The political cartoon by Glenn McCoy (Sept. 27) strongly suggests that Catholics are most unlikely to vote for Pres. Obama. I beg to differ.

The tag on the figure of the woman says she supports choice, I assume of course, about abortion issues.

If the figure had been a bishop, the cartoonist might have gotten it right. There probably is no such person, but the laity of the church has a far broader and more compassionate understanding of the issues than the bishops, who have to toe the Vatican line, and for whom all this is a distant theoretical situation.

Yes, abortion is abhorrent, but there are situations where the serious risk to the mother has to be considered as well, and to choose the unborn child over the mother is just as wrong as choosing the mother over the child.

These are very hard questions. To automatically choose the child over the mother is wrong , and may be counterproductive anyway.

I am reminded of Pres. Obama's words: Abortion should be rare, but legal.

I would say very rare, but ectopic pregnancies, for instance, do occur, let alone the situations where a subteen child is raped.

Research should show that Catholics are now actually in the majority allowing civil same-sex marriage, which shows a maturity about separation of state and church, which the bishops haven't arrived at yet.

Peter van Oosten, Greene