Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 16

Ed torials Who Cares About Children? Newsday reporter Rhoda Amon's recent series on children was shocking. It exposed the fairy tale that American children are pampered, privileged and protected to excess by doting grownups. The cruel fact is that in all too many instances children in America are an abused minority. Among reporter Amon's findings were these: Inadequate diets are condemning at least 5,000,000 American children to mental retardation serious physical handicap. Those much-publicized free milk and subsidized school lunch programs often are administered more for the benefit of the agriculture lobby than for children.

Five out of seven of the 7,000,000 American children with mental or physical handicaps receive absolutely no special education, or any other type of professional help for that matter. For more than 10,000,000 children, this land of plenty offers very few frills and often not even enough of the necessities of life. These are the children of parents who make less than $4,000 a year- -the official government poverty line for a family of four. Day-care centers exist more in rhetoric than in reality. There are 6,000,000 preschool-age children with working mothers, but room for only about 700,000 in licensed -care centers.

Existing facilities are almost always run for either the very poor or the very rich. Middle-class working mothers must make other arrangements, often to the detriment of their children. Children have virtually no legal rights. In legal actions involving children, the governing principle is supposed to be "the best interests of the child," but the courts very seldom have the time or the staff to determine what is best for a child. "We've treated children as nonpersons and only dealt with them as they related to adults," Assemblyman Eli Wager (D- Woodmere) said.

"We've always talked about the welfare of the child, but I suspect we really meant the welfare of the parents." One problem is that children lack political clout. Congress often is quick to enact child welfare legislation, but slow to fund it. Help may be on the way in the form of the recently organized national Children's Lobby, a conglomeration of the many agencies that now take a piecemeal approach to children's problems. The organization is lobbying for a $2-billion-a-year federall program to finance child welfare legislation. That would amount to about 75 cents a week for the 72,000,000 children in this country under the age of 18.

The Children's Lobby also intends to establish a "legislative alert" to push for local and state programs aimed at helping children and it will work to eliminate the many inequities and conflicts of existing child legislation. The Children's Lobby is still in the organizational stage, but we wish it well. It is paradoxical that a country that is supposed to idolize its young should have a need for a Children's Lobby, but the need is real. Miss Amon's extensive research led her to conclude: "The quality of life for children, and the help offered to children and parents who need help, lags, often scandalously, behind the standards of most other civilized countries." The Fischer Forfeit Bobby Fischer was well aware of plans to film and televise his 24-game challenge match with Boris Spassky, the Russian world chess champion. So it's curious indeed that Fischer should stage a row over cameras and forfeit the second game by refusing to play.

Now the contest may move from the chess board to the law courts as Fischer protests the forfeit. Is this newest gambit simply another display of cantankerousness? Or is it some shrewd defense against Spassky's prowess? In any event, with his monumental greed, sullen temperament and all-around boorishness, Bobby Fischer has managed to affront the entire chess world, insult his (candic hosts, and provide something less than a shining example for the country he represents. Letters Fed Up and Disgusted I'm fed up and disgusted with some of the articles that I have been reading in the newspaper these past few days. Writers like Mike Novak and Nick Thimmesch are analyzing and complaining about the delegates at the Democratic Convention. Novak decries the fact that the ethnic pressure groups have lost control.

I say that it's about time they did. We should be able to vote for a man on the basis of his beliefs and not because of his race, religion, or color. Thimmesch is sad because the old line politicians are missing from the convention floor. Well we can be thankful for that too. When I look at the condition of our country now, the polarization and distrust everywhere, I realize that we need some new "politicians" to replace the bunglers who got us into this mess.

Novak was asked by some of his Long Island Democratic neighbors, "Give me one good reason why I should support He could have given them many good reasons. The most important one would be to look at the alternative. Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson before him, are the sad results of the old political coalitions. We don't want them anymore. And while we are at it, let's get rid of some of the old writers who can't see the needed changes in our political attitudes.

Robert H. Levine Franklin Square The New Hypocrisy It is strange how quickly the "new politics" resembles the "old politics." Early July 12 on television A Abortion: Birth is not an end in itself. It is, rather obviously, the beginning. This is a fact that is all too often overlooked in the abortion controversy. Opponents of abortion strike me as excessively concerned with ensuring the birth of what are, by definition, unwanted op children, not with ensuring them a physically and psychologically healthy development thereafter.

Admittedly a few women, if forced to go through with the birth of an unwanted child, will be capable of giving that child such care, but almost as certainly for every one woman who can make such an adjustment, there is at least one who cannot. What is to become of the child of such a mother? Most will probably be offered for adoption or foster care; some will go on the welfare rolls and become state wards; a few will almost assuredly be abandoned. neglected and abused. Surely we have heard all too much of the battered child. Are the opponents of abortion ready to accept the moral and physical responsibility for these children? How many abortion foes are willing to adopt or provide foster care for these unwanted? How many are in favor of increasing welfare allotments to provide for their basic physical necessities? And what of the abused or battered child? Surely these considerations must be resolved before one can assume a moral stance on abortion.

Obviously proper contraceptive precautions are one solution. Yet how many abortion opponents also oppose providing contraceptive advice to those who need it the most (the young, the poor, the unmarried, the psychologically disturbed)? As long as this situation prevails, I say better abortion than an early and brutal death (the latter can be taken in a spiritual as well as physical sense). And for those who survive what does the future hold in store? Surely we do not need any more Lee Harvey Oswalds or Charles Mansons. Carole L. Martinez Islip Terrace I would like to tell you about Birthright, which could be called a "model for birth." Birthright is a non-sectarian, free service, staffed by volunteers, whose underlying principle is to uphold the right of every mother to give birth, and the right of every child to be born.

Through this confidential and personal service, a pregnant girl or woman, married or not, will receive the support necessary to mobilize her own resources and those of the community. 16.