William V. D’Antonio’s review of Robert Boston’s book Taking Liberties (Vol. XXXV, No. 3) curiously neglected to note that the book is silent on the Religious Right’s war on abortion—surely one of the most important church-state -separation issues in the US and the world today. Boston’s silence on this matter is odd, as he is the editor of Church & State magazine (which I edited for over a decade before taking the helm of Americans for Religious Liberty in 1982) and surely knows this. I am at a loss to understand why anyone keen on defending religious freedom and church-state separation would shy away from this topic, though articles in the issue do address it.

In 1975, the US government’s National Security Study Memorandum 200 (mysteriously “classified,” buried until shortly before the 1994 UN population conference in Cairo and then simply ignored) noted that in the early 1970s there were 30 million abortions performed each year worldwide. Alan Weisman’s excellent 2013 book, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth, reported that the figure is now 40 million per year, a large percentage of them illegal and dangerous. It should be painfully obvious that what is needed is universal legal access to the full range of contraceptive and safe abortion methods, plus, full political and educational opportunity equality for all women. Educated women who enjoy political and social equality simply have fewer children.

EDD DOERR
President, Americans for Religious Liberty
Silver Spring, Md.