While Ms. Gretchen Cararie's response to my recent letter to the editor opposing the ban on partial birth abortion lacked the vitriol that must have animated the person who defaced my mailbox in response to my letter, her response is still based on a religiously construed conception of the rights of the unborn. Ms. Cararie asks how I can "believe that it is 'sacrificing the health of women' to forbid partial birth abortion." The Partial-birth Abortion Act only permits the performance of this procedure to save the life of the woman involved. The law does not have an exemption for non-life threatening health matters, thereby sacrificing the health of pregnant women. Furthermore, the ban on partial birth abortion is clearly a beach head position for the Religious Right in their quest to ban all types of abortion. While a fetus is clearly alive, it is still physically a part of a woman's body and does not negate her right to her own body as Federal District Courts in San Francisco, New York, and Lincoln as well as the 2nd, 8th, and 9th circuit federal appelate courts have held.