To the editor:

I read with shock that the proposed abortion amendment to the Kansas Constitution provides that “legislators can regulate abortions, including when a pregnancy results from rape or incest or threatens a woman’s life.” Back in the old days, long before Roe — we’re talking 1960s, when abortion was illegal and birth control difficult to access — a friend of mine had an ectopic pregnancy, the one where the fetus gets stuck in the fallopian tubes and the only outcome is the mother bleeding to death while the fetus, only a month or two along, dies. You’d better believe my friend was given an abortion. Legally. In a hospital. I can’t imagine what kind of ideology would decide that women should die in order to make a theological point. Even in the bad old days people were not that cruel.

As for denying Medicaid, and hence medical care, to vulnerable people in the name of preventing abortions … the name for that, too, is cruelty. Kansas, we’re better than this.

Judy Roitman,

Lawrence