We read that “the rights and freedoms of more than 300 million people are on the line” and that women’s health will be devastated if abortions are outlawed with selection of a new Supreme Court justice (July 5).

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a well-known source of data on abortion, only 2.8 percent of women who had an abortion in the U.S. in 1987-88 cited a risk to their health as the reason. There is a long list of other reasons abortion is chosen, but we can make the case they are not “women’s health” reasons.

And consider “the rights and freedoms” of the unborn but alive child in the womb. We agonize over the pain a lobster feels being thrown into a boiling pot of water and we cannot bear to hear of puppies being killed or abandoned alongside a road. But ignoring the pain of a baby being aborted is somehow OK because the Supreme Court said so?

Google “pregnancy centers in Maine.” There are 10, from Sanford to Fort Kent, who will help a pregnant woman look at other options than abortion; I doubt if Planned Parenthood Centers (only four in Maine) ever do that.

In her ongoing support of Planned Parenthood, Sen. Susan Collins should find it her heart, as a pro-choice woman, to consider and urge women to consider these other options and make the right choice.

Roe v. Wade is wrong. Even the woman who brought it to the Supreme Court later said so.

Daniel J. Rooney

Sanford

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