Affordable health care

Thank you, Mr. Glen Hooks, for your eloquent response to the recent editorial “Death loses in court.” I too stand with Planned Parenthood.

It offers professional, confidential medical services to men, women, children and families. They have a primary-care physician on staff to address all non-reproductive services. They offer STI screening, conception counseling and birth-control services for men and women. Wellness exams, pap smears and breast exams for early cancer detection are available. The vast majority of Planned Parenthood’s work (96-97 percent) does not involve abortion services.

Many people depend on Planned Parenthood to provide them with straightforward, affordable medical care; some come from Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas and even Texas (where some of these services are unavailable). Many are the less fortunate and more vulnerable members of our society. It is very arrogant and disrespectful to deny Americans health care based on someone else’s personal beliefs, thus possibly condemning them to even harsher outcomes with which to deal.

Attorney General Leslie Rutledge appears to have only one project on her agenda, to deny women the right to a safe and legal abortion. Perhaps Ms. Rutledge is not old enough to remember when women were shamed and sought back-alley practitioners and questionable clinics in Mexico to obtain abortions. I am! As long as women can become pregnant, there will be a need for safe and legal abortions.

I think if Ms. Rutledge and her office would task themselves with supporting frank and open sex education, promoting safe and responsible sex, and making birth control available to all who need it, we might have fewer unwanted pregnancies and thus a need for fewer abortions.

And where is her understanding, encouragement and support, her heart, for the prospective parents who find themselves in this unwanted, troubling and precarious situation? HARRIET NEIMAN

Springdale