By Shirley Kirkwood

THIS IS NOT a topic I’ve found covered in the Daily News-Record. However, Boston Globe and Roanoke Times editorials have weighed in on this very personal issue for women — and men.

According to the Globe, “within just a few months left in office, President Bush is still doing the bidding of social conservatives who oppose women’s reproductive freedoms. Under the guise of rules to protect antiabortion nurses and doctors from discrimination in hiring, a proposed new regulation would expand the definition of abortion to include any form of contraception that can work by stopping implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus. This can include common birth-control pills, emergency contraception and the intra-uterine device or IUD. Doctors who refuse to perform abortions for reasons of personal conscience already are protected by law.

“The potential impact of this new rule on the more than 500,000 hospital, family planning clinics and medical offices that receive any form of federal funding could be dramatic. The rule could also undercut many state laws — including one in Massachusetts requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception for rape victims — and laws requiring prescription drug insurance plans to include contraceptives. Massachusetts passed such a law in 2002.

“The draft proposed rule highlights the fact that many antiabortion groups also oppose one good method of preventing the unplanned pregnancies that lead to abortions — birth control. At some point in their lives, 98 percent of U.S. women use birth control.”

I would remind readers that there have always been abortions — legal or illegal — and many women have died from backstreet, coat-hanger abortions. Who could judge and deny a rape victim who was impregnated the access to emergency contraception or an abortion?

How many readers have visited state institutions where handicapped, disabled children spend their lives, unable to speak, move or care for themselves because of genetic or various causes before their births when testing and abortion was unavailable?

What concern is given to families who attempt to care for these children themselves and the effects on other siblings in the household? Or at what expense to families and taxpayers?

Do we consider the future and lives of unwanted and uncared-for children? Having spent three weeks in an orphanage in Romania in 2001, I learned that under a communist regime, women were expected to keep having children; they had no prenatal care or adequate nutrition. Often, the children were malformed and starving.

Later, many became street children, while many others spent their lives in orphanages or on the street. That legacy remains a problem in that country. Women (and the men who father children) have a responsibility to themselves and to the children they produce to provide for and care for them in a way that supports their growing up to be independent and responsible adults themselves.

Yes, life is sacred — and we each bear responsibility for how we care for our own lives; the choices we make about lifestyle, diet, beliefs, relationships and our own health care. The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice was founded in 1973 by clergy and lay leaders from mainstream religions, many of whom have provided women with referrals to safe abortion services before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade.

The RCRC brings the moral power of religious communities to ensure reproductive choice through education and advocacy. The coalition gives clear voice to the reproductive issues of people of color, those living in poverty and other underserved populations. While its member organizations are religiously and theologically diverse, they are unified in preserving reproductive choice as a basic part of religious liberty.

Pointing out the diversity of religious views about health care, RCRC notes that those who object to filling certain prescriptions demand protection of their religious convictions but do not seek “the same protection for the convictions of other members of the population, most notably patients. … The tremendous disparity in beliefs regarding health care also supports government regulation that accommodates all religious and personal views and practices to the greatest extent possible while preventing harm to others.”

We give lip service to our belief in religious freedom; the freedom for women to choose how their own bodies and lives are used is part of that religious freedom. No one can force a woman to use birth control or have an abortion; no one should have the authority to restrict that freedom.

Kirkwood lives in Mount Solon.