Right to Life Oratory
Dear Editor:
Last Thursday evening, 20 young men and women in grades 9-12 competed in the Robertson County Right to Life Oratory Contest with original compositions on the critical issue of life. It gives me hope for the next generation to hear these voices speak for the one third of their generation that will not have a voice because they were denied the opportunity for life.

While these students are speaking, the voting citizens in Tennessee are being silenced on this issue. We continue to live under a legal mandate that says that the most common sense regulations around abortion that most states enjoy such as informed consent, waiting period following informed consent and that late term abortions be performed in hospitals, cannot occur in TN. We don't even require abortion facilities to be inspected and licensed! Now our own attorney general appointed by the governor has given an opinion that the same ban on partial birth abortion that the US Supreme Court upheld last year would not be constitutional in our state–all due to a ruling in 2000 by our State Supreme Court which decided Planned Parenthood vs. Sundquist.

What can we do now? Our only vehicle is to have a state constitutional amendment approved by the people that would once again give our Representatives the power to place regulations and protections around abortion and ban partial birth abortion. Sound reasonable? Let the people of TN vote on this. We voted on the lottery, but we can't vote on issues of life and death?

This piece of legislation has passed the Senate four times but is always sent to a hostile subcommittee that is stacked by Speaker Naifeh with legislators that he knows support the abortion industry. Six legislators have, for 8 years now, stopped 6 million Tennesseans from having a voice on this issue. Citizens are denied the opportunity to speak just the like millions of voices silenced by abortion.

Will you speak?

Susan Allen
White House, TN