In regard to “Remembering Roe v. Wade” (Jan. 20): and “Government financing moral decay of our nation” (Jan. 13): Steve Casey, the author of both letters, is an evangelical Methodist chaplain for Evergreen Presbyterian Ministries in Stonewall, a small white fundamentalist enclave in northwestern Louisiana, population 1,904. Both letters published in the LJVN were previously published unchanged in several right-wing newspapers and websites. In his diatribe on Roe v. Wade, Mr. Casey opposes any role for abortion, even in the case of rape or incest or to save the life of the woman. He is an outlier in the whole anti-abortion movement. His views mirror the thinking of those who attack Planned Parenthood clinics and murder doctors who provide legal abortions. They hide behind the U.S. Constitution while blocking access to legal abortions. During the founding of our nation, abortion was legal. Not until the 1840s, when the evangelical movement circuit riders and revival camp meetings emerged, was anti-abortion legislation passed. The first law making abortion a crime was passed in 1845 in Massachusetts. Pregnancy places a woman at risk for illness and death. About 20 percent of confirmed pregnancies result in a spontaneous abortion. In 1975-1977 there were 1.7 deaths per 100,000 spontaneous abortions. In 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade, there were about 30 deaths per 100,000 illegal and self-induced abortions. After legalization of abortion, in 1987 there were only 0.4 deaths per 100,000 legal abortions. This is much better than the overall pregnancy-related mortality of 11.8 deaths per 100,000 live births (years 1991-1999). Therefore, it is safer for a woman to have a legal abortion than to have an unwanted pregnancy go to term. The most important effect of the legalization of abortion was the near-elimination of deaths from illegal abortions. In his other letter, Mr. Casey offers no solution for unwed motherhood other than to attribute it to a lack of morals. However, there is a strong positive correlation between a state’s religiosity and both its teen birth rate and teen pregnancy rate, despite a negative correlation between teen abortion rate and religiosity. Therefore, the more religious a state’s population, the higher it’s teen pregnancy rate. This is attributed to evangelicals’ opposition to sex education in schools and their funding of abstinence-only programs. Casey accuses Johnson’s war on poverty with causing an increase in unwed motherhood. Some have said this program contributed to the destruction of African-American families.  However, this program reduced the percentage of African-American families below the poverty line from 55 percent in 1960 to 27 percent in 1968. The solution is education. — Richard Prutow, Ph.D., M.D. lives in University City