Valuing Life

May / June 2007

May 17th, 2007

In her letter to the editor (Mailroom, March/April), Alice Lemos ’81 PhD condemns politicians such as Lincoln Chafee ’75 for championing abortion on demand and having a “cavalier attitude towards the sanctity of life.”

Senator Chafee voted against authorizing the president to attack Iraq.

Had Chafee been in the majority, more than 3,200 soldiers, fully formed and sentient, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, fully formed and sentient, would be alive today, validating the importance that Chafee placed on the sanctity of life. And that’s not even taking into consideration the tens of thousands of permanently disabled soldiers and Iraqis. However, their lives have been only partially destroyed. Tragically, the loss of lives and the permanent impairments have been in vain.

To impute more importance to relatively unformed and non-sentient fetuses than to the lost lives of adult individuals, as the original letter writer has done, is totally beyond my understanding.

Lawrence Ross ’52

Tucson, Ariz.

The Haggadah and Gays

The Passover Haggadah provides an interesting context for the comments of Phillip N. Jacobs ’79 on gay synagogues and gay people (Mailroom, March/April).  He writes: “[H]omosexuals, like all people, are G-d’s creations, and as such we must treat them with kindness.  However ... it must be clear that their behavior is ... not to be condoned.”

Teaching Doctors

While we can welcome “A Major Milestone” (Under the Elms, March/April) in the form of a $100 million gift to the medical school, one can only hope that Brown will begin to prepare new doctors for the fact that, while we’re spending twice as much per capita as any other nation, the World Health Organization has ranked us No. 37 in the effectiveness of our health-care non-system.

Life Lessons

In response to “Fitting In” by Amy Ramos ’87 (Alumni POV, March/April): As a low-income student accepted in a need-blind period when Brown was increasing the ratio of public- to private-school students, Ms. Ramos points out a number of very real differences in the environment. In a sense, we lucky ones gained a greater education at Brown than most.

Rods Per Hogshead

I have learned to be suspicious of measurements given in unfamiliar terms. (In a Simpsons episode, Grandpa boasts of his car’s fuel economy as so many “rods per hogshead.”)  Sometimes even using familiar terms, such as feet and seconds, can be confusing.  Your article on bats (“To Build a Better Batmobile,” Elms, March/April) breathlessly refers to their speed as “up to forty-nine feet per second.”