Abortion

Remember when you were around 10 and you went to the movies and were into it until the music suddenly got all schmaltzy and the hero shifted into eyelock with the heroine and they, um, kissed? Remember how you had to look away because you felt, gulp, vicarious embarrassment? If you're nostalgic for that feeling, then see Listen to Me - a film that treats its college debating squad with the pep-rally spirit that typically greets gridiron stars. And treats its audience like a bunch of youngsters to whom it intends to teach the (politically correct)

The Daily News has ill-used its position of prominence in influencing public opinion in publishing Tom Clay's flawed criticism of pro-life activists displaying pictures of mangled pre-born humans killed in the process of abortion (Op/Ed, July 12). If it is correct to admonish pro-life activists for displaying these grisly results of deliberate murder, why not the recurring display of Holocaust victims' emaciated corpses? Could it be that it is politically correct to display pictures of victims of the ovens but not victims of the abortionist's scalpel?

Like various forms of contraception, abortion was illegal under the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu - totalitarian measures to boost the country's population. And so, in the haunting 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days , a pregnant college student and her dorm-mate arrange for an illegal termination - to be performed in a drab hotel, by a guy carrying his devices, and his rubber gloves, in a cheap attache case. Set over the course of one harrowing 24-hour period and featuring an astounding performance by Anamaria Marinca as the young woman who abets her pregnant friend, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a grim and powerful study of desperation and defiance.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group Hey, did you hear the one about the woman who aborted her kid so she could save the planet? That's no joke, but Darwin must be chuckling somewhere. Toni Vernelli was one of two women recently featured in a London Daily Mail story about environmentalists who take their carbon footprint very, very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that Vernelli aborted a pregnancy and, by age 27, had herself sterilized.

A comedy with a very familiar - and somewhat puffy - face, and a troubling drama from France are at the top of this week's list of new videos. THE FRESHMAN (1990) (RCA/Columbia) 102 minutes. Marlon Brando, Matthew Broderick, Bruno Kirby, Maxmilian Schell. Andrew Bergman's comedy is a breath of fresh air, and not just because Brando does a hilarious sendup of his Oscar-winning portrait of Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Here he's a Little Italy "importer" whose machinations turn innocent film-school student Broderick into an unwilling godson.

Dr. Joseph Melnick, the Overbrook gynecologist accused of infanticide, says he tried to persuade a 13-year-old pregnant girl and her mother to allow the girl to have the baby and either raise it or give it up for adoption. But, during testimony yesterday, Melnick, 66, said, "They were adamnant. They wanted the abortion. They did not want to (have the baby). " Melnick performed an abortion on the girl on Sept. 12, 1984, at Westpark (now Jefferson Park) Hospital. It yielded a 3-pound, 9-ounce infant girl, whom the prosecution contends was born alive but was permitted by Melnick to die. Earlier yesterday, a charge of performing an abortion after "viability" was dropped by Common Pleas Judge Lynne M. Abraham on a motion by Melnick's lawyer, Richard A. Sprague.

Add abortion to the issues that mark the contest for consistency in the battle for the Democratic nomination in the First Congressional District. Both U.S. Rep. Thomas M. Foglietta and challenger James Tayoun have been trying to portray their opponents as political weathervanes, susceptible to changing their views on issues depending on prevailing public opinion. Tayoun, proclaiming in his political commercials that he "has never flip- flopped in his life," has accused Foglietta of changing his stands on a proposed trash plant in South Philadelphia and on the issue of school prayer.

Cardinal John J. O'Connor, archbishop of New York, is not a lawyer, but he has studied U.S. law on abortion. It is the law he attacked during an address to more than 400 attorneys and their friends at a Delaware County Lawyers for Life dinner on Friday at the Drexelbrook Restaurant in Drexel Hill. Cardinal O'Connor was the featured speaker at the anti-abortion organization's sixth annual dinner. "Law is the teacher in our land; I would like to say it is the church, but it is not," Cardinal O'Connor said.

Abortion rights advocates in Philadelphia are telling anti-abortion activists to stay home this year on Good Friday, the day mass anti-abortion rallies have traditionally been staged here. No abortions will be performed at Philadelphia women's clinics this Friday, Joan Mintz Ulmer, a Womens Way spokeswoman, said. Instead, volunteers will distribute pamphlets in Center City about women's health issues, from Pap tests to contraception, as part of Women's Health Day, and solicit contributions to the Greater Philadelphia Women's Medical Fund, which helps finance abortions for poor women, she said.

Far, far back in the crowd that had turned the march into gridlock, one young woman climbed onto a friend's shoulder and offered instructions to her schoolmates. "Stand behind the banner when we march," she yelled, and then added, "And look for my mom!" I never found out if the lost mom was recovered in the stream of humanity that shuffled down Constitution Avenue last Sunday. But if anything typified the crowd, it was the pairs of mothers and daughters in every nucleus of demonstrators.