The San Bernardino County Sun from San Bernardino, California • Page 14

eihe oSun 4 TTie prize winning paper serving the Inland Empire WILLIAM HOriEYSETT Publisher r-- MERREL STAFFORD Production Director WAYNE C. SARGENT WILLIAM F.IDENOUR Advertising Director EDWARD D. LYNCH Business Manager RICHARD S. KIM8ALL Editorial Page Editor 399 Street, San Bernardino 92401 Monday, Feb. 8, 1982 pt fit Langky is a senior editor of the Hispanic American News rOQerlOnQley Service.

He specializes in commentaries analyzing the effect national issues have on U.S. Hispanic communities. Hospital reorganization The dissident bloc within San Bernardino Community Hospital's 150-member corporate board, unhappy about the way a tentative decision was made to move the hospital to Rialto, has won its point. It has removed 12 of the hospital board's 18 directors. Now, a reconstituted board has promised to consider all options, including Rialto.

Now that the clamor is clearing, there are certain realities that must be faced. First, whether it moves from its present Westside San Bernardino location or stays, the hospital still needs to make substantial changes and improvements to its facility. As the hospital management has said, "Despite the amount of construction hich has been completed on the hospital site since 1958 (when the building was originally constructed), the facility has repeatedly experienced physical plant difficulties, space limitations for patient care and support services, site and facility constraints, poor circulation and other deficiencies which inhibit proper work flow and contribute to lower productivity levels and efficiencies." Secondly, because the hospital is operated as a private corporation, ultimate decisions about the hospital's future will be made not on sentimentality, but upon hard, cold projections of profitibility. One-and-a-half years ago hen the decision was made by the old board of directors to seek a move to Rialto, San Bernardino's city government did nothing effective to compete with Rialto (or any other community) to retain the hospital within San Bernardino. This inertia prevailed even though San Bernardino officials must have been aware that the hospital was considering a variety of options.

Fifteen days after the hospital site selection committee was appointed, it met with San Bernardino's mayor, three of its councilmen and the council's executive assistant. The present reorganization of the hospital's board of directors, which was closely coordinated between San Bernardino's Mayor W.R. Holcomb and the dissident hospital corporate board members, gives San Bernardino a second chance. It will be interesting to see how San Bernardino uses that opportunity. Raw political muscle can carry its goals just so far.

At some point naked power will need to be backed by some display of capability and skill. Is sterilization involuntary? WASHINGTON Married Hispanic women are as likely as married Anglo women to undergo ster-ilization for birth control purposes, but less likely to use other means to prevent pregnancy, according to a government study. The U.S. Center for Disease Control in Atlanta interviewed 2,500 Hispanic and Anglo married women and discovered that 75 percent of the Anglos and only 65 percent of the Hispanics use some form of contraceptive to prevent pregnancy. The study also found that sterilization was favored by 18 percent of the Anglo and 19 percent of the Hispanic women practicing birth control.

Sterilization figures for Hispanics and Anglo men were sharply different. Nearly one quarter 24 percent of the married Anglo women currently using a birth control method are protected from pregnancy by their husband's sterilization, while only 6 percent of the Hispanic married men have had a vasectomy. The study also shows that among on poor people as a means of reducing the number of person on welfare." The coalition for Medical Rights of Women in San Francisco claims that more than 21 percent of the women sterilized in the United States are Latinos. Eleven Hispanic women filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Medical Center claiming that they were sterilized without their informed consent. The women charged that some of them were not told that sterilization was irreversible.

They also said that women who spoke only Spanish signed forms without understanding them. Others charged they were pressured to sign a form while under sedation. Carmen Estrada, director of the Chicana Rights Project, says, "Courts have failed abysmally the helplessness of these women. Doctors and hospitals are obligated to obtain their patient's consent. If the patient does not speak English, provisions must be made for her to understand what is being asked of her." both Anglo and Hispanic women, the number of sterilizations increases as they get older.

Some have interpreted these figures to mean that women in both groups have elected to have children while they were young and then decided to prevent any further pregnancies. There are others who say that the figures for Hispanic sterilization may not mean this at all, since they claim that many Hispanic women are sterilized against their wills. "Sterilizations are pushed by teaching hospitals in order to train new physicians," charges Sandra Salazar, deputy civil rights officer of the California Department of Health Services. "Deceptive labels such as 'tying the tubes' and 'ban-daid surgery' are used which mislead people to consent without their understanding the true nature of the procedure." She says, "Consent is solicited during times of great stress such as during labor or prior to an abortion. "Some medical and social service staff members push a sterilization CHRISTOPHER H.

WALK Circulation Director BEVERLY RICHARDSON Personnel Director 889-9666 the people mountains. Supervisors claim that traffic, noise, parking, and building procedures will not be a problem, but if they want to secure safety, they had better double check the area even if there is a delay in building. GARY WOODALL San Bernardino jack anderson Research cuts may hurt U.S. WASHINGTON To save a few dollars, the United States may lose its leading role in developing the uncalculated wealth of the world's "last Antarctica. This would please the Kremlin, which is able, willing and eager to dominate the frozen continent.

A 14-agency advisory group on Antarctica has urged the National Security Council to maintain a "basic balanced program" at the South Pole lest we lose our influence over the ultimate fate of this uninhabited but potentially rich continent. The price tag the advisory group puts on this "basic balanced program" is from $80 million to $90 million. That's less than half the estimated cost of a single B-l bomber. I sent my associate Dale Van Atta to Antarctica. He found no evidence of significant waste; quite the contrary.

By and large, he found a group of dedicated scientists, working under harsh conditions and performing valuable research on a tight budget. The nearest thing to waste that my associate found involved a tracked vehicle that quit at the South Pole and was left sitting for a couple of years. Then, almost on a whim, a worker jumped into the vehicle's cab and got the engine to turn over. It has been doing its job ever since as have two C-130 transport planes that crashed into the ice and were pieced back together. Some Americans at McMurdo, the main supply base, still live in cramped "temporary" quarters put up in 1957-58.

There has been no money for new water plants, and the full-time residents can take showers only about once a week. My associate was there 10 days without a shower; why waste precious water on a visitor who would soon be back in civilization? One budgetary problem is unique to the hostile environment of Antarctica: The wind-whipped ice and snow have a way of swallowing up man's puny "improvements." The U.S. station at the South Pole, for example, is being inexorably reclaimed by the Antarctic weather, and it will cost $20 million to replace. Perhaps the basic financial problem of our Antarctic program is that its current $70 million budget is about one-tenth of the National Science Foundation's. This led to internal criticism that the Antarctica budget "may be an unnecessarily large commitment of Science and Technology funds They had no complaint about the science itself.

In fact, a confidential State Department document describes the United States as "the preeminent nation in the scientific investigation of Antarctica." But one of the policy groups' reports noted the U.S. effort has suffered "a real decline since 1979" because of escalating fuel costs, military salaries, and "special expenses associated with maintaining a self-contained infrastructure on an otherwise barren continent at the end of an supply line." Without the U.S. commitment, the international treaty preserving Antarctica for peaceful scientific research will die, the advisers predicted, leading to "conflict over disputed territory among claimants and non-claimants, and almost certain Soviet hegemony." HOLIDAY PLEA: Choosing a time when most of the media were concentrating on highway fatalities and the first babies of 1982, a Defense Department contractor on New Year's Eve pleaded guilty to 20 counts of submitting false information to the government, accepting a $200,000 fine, $100,000 in additional civil liability and an agreement to repay $750,000 in money fraudulently obtained from the taxpayers. The company, Bradford National, admitted that it used time billed to the Navy on a Trident submarine contract to do work for the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles and to redesign its own computer system. Bradford National also admitted it billed the Navy for time spent on a contract for the New York State Medicaid program.

Lewis has been a New York Times editorial columnist since 1969. Before that he was a reporter in the Times Washington bureau and chief of Hs London bureau. He has received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. anthony lewis py- Seals of approval for Higher college standards Trustees of the California State University system are moving in the right direction by seeking to impose tougher admission standards for students entering the college system starting in 1984. A committee of the trustees has recommended that prospective college students be required to complete four years of college-preparatory English and two years of college-preparatory mathematics courses while they are in high school.

This trend is a good one. College students ought to be well grounded in these types of basic skills. Too often, in the last decade or so, colleges have degenerated into remedial centers, trying to teach students to become proficient in areas that ought to have been mastered at lower levels of the educational process. The complaint has been raised that the new standards would exclude applicants from minority ethnic backgrounds. An official involved with the Los Angeles school system's minority programs said many of his students are "from families who speak little or no will be hard put to meet" the proposed English requirements.

This raises the question: When does the individual, rather than society as a hole, become chargeable with determining a person's future? As a person progresses along in his educational endeavors, particularly if he is seriously interested in attending college, he should take an increasing responsibility for preparing himself to meet that challenge. An elementary form of preparation for a sincere student is mastery of a society's dominant language. The opportunity to accomplish this should be generously offered to willing students, particularly in the lower grades. But it is up to the students themselves to use the opportunity effectively in time to be prepared for college. A large part of education is the development of a sense of self-discipline.

One must question the dedication of "students" who expect to be admitted to college, but who have not not developed a reasonable proficiency in English in time to take the needed preparatory classes. For educational systems to be successful, there must be certain standards of academic progress that all students must meet. Persons who have not exerted themselves strenuously enough to meet those standards should be channeled into some other endeavor. tyrants all efforts to extradite the accused conspirators. Last month, in a transparently fraudulent gesture, the Chilean supreme court declared the case still open.

But no proceedings are pending or planned. Despite the formidable obstacle of truth, State Department officials have drafted a certification for President Reagan. There is pressure to hurry because some American companies want to display their products at an air show in Chile next month. As the examples of Chile and El Salvador show, the Reagan administration's evident willingness to certify just about anything has the effect of weakening American influence. Gen.

Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean president, believes that his government will not really be called to account, so he feels free to mock the United States on human rights. The United States is also being hurt in international forums. When we opposed the U.N. resolution on Chile, our European allies voted for it and it passed easily. This week the United States tried to get the U.N.

Commission on Human Rights to put a special item about Poland on its agenda and had thrown back at it the argument that it would be wrong to single out one country. There is reason to think that all this is clear now to the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, Elliott Abrams. But American influence will be restored only if his superiors actually draw the line somewhere. In Chile there should be no certification unless Pinochet agrees at a minimum to let exiles return and stop official torture. Otherwise the United States will be in the position of demanding decency and then giving a certificate of good behavior to the indecent.

men arrested in December, Pabio Fuenzalida, was gruesomely tortured. He was seen in a Santiago prison, last month by a U.S. visitor, Aryeh Neier of the Americas Watch CommitUig, a private group that monitors conditions in this hemisphere. Fuenzalida described what had been done to him. He was tied, naked, to a metal bedframe.

Wires were attached to his legs, testicles and chest. As electric shocks were applied, a man asked him questions about the Human Rights Commission, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, politics. Later he was dressed and questioned in front of a movie or television camera; when his answers were not satisfactory, the camera was turned off and an electric prod applied to his body. When Neier saw Fuenzalida, his body showed the effects of trauma. His right side was partly paralyzed, and he could not use his arm sufficiently to shake hands.

Congress banned U.S. arms aid to Chile in 1976 because of the brutal repression there. Last year the Reagan administration asked Congress to lift the ban. It did, but required President Reagan to certify certain things before arms could be given or sold to Chile. Reagan must declare that Chile "has made significant progress in complying with internationally-recognized principles of human rights." He must also find that Chile has cooperated in "bringing to justice" Chilean intelligence agents indicted by a U.S.

grand jury for the assassination of Orlando Letelier, the former Chilean foreign minister, in Washington in 1976. It will take even greater cynicism to certify the second point than the first. The Chilean government has crudely blocked BOSTON Having certified the good behavior of the El Salvador junta, President Reagan is ready for the next logical step. Unless there is a last-minute change of mind, he will shortly certify that Chile's dictatorship and its torturers are making "significant progress" in respect for human rights. Some thought it was Orwellian to give a stamp of approval to El Salvador's armed forces immediately after evidence surfaced that they had carried out another massacre of civilians.

To declare that Chile has met the test laid down by Congress for U.S. aid would be if anything more cynical and more humiliating to the United States. It would be humiliating because the Chilean government, over the last six months, has made a point of expressing its contempt for this country's human rights concerns. Item: Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. representative to the United Nations, visited Chile last August to express the Reagan administration's intention to improve relations.

The president of the Chilean Commission on Human Rights, Jaime Castillo, asked to meet her; she said she was too busy. Two days after she left, Castillo, a distinguished lawyer and former minister of justice, was expelled from Chile. Item: Last Dec. 4 in a U.N. committee Mrs.

Kirkpatrick's deputy, Carl Gershman, opposed a resolution to continue paying special attention to the human rights situation in Chile. He said it was wrong to single out Chile. Six days later two other leading officials of the Chilean Human Rights Commission were arrested and held without charges. They are still in prison. One of the human rights spokes voice of Wants rink report I want to say something in contrast to the county supervisors' ruling that an environmental impact report is not necessary for the project to make an ice skating rink near Lake Arrowhead.

This report is necessary on anything that is built, especially in the.