Adopt a better choice.

Thank you for acknowledging the possibility of a middle ground in the September cover story ("A little less confrontation, a little more action") by Vincent Gragnani.

I was silent about my pro-choice position until a year ago when speaking to one of my daughter's teachers at our Catholic high school. I was telling her I appreciated her approach to teaching critical thinking, that I had been concerned when my daughters had come home from school in the past year expressing vehement opposition to our governor because of her position on abortion. It was astounding to me that these bright young women could be driven into a single-issue political view.

I am 52, a social worker and mental health professional, and the mother of three young women; I am a feminist, a Catholic, a Democrat; and I support safe, legal abortion by choice.

I believe that the path to reducing abortions needs to include adoption law reform. Many mothers consider the horrors of adoption worse than abortion. The dialogue surrounding adoption as a solution to abortion rarely addresses the grief, attachment disorders, and other mental health problems that come from closed adoptions. And the conditions of the child welfare system are equally horrific.

Asking a woman to "trust [her unborn child to] the system" is asking her to put that child in grave danger. Most poor women, most women, know this. Adoption and child welfare are not acceptable choices for a woman with a strong attachment to her baby. We have miles to go before we as a society can say that we support life.

Name withheld

Saginaw, Mich.