Sasaki, a northern Kentucky physician. On Nov. 17 he was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $1,000 for violation of the abortion act. He is appealing that decision.
The charge was filed by Kathleen Iatrides, whom Dr. Sasaki examined twice in August for pregnacy. Both tests proved negative. Later that month, he was called to the patient's home by her mother. Mrs. Iatrides was seriously ill, and an examination led Dr. Sasaki to believe she may have tried a self-induced abortion She was later admitted to a hospital and the charges against Dr. Sasaki were filed.
This case led to the constitutional challenge. In a brief Dr. Sasaki's attorney, William Allison, argues that the law is unconstitutionally vague and indefinite and that it deprives patient and physician of first, fourth, fifth, ninth and fourteenth amendment rights.
The law forbids abortion unless necessary to preserve the life of the mother. The brief argues that this provides insufficient warning to physician and court which conditions justify abortion.
According to the brief, the law invades the privacy of the physician-patient relationship, places a legal liability on medical opinion and imposes a cruel and unjust punishment on the physician.
It further argues that the law impinges on the right of women to choose whether to have children, as guaranteed by the ninth amendment.
Four states"Maryland, the District of Columbia, Texas and Wisconsin"have already had abortion laws struck down as unconstitutional.
Whatever the decision of the three federal judges, Allison believes the case will be appealed to the Supreme Court by one side or the other.
It's treaty time
BERKELEY (CPS)-Using the method of initiative, a group in Berkeley is planning to circulate petitions to place on next April's city ballot a proposal for a peace treaty between the people of Berkeley and the National Liberation Front of Vietnam
The petition, which if passed by the Berkeley citizenry would become a city ordinance, first needs enough signatures to equal five percent of the entire vote cast in the last municipal election to make it on the ballot.
At this time, that means approximately 1,800 signatures, which
can easily be collected from the registered voters attending the University of California at Berkeley.
The petition, in addition to authorizing five representatives of the city to become delegates to the NLF and Vietnamese people, demands that the United States withdraw its troops from Southeast Asia and cease to support the present South Vietnamese government. It also declares that no Berkeley citizen will serve in the war.
If the proposal were to pass, Berkeley would have to secede from the Union. The U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibits the signing of treaties by any local government.
On Charger! On Firebird! On Pinto!
Liberation News Service
In America, car is King. More people have jobs related to the auto industry than any other industry in the American economy.
Thirty per cent of the nation's consumption of sheet, bar and strip steel goes for the manufacture of automobiles; the auto industry consumes 70% of the rubber, 50% of the lead, 45% of the malleable iron, 35% of the zinc, 12% of the nickel, 11% of thealuminum and 9% of the copper used in this country. The major share of oil and gas consumption also goes to automobiles.
Auto production is woven into the entire fabric of this country. Many of the resources for production and use of autos must be obtained from Third World countries; 80% of the rubber used in the U.S. comes straight from Southeast Asia, where the U.S. is fighting largely to defend and expand its access to such resources as rubber and oil
There is an interlocking directorship of corporations in the various sections of the auto industry and in nearly all other important sectors of the economy. The directors of GM, for example, sit on the boards of three major oil companies and four major steel companies.
The auto giants also have enormous defense contracts. GM alone has a yearly business of more than $580 million in government military contracts. They make everything from fighter planes to diesel parts. GM turns out 230,000 M-16 rifles yearly, rifles that are used to kill Vietnamese and to fight other of America's wars.
General Motors, the largest of the big three auto makers (the other two are Ford and Chrysler) produces one out of every three vehicles made in the non-socialist world. GM is an international giant who need pay no attention to national or continental boundaries. GM has assembly plants in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
In South Africa, where GM has been since 1926, wage slavery is developed to a high degree. In a country with 11 million blacks and 3 million whites, cheap non white labor makes up the foundation of the South African economy. Blacks have no political or trade-union rights, they are forbidden by law to strike for better wages or working conditions, even though their pay averages less than one-eighth that of whites.
Not only do the auto giants exploit labor abroad, they rob you at home. In 1966, GM took materials worth an average of $1400 and used factory labor to turn it into a vehicle that it could sell to a dealer for $2500. Of this $1100 difference, only $247 went to the workers in wages! The remainder goes to GM, to the yearly salary of GM's president, who makes $750,000 a year, and into advertising, the packaged sex appeal that get consumers to discard their old cars and go into debt to buy the latest model.
When the dealer sells the car to you for about $3,000, that's a lot of money to pay out at once. So you borrow the money and pay it back in installments. Right now there is more than $35 billion out on loan to American consumers for car purchases, a full 40% of all consumer credit.
And the cost of auto repairs has soared. Between 1955 and 1965 prices increased a good 60%. Insurance claims have nearly tripled, and the cost of parts have increased as much as 400%.
The giants say in their P.R. that they care about pollution. But GM has put more smog, dirt and poison into the air than any other industry or corporation in the country. (By tonnage, GM contributes 35% to all pollutants in the air.)
The auto companies spent $9 million over the period of 1953-1963 to control pollution. At the same time, the damage to the environment from pollution was exceeding $11 billion each year. (The 22 highest paid executives in the auto industry get a combined salary of more than $9 million a year, 10 times what was spent in that decade on pollution control.)
Today GM claims to be spending $20 million a year on new methods of pollution control That's less than 10% of what they spend on advertising, and less than 2% of what they spend on model changes. The amount GM spends on controlling pollution is an amount equal to their gross sales for only eight hours on one day! (GM grosses $2.5 r.iiilion an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.)
On a national scale, auto pollution contributes 60% of the waste in the air; in urban centers, auto pollution makes up as much as 90%.
American cars are not designed for our safety. How can any product with planned obsolescence built in be safe? You take a chance when you buy a car-35-40% leave the factory full of defects, according to Consumer Reports. Once the car is taken into the shop, from 30 to 90% of the repairs requested are not made correctly.
Ninety per cent of the cars on the road have faulty headlight aim; 50% have suspension and alignment problems, 25% have brake deficiencies. Each year, 50,000 of us die in car accidents.
But our deaths do not cost the auto industry a cent.
More heads at Morehead
By Sue Anne Salmon
The Student Mobilization Committee at Morehead State University during the week before Thanksgiving led students in a protest against restrictive women's dormitory hours. "Not many students at Morehead think about the war, but everybody has an opinion on women's hours," SMC president Bill Read said.
At the paternalistically-governed campus of about 6,000 students, current dorm hours range from 11 p.m. for freshmen, sophomores and juniors on week nights to 2 a.m. for seniors on Fridays and Saturdays. Men students have no hours.
Women in the SMC at Morehead circulated leaflets Wednesday night, Nov. 18, to all women living in the compulsory University housing units for undergraduates. The leaflets contained articles written by SMC women concerning discrimination against women, especially in regard to imposed curfews.
Counter-dissent leaflets reportedly also were distributed to the women students. The leaflets, signed by the Student Council president and vice president and
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