Peat ••Health's expansion, but their enthu siasm misses the point, It is just as likely that a powerful atheist organiza tion could buy Eugene's hospitals and eliminate the small chapels where people find solar o during the ill ness of a loved one. A white-supremacist group could begin to buy all of the city's bookstores and ban the sale of African-Ameri can literature. They have the right to do it, but is it right? Is it just? Peace Health and the state have crossed no legal boundaries. But do we want any service, any commodity, any market to be controlled or dominated by one institu tion? 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A REPEAL OF WE PE6ULAT/0A/ pftomeiT/KfG Doctors ea<*a e.E.F£ARiAJ6 PAr/£wrs ro LABS THAT THEY OU/A/l J 5AV WE DECLARE 7RE oaerattow A JOCCfSS { _— A*) WOVi>£ Q v 7>Uy WEAR MASKS LETTERS Might makes right? Larry Unftl in right, of course (ODK. Nov 10) We d all be much happier if we could just accept lhai the need and desire la make war is a part of our human nature ll is absolutely true that our lives would be much easier if we would all simply rid ourselves of the notion that the life of a peasant in some faraway land, with whom we really don't have much of an obvious connection anyway, has exactly ns much value and dignity as our own lives and the lives of our fami lies, friends and neighbors. Once we shrug this moral bur den. we are free to eii)oy the wonderful things available to us as citizens of a country with a very powerful military presence. We know these things are ours by the simple and logical equa tion that might equals right Finally, we might he able lo find it within ourselves to offer thanks not only to the soldiers who preserve our way of life, hut perhaps also to the great war makers themselves who have surely understood and accepted — even celebrated — the same facts Haiti outlined in his col umn. Hitler, for instance, has been badly underrated After all, though he was not our enemy in a nominal sense; he provided millions with the opportunity to experience the incomparable adrenaline rush that accompanies combat, and ho clearly appreciated the need for population reduction in a time of scarce resources And look at the thanks he got 1 don't think many of us like the idea of becoming "pacifist victims," as Haftl suggests But it is also very dangerous to allow oneself to be lulled by his argu ment into believing that we are inevitably or “naturally" mon sters. We accept such a vision of human nature at the cost of our humanity. Karynn Fish 1994 Alum New York City I-firry Haiti's editorial (ODE, Nov. 10) embodies the kind of uninformed opinion (hat is actually dangerous in its igno rance. Halil claims that “war is one of nature's tools for thinning the herd." He goes on to claim that our biosphere cannot sup port the success of our own species, and war therefore helps to ensure that a smaller population has access to Earth's limited resources Perhaps Hah I has never seen the desolation of once-fertile land in Vietnam and Cambodia, a testament to the success of the A men can chemical arsenal Hafll further compares the “ethnic cleansing” occurring in Bosnia to some supposed geno cide of Neanderthal man at the hands of Cro-Magnon man. This comparison is mon strous in its implications Is it some sort of racial war as a means to a higher rung in the evolutionary ladder? “Finally, waging war can be an incredible adrenaline high." Ifaftl claims Of course What is more of a rush than killing indiscriminately? War is a little more expensive than heroin addiction, but you can get the same dizzying, life altering highs |ust ask the sol diers who drove bulldozers to bury the dead at Iwo Jima. One is my grandfather. 'Many combat veterans never again achieve the same sense of alive-ness that comes with being around when the smoke clears.” continued Haftl. Funny, 1 would wager that many combat veterans have a real problem getting rid of a pervading finding of dead-ness after the smoko clears Mr Haftl. war takes the lifeblood of a nation, its young men and women, and muti lates. cripples and kills them. War is glorious — just ask its blind, its limbless, its insane Haiti's arguments that wur will maintain our species and our “biosphere." that war is an evolution of the advanced over the inferior race, and that war is a glorious "adrenaline high" ore < ategoru ally, wrong. Haftl’s article was ironically in commemoration of Veteran's Day, originally named Armistice Day. The word “armistice" refers to a truce pre ceding a peace treaty, in this ui.se at the conclusion of World War I This day is not a celebration of war. but of its end. Richard Oberdorfer History Last resort War in response to Larry Haftl’s column (ODE. Nov. 10), is the killing of other human beings. The flesh is pierced; blood runs; the breath is extin guished. the heart stops. Mur der is forbidden to the average US citizen, except in self defense or in time of war. It is important to get in touch with the fact that war is killing other people. How about killing people because their leader is a drug trailer who thumbs his nose at the U S. government? A lot of people were killed in Panama. Manuel Noriega is, however, alive and well. Does Haftl know that woman and children are often the majority of the victims of mod ern warfare? Does Haftl think the civilians killed in f'anama were not worthwhile human beings because they don't have the same culture and ethnicity as is dominant in the United States' Does he think we have nothing to learn from the incredible depth and diversity of human cultures in our world today? I envision a world in which our first effort is to come to know and understand the many diverse peoples who share our planet Earth — one in which war would be the last resort after deep and quiet contempla tion of any problem or concent. We are all responsible for our acts, soldier and civilian alike. Marion McLean Undeclared War hurts