POLITICIANS HAVE NO BUSINESS LIMITING ABORTION, MEDICINE

The government has a hard enough time delivering the mail. Do you really
want it looking over your doctor's shoulder as he operates, guiding his
hand, or batting away medicines that she would like to prescribe to you,
medicines proven to help your condition? We think the answer in both cases
is no.

Yet in two separate cases, politics has trumped sound medicine.

First, abortion. Abortion is legal, has been legal for 30 years, and will
remain legal as far into the future as anyone can foresee.

Having lost the battle for public opinion, solidly in favor of allowing
women the right to an abortion, anti-abortion forces continue their Battle
of the Borderlines, attempting to nibble away at abortion by addressing it
at the extremes, most notably going after the marginal form known as
"partial birth abortion.'' It would be outlawed by a bill passed by the
House last week and by a similar measure OKd by the Senate in March.

The rare--it's just one-tenth of one percent of abortions--procedure of
late-term abortion is not pretty. But the key issue is that this is a
medical procedure, and its use should be determined by doctor and patient,
not politicians. Furthermore, the language in the proposals is sufficiently
vague so that it confuses doctors as to exactly what they can and cannot do
in the operating room. The Supreme Court is almost certain to toss the law
out, assuming President Bush signs it, which regrettably he says he will.
In the meantime, the law could have a chilling effect on the free exercise
of women's basic medical rights, which is probably the reason it was
drafted in the first place.

In another case which represents the trampling of medical rights of both
men and women, plus a gross violation of state sovereignty that would
normally boil the administration's blood, a U.S. District judge gave a
California man a day in jail for growing medical marijuana. The prosecutors
had asked for 61/2 years, even though the man had a license to grow pot for
medical use from the city of Oakland, acting under California's 1996 law.

We are glad that a compassionate, clear-eyed judge saw through the
draconian federal view of medical marijuana, which would ignore the desires
of voters and findings of medical science in the name of our hidebound,
traditionalist, vindictive drug policy.

But a good outcome here does not soften the fact that, just as
anti-abortion groups are pushing politics into the hospital operating room,
so the federal government is making those who want to bring relief to the
sick and dying with marijuana into scapegoats for our generally failed war
against drugs.

Congress needs to stop placating anti-abortion forces with symbolic
victories that have negative side-effects, and also start recognizing what
is obvious at a state level: Marijuana has a place in our accepted
pharmacopoeia.