So-called “mainstream” anti-abortion activists have taken pains to distance themselves from the murder of Kansas Dr. George Tiller, assassinated outside his church yesterday morning. The suspect, Scott Roeder, was a member of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, whose leader, Troy Newman, issued a statement declaring himself “shocked” at Dr. Tiller’s murder yesterday. (The group’s former leader, Randall Terry, used the occasion to again call Tiller a “murderer” killed because he violated the “Law of God.”) Newman added that the group “has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see [Tiller] brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning.” Meanwhile, officials called the murder “the act of an isolated individual,” and President Obama said in a statement, “However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.”
The problem with statements like Obama’s is that they presume each side is equally responsible for the contentiousness of the abortion “debate”—that the belief that women have a right to take part in a legal medical procedure without threats and intimidation is somehow equivalent to the belief that women should be forced to carry every child to term, even if it kills them. Or, put another way, that supporting judges and elected officials who are pro-choice is the moral equivalent of standing outside a clinic and screaming at every woman who enters. Killing doctors is only the logical conclusion of a movement whose primary currency is intimidation. No other activist movement in this nation relies so heavily on the implicit threat of physical violence to get its way. And if you believe, as anti-abortion extremists do, that abortion is “murder,” then murdering in retaliation makes perfect sense. An eye for an eye.
Those of us who are pro-choice—and I include in that group all shades of pro-choicers, from those who believe abortion is morally fraught to those who support the liberalization of abortion laws— will never find “common ground” with those who are anti-choice, because there is no common ground. On one side, we have those who want to protect women’s right to obtain a legal medical procedure; on the other, we have those who think abortion is murder and will use any means necessary to prevent women from obtaining one (even while they fight against measures, like accurate sex education and emergency contraception, that would make abortion less common). On one side, we have those who believe in women’s right to determine their own destiny; on the other, we have those who believe women should cede control of our bodies to the state. On one side, we have those who attempt to protect women’s access to abortion by supporting pro-choice judges and elected officials; on the other, we have those who use violence and the threat of violence to intimidate women and abortion providers. Tell me, where is the common ground between those two groups?
So no, President Obama, those who believe in a woman’s right to choose should not “open our hearts and minds to those who may not think like we do.” Because “common ground,” in this case, is code for ceding away our rights— women’s rights—in the interest of calming a storm we didn’t create. And because you don’t negotiate with terrorists—whether they’re threatening doctors or taking hostages.
Obama declared himself “shocked” by Tiller’s murder. But why? Tiller had been shot before. For years, he had worn a bullet-proof vest, driven an armored car, and protected himself with security guards. As Jill Filipovic notes, anti-abortion activists had harassed his patients, bombed his clinic, and published his address and the addresses of everyone who did business with him. So why should anyone profess surprise when one took those actions to their logical conclusion?
Tiller provided abortions past 21 weeks, to women whose pregnancies had gone tragically, life-threateningly wrong. They were women, as Lynn Paltrow notes, with wanted pregnancies “who learned that their baby had no brain, or kidneys growing on the outside of their bodies or things their doctors described to them as ‘severe fetal cardiac malformations.'” They were rape victims as young as 10 or 11, some of them too young to even realize they had had periods. For these women and girls, Tiller was a godsend. His death leaves the US with just two doctors willing to perform late-term therapeutic abortions—and a medical community in which providing late-term abortions will be seen, rightly, as increasingly dangerous. And who can blame them? Terrorism works. Its means is intimidation—don’t go into the clinic or you’ll be harassed and threatened, don’t provide abortions or we’ll harass your family, don’t provide late-term abortions or you’ll be killed. In the battle to eliminate women’s right to abortion, the terrorists are—undeniably—winning.
Washington State pro-choice groups are holding a candlelight vigil in Cal Anderson Park, 635 11th Ave, at 6:00 tonight. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington is Twittering updates here.
You grab some wine on the way from QFC?
For once I agree with everything Erica says.
Two things: One is that I had no idea there were so few physicians providing late-term abortions. I guess I just assumed that it was not terribly controversial to get an abortion at 22 weeks, if you’ve found out your fetus has no brain. This has been eye-opening.
The other is that, we need to recognize that not all pro-lifers are out there protesting abortion clinics. You set it up as an either/or — either you’re pro-choice or you’re going to “use any means necessary to prevent women from obtaining” an abortion. When clearly, that’s not even remotely the case — you can be anti-abortion and not be an activist, just as I am anti-capital punishment and yet actually don’t do really anything to work to outlaw the death penalty. These are the people that Obama wants to find common ground with, not the crazies outside the clinic.
A movement that relies so heavily on the implicit threat of physical violence?
How does 800,000 slaughtered babies every year rate on your scale of ‘physical violence’?
I do hope that the news picks this story up and runs with it as a terrorism story. That’s really what it is, after all.
Thank you for putting this so beautifully.
Those who opposed slavery found it difficult to reach ‘common ground’ with slaveholders also.
That vile practice did not go away quietly, either.
Erica, you see no common ground because you have eliminated the common ground; you only want to see extremes, but the world is more complex than that, and blinding yourself to nuance is dangerous. Yes, you have extremists who are willing to kill for their retrograde beliefs, but if we are honest with ourselves we can see there is a lot of complexity in the abortion debate; there are people who have qualms with the grisly nature of late-term abortion who have no problem with early-term abortion and the morning-after pill, for instance. That would be an example of a middle ground.
And you’re wrong – you do negotiate with terrorists. That’s the mistake that the right-wing extremists have made.
Negotiation is not capitulation.
“we have those who think abortion is murder and will use any means necessary to prevent women from obtaining one”
Take a breath Erica.
You sound foolish.
Actually, you sound stupid.
“Any means necessary”?
Hardly.
800,000 abortions a year put the lie to your hysterical rantings.
Were your assertion even 1% true there would be no physicians doing abortions left in America.
a friend’s mom commented on my facebook post about the murder “please don’t bring politics into a sensless murder” and while i agree there was no sense to the murder, how could it not be political? obviously it works to the “Pro-lifers” benefit to make it an isolated event having nothing to do with ongoing acts of domestic terrorism and all, but come the fuck on. common ground with someone who would deny the political implications? there isn’t much.
Erica, on which side will we find those who believe in the yet-to-be-born’s fundamental humanity and right to HAVE their own destiny?
“How does 800,000 slaughtered babies every year rate on your scale of ‘physical violence’?”
Aaaand, that right there is the problem with the Pro-Life movement. Any act of violence can be justified in the name of “800,000 slaughtered babies every year”. Violence is merely the logical continuation of their rhetoric.
They are more then welcome to their own destiny. They just need to find somewhere other than the wombs of women who don’t want to have children.
Actually, the radical elements of the pro-life movement has been remarkably restrained.
Erica, if 800,000 homosexuals were being killed each year how do you think Dan would respond?
What measures would he advocate?
You say there is no room for common ground.
You say there is no room for talk or negotiation.
If you close the political process to those who believe 800,000 abortions yearly are murder how do you propose they address those concerns?
Well said, ECB, even though I don’t necessarily agree with everything in detail. It’s true that there is a philosophical divide – actually, though everyone seems to shrink from admitting it, a religious divide – that makes common ground difficult to attain and mutual understanding virtually impossible.
That said, can we IP-ban the cowardly anonymous-posting troll in this thread? Or just finally do away with anonymous comments entirely?
13
those women put them there.
the babies didn’t ask to be conceived.
if a mistake was made it wasn’t by the babies.
the CHOICE has been made.
a baby is the result.
abortion is about trying to escape the consequences of an already made CHOICE.
Perhaps one positive thing that will come out of this terrible murder is that more people who are right in the middle will identify more with the pro-abortion crowd instead of the anti-abortion crowd simply because they don’t want to be associated with people whose fringe extremists commit terrorist acts.
15
fuck you
@ 14 – Your 800,000 number is not valid because it refers to blastocysts. A blastocyst is not a person, period. You can rant & rave and threaten (and, apparently, carry out) murder until the end of time – it won’t change the reality that a blastocyst is not a person.
Cascading troll failure.
17
Even the Democrats in Congress were repulsed by and didn’t want to be associated with procedures performed by Tiller.
Excellent commentary ECB. I could not agree with you more. I have said here that it is very hard to get abortions, even when the baby is fucking dead inside of you. That because of what Bush did, most doctors cannot/will not help take a dead fetus out of you because it is a “late term abortion” and those women have to fucking bleed out for 2 weeks for the fetus to come out on it’s own. It is sick and wrong.
For any *actual* people on this thread who oppose abortion, wait until your wife/sister/friend miscarries in her 2nd trimester. Then let her deal, in agony and bleed out. And when that happens I want you to know that there is a procedure that could and would help her, but that she can’t get it. Because of you.
While I still supported a women’s right to choose an abortion I opposed the idea of having an abortion and would (almost) never want my potential offspring to be aborted unless the health of the mother was at risk or the baby would have some profound defects.
I am pretty radical as far as aborting a defected fetus having grown up all my life with a profoundly mentally handicaped sister. IMHO you’re not really bringing a “child” into the world. Or you’re bringing a child to the world that will never mature beyond the age of a very young child but even its adult intellect will still be unlike a normal child.
However, since it would be hypocritical to oppose my own child’s abortion but support other people’s I was trying to find some middle ground.
Fundamentally Support a right to choose but oppose abortions whenever another option exists. This was until yesterday when the Dr. was mudered. I think this is a lesson to radicals on the other side as well. This kind of violence really does swing the pendulum back the other way. I can feel it. So as much as we may hate those that oppose gay marriage, violence is clearly never the answer. In fact, the powder that showed up at the Temple after Prop 8 seems a lot more like the MO of the radical right to try and make gays look bad. Lesson learned, violence inflicts much damage to your own cause.
@18
Say whatever you like, even if it’s wrong. Just have the courage to do it openly. Don’t hide behind anonymous internet postings or, you know, bullets and bombs.
Spineless. Just spineless.
@14: They should have, like, 800,000 more babies every year. For Jesus. Or something.
Julie in Eugene @ 3, thank you for bringing this up. This is a point I always forget to make: what George Tiller did was special on multiple levels. It was not only that the service is (to put it mildly) controversial, it was not only that he wound up seeing (and with great kindness!) the most miserable cases (the 10 year-olds, the cancer patients needing an abortion before the oncologist would start chemo, the moms whose babies had no brains or no kidneys or whatever and couldn’t find a doctor in their own state), it was also that his skills were very specialized. I cannot do the procedure he did–only a few people in the country have the skill. I’m capable up to about 16-18 weeks, but after that it gets really really difficult, both technically and emotionally.
The procedure is not easy on the patient either; it’s rather harrowing, really. And that’s why commenters who talk about abortion for “convenience” are demonstrating that they simply haven’t a clue.
Please don’t feed the trolls, folks. It’s not worth oversimplifying this discussion here into “pro” or “anti” stances, because there’s more nuance in this discussion than “pro” and “anti” will let us have. I personally feel that the government should stay out of making those decisions, and that doctors and women should be the ones to bear the burden of the moral decisions involved.
But let’s also not pretend that the issue is a simple one to decide, or that there’s not moral ambiguity here, because that’s the mindset of extremism; we can decide to do the least bad thing without pretending it’s a great option either.
Again with the ‘no common ground’? I’m disappointed. We shouldn’t look at these topics with only emotional thinking. Even though it feels good. That’s just our brains rewarding us with endorphins for not thinking logically. It makes it easier to hate the other side and praise our side, allowing us to do heinous things in the name of our group. Don’t stoop to their level.
19
Blastocyst is a stage in the growth of a human beginning about 5 days after fertilization and lasting 1 to 4 days (until implantation) The Blastocyst stage is long over before a woman realizes she is pregnant. Or has an abortion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blastocyst
On the other hand, tens of thousands of families in America have pictures of their in vitro conceived children when they were blastocysts in a Petri dish. They know that they are “persons”.
Erica,
Great post. I only disagree with you on one point. You stated, “No other activist movement in this nation relies so heavily on the implicit threat of physical violence to get its way.”
I would say the NRA behaves in the same manner.
Powerful post, Erica. You’ve articulated my own feelings very well.
If abortion is illegal then trips to mexico and porto rico should be free.
That way both the poor and rich can go get medical abortions in other countries.
Oh, and that candlelight vigil? It’s touching, but shouldn’t they wait until 9 PM or at least until the sun goes down? At 6 PM you won’t be able to see many candles flickering in the BROAD DAYLIGHT.
@ 28 – I would respond to you, but since you’re hiding behind an annonymous post, I’m not going to bother. Either believe in what you’re saying enough to put it under your own name, or get the fuck out. Since you’re so hysterical about abortion, I would think you’d want to stand up and be counted – apparently not. Although, seeing as so many on your side are literal criminals and fucking lunatics, I can see why you’d prefer to be sneaky.
33
whaaaaaaaaaa
you won’t respond because you don’t want your ass served on a platter, moron
@27
Yes and no, I think.
Yes, in that there is what could be described as common ground, in a potentially mutual interest in preventing unwanted pregnancies. No, in that pro- and anti-choice positions really are philosophically irreconcilable because they’re developed from completely separate moral and ethical premises.
It’s a matter of utilitarian ethics versus Biblical morality, ultimately, and by definition you can’t compromise with Biblical morality or any other absolutist system. They promote a binary, right-or-wrong view, and in this case, that means that for them, killing an “ensouled” fetus is, in fact, murder, and murder is wrong.
Socially, there’s common ground, but philosophically, there’s not, and I really don’t know if we can reach social common ground over an unbridgeable ethical divide.
DavidG @26 – Well said. I get irritated with the people who pretend that abortion has not even the slightest amount of moral ambiguity (e.g., it’s no different than having a tumor removed). If that were really true, then what would be the problem with “aborting” a fetus at 8 months?
I am pro-choice (I am partial to Roe v. Wade’s distinctions between the trimesters: 1st = okay, 3rd = not okay, 2nd = gray area), but I think it does us a disservice to pretend that getting an abortion is like getting your wisdom teeth removed. Just because there is some ambiguity doesn’t mean that legal abortion isn’t the right thing to do.
Anyways, attitude devant @25, it really is interesting to think about a medical student/physician making the choice to follow this career path and learn the skills necessary. It’s pretty clear that Tiller murder was an act of terrorism when you think about an individual physician deciding whether or not he/she will do so — I know I would think twice about it, given the threat to personal safety.
I’m with you all they way on this one, ECB. Nice job.
Also: “Common Ground” is key and exactly the right tone, because it calls the real extremists on their bluff. There are certainly plenty of faith-based moral extremists who refuse to compromise on this issue or work together to prevent unwanted pregnancies – they’d prefer to have abstinence-ONLY education, and won’t lift a finger to help empower women to keep from getting (unwantedly) pregnant in the first place. If you’re calling for common ground and the other side steps up to work with you, good. If they don’t give an inch, you’ve exposed their extremism. It’s a win-win, actually, and I wish Erica could take off her ideological blinders for a second to see the tactical advantage of taking this position, because that’s what it’s going to take to win the hearts and minds of those who don’t already agree with you.
@ 34 – I can’t imagine you do much ass-platter-serving, professor. If that post is any indication, my guess is you spend most of your time getting laughed at.
@34 if “the truth speaks for itself” than how about you do us all a favor and shut the fuck up.
ECB great post.
I’ve always wondered, what exactly is the biblical argument against abortion? I know there’s some line about paying a fine if you cause a woman to miscarry, but is there any paint where they say that the baby is a person when it’s conceived, or later ( I’m pretty sure the angel that talked to Mary was some time after she conceived so who knows)
@ all the abortion-banners: fetuses aren’t people. They’re not babies, either. That’s the informed opinion of many doctors and scientises. That’s the informed opinion of many pro-choicers. That’s my informed opinion.
You have a different opinion, informed by a different worldview.
And that’s fine.
So: how about you guys don’t have abortions as per your beliefs/opinions and we’ll all be cool about it, and you guys stop trying to outlaw abortion for everybody?
And refrain from the public hatred/hysteria/rage that leads to people being murdered?
And maybe have some goddamn compassion for people in situations of medical crisis?
Common ground, found. Problem solved! Erica is proved wrong.
Or, alternately, be a pack of psycho Christian facists and prove her right.
Once again ECB hits the nail on the head. Very well articulated—nice job.
Our national community—if not global community—is worse off and will suffer for this loss.
@42 how is that common ground? That sounds like complete and utter support for Erica’s argument actually. Because pro-choicers are not saying that we should FORCE those who don’t believe in it to have abortions … we are just telling them to shut the fuck up and stop try outlaw, or place conditions/limitations on a perfectly legal medical procedure.
They should continue to have THEIR choice to keep their unwanted children and carry on their un-happy lives resenting the fruit of their wombs, and to shut the fuck up about it.
I want the law to reflect that CHOICE.
So … isn’t that exactly what you are saying?
The point is that … ummm … I don’t want some dumbasses trying to place limitations and conditions on abortion, deciding when it is okay for me to make informed decisions about my own body.
Balderdash @ 15: Anonymity has value. Some of us don’t have registered accounts because we find Slog registration a silly failure (are comments by StillNon and Loveschild and people who mindlessly trash the Stranger writers–plus all the troll-feeders–really more worth reading than the anonymous ones simply because we can see a username?). The average comments haven’t gotten any more insightful on Slog since comment registration was implemented. It was an experiment, and it clearly hasn’t worked.
But something is lost, if people don’t see anonymous comments. See http://www.aaas.org/spp/anon/cases/ for why anonymity can have value. Also, it’s an inconvenience to have to register. A better solution would be to allow people to block comments from an IP (without revealing what the IP was)–that would empower readers, while maintaining anonymous posting. Anyway, your assertion that all people who post anonymously are cowards is silly, since there are good reasons to do so.
Excellent article and comment, Erica, well said!
Allow me to state my story. I was the sixth of seven children, all of whom were born out of wedlock, all to different (absent) fathers. Catholic Charities was personally involved in my mother’s choice to keep me. When I was nine, my mother’s new boyfriend decided that he wanted to start beating me; he did so until I attempted to hang myself. I was placed into “residential treatment”.
In state-provided protective custody, there is a bid for contracts to see who would be the “first responder”, that is to say, first place that children will go to upon being placed into state custody. Catholic Charities uses the coffers of the Catholic Church to supplement its bids against other, more secular non-profits–and therefore wins the bid every time.
Many times, these facilities are retrofitted orphanages of the previous century or earlier. Other providers of care to at-risk children, who have more modern accommodations–and more modern philosophies of child care–are prevented by this process from providing care to children until after the CC’s facility is full. In my lifetime, several have closed due to funding cuts.
The reason for this competition on the part of the Catholic Church and other religious organizations is that these at-risk children, without a visible means of support or role models to look up to, are easily made to feel that what in others would be kindness without ulterior motive is “God’s grace” through the instrument of the one true faith. Treatment centers, for displaced children as well as drug addicts, are veal-crates of evangelism.
I was given candy to learn Bible verses, and excused from chores to attend religious services–in effect, bribed to become Christian. I cannot help but feel that this exploitation of tragedy is the primary reason behind the Church’s institutional support of the so-called ‘pro-life’ movement. It also accounts for the fact that as the child grows to independent age, he or she becomes less susceptible to conversion, less “innocent”, as the saying goes. Hence, these religious types lose interest in the child’s welfare after it ceases to concomitantly serve their religious interest.
One of the effects of this dogma is that, for the purposes of evangelism, all children are considered ‘equal’. Children from broken homes are put in the same facility as juvenile sex offenders, child psychopaths who are capable of unpredictable violence, the children of non-Christian immigrants who have fallen on hard times (but who are nonetheless solicited through being a captive audience away from the faiths of their parents through being a captive audience).
Additionally, many of the staff of these institutions are religious idealists who are taken in by the supposed “innocence” of all children, and quickly burn out when faced with the reality. This means that there is a high turnover rate in staffing, and that many children, lacking any consistent care provider, go on to develop attachment disorders and many other social problems as a result of this “God will provide” belief system and its attendant poor planning.
Pro-lifers, have you seen a developmentally disabled child burst into tears because his parents terminated their parental rights while he was in the care of these places? Have you seen a child who has been institutionalized for over seven years because no parents were found for him and has seen his ability to relate to others atrophy? Have you seen headlice and other contagions race through a ward due to it being overcrowded, or the mess that special healthcare problems present in an understaffed environment? How about the heavy handed ways in which emotional difficulties are handled when people have insufficient training for dealing with them, where restraints are used to incapacitate a child for misbehavior, some of which were determined to be abuse only after a child had DIED from them? Look it up.
I think that by far the worst was seeing children who were sent back to abusive homes, literally pried off of the legs of the staff, because they needed to make room for another ‘soul’ to save. The fact that they bid for children’s lives is beyond sickening; ‘priceless’ indeed….
The fact that you truncate the discussion of abortion to babies and forcing mothers to carry children to term is evidence of not only selfishness but overt cruelty in order to sustain your viewpoint. That you are also willing to kill for it speaks to a lack of sanity as well. Seriously–think of the children.
@42
winnnnnner
@ 45, the problem with your statement is that you DON’T have to post under your own name. You can pick any old handle you can dream up, as long as someone else hasn’t picked it first. Your identity is not put up for all to see. Your anonymity is protected.
I actually respect Loveschild a tiny bit because she writes all she writes under her own name, and risks her credibility every time she posts. The unregistered coward above is too scared to even go this little bit to spout his tripe.
Anonymity has it’s value. But registering costs you nothing on that front. The process of registering is not inconvenient enough to call it that – they don’t ask for your real name, your address, your blood type, or anything like that. If anything, it’s inconvenient to have to type in that code every time you want to say something. Obviously the cowards feel safer putting up with that.
It’s all up to the SLOG administrators, of course. I don’t see why they created a registration system if they were going to allow anyone to keep posting anonyously – at least, I don’t understand why they can’t simply make all the unregistered comments simply show as “unregistered,” instead of allowing them to keep making up any smartass handle every time they post.
I think the notion that you can’t have common ground is sensationalist and wrong. You can have common ground. I have many Muslim friends and not one of them thinks Islamic Radicalism is the answer.
You can’t pin everything on the extremes. Is ELF burning down McMansions, a form of terrorism, a good representation of people who love care deeply about environmental causes? Nope.
Tiller was a Christian, going to a Lutheran church. It is highly likely that some people there were not on the same page as him, but still welcomed him every week as a member, just as welcome as they were. That’s common ground.
There has to be a common ground, or we’re all gonna end on up on two sides of a duel. That is no way to live. For any of us.