I found this an interesting response to George Tiller’s murder. Frank Schaeffer, a reformed evangelical, argues that the hate speech continually spewed by the religious right regarding abortion set the stage for George Tiller’s murder, and other abortionists before him. He still expresses disgust at late-term abortion, and while I am more likely to agree with that, I do believe there are situations in which that choice is the only one that makes sense. Painful, horribly so, but sometimes the only choice is.
And in true hate-speech fashion, Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry responded with this statement: “George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.”
I’m sure Tiller’s family is comforted by Terry’s concern over his eternal soul. What a frightening piece of work this guy is.
Part of the context of the abortion debate:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31048153/
I have often said this, and if Randall Terry were in front of me right now I would say it to his face:
Not murder. Justifiable homicide. Live with it.
The day these morons realize that the main preventative to abortion (while still maintaining a woman's right to a private life) is effective birth control education and availability, the sooner this issue will shrink into the teacup proportions it should be.
But Terry is one of the more forthright in his rhetoric in declaring that, to his mind, ALL contraception is murder.
I have also said it before but it bears repeating—the concern for these folks, like Terry, is not abortion so much as it is sex. IMHO there is a pathological aversion to the idea of sex for pleasure and the time-honored method, for them, of both preventing sex and/or justifying it is pregnancy.
Of course, this burden falls on the women. So we're back to equality issues.
And so it goes.
I won't argue the status of the fetus anymore. Justifiable homicide. For the woman who does not wish to reproduce, pregnancy threatens a form of slavery, and last time I checked that is illegal in this country.
If that sounds a bit over the top, just compare it to the rhetoric of the estimable Mr. Terry.
RH (Reproductive Health) Reality Check has a good article about why Dr. Tiller continued to run his clinic in the face of continued threats – his patients were almost always making one of the most heart-wrenching, horrendous decisions of their lives, and while Bill O'Reilly and his ilk continue to portray him as a baby killer, the "liberal" folks like Olbermann and Maddow are getting so much satisfaction out of laying the blame at the feet of those who stir the fanatics to action that they are missing an opportunity to explain exactly WHY Tiller's patients made their choices when they did, as in, later in their pregnancies.
I think this is an important component of the conversation and needs to be discussed. The whole concept of "late-term abortion" is tragic to have to consider, but consider it we must, if the abortion conversation and the murder of Dr. Tiller are going to be kept in appropriate perspective.
http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/06/02/thi…
From Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism:
Late-term abortion is never performed on a whim. The only time such abortions are performed is when the fetus has severe abnormalities incompatible with life, or when the woman develops a life-threatening complication, such as preeclampsia, and terminating the pregnancy is the only way to save her. But even these limited exceptions are too much for anti-choice Christian terrorists. It was for these acts – for his compassion in saving the lives of women – that Dr. Tiller was murdered.
http://www.daylightatheism.org/2009/06/the-murder…
"I won’t argue the status of the fetus anymore. Justifiable homicide. For the woman who does not wish to reproduce, pregnancy threatens a form of slavery, and last time I checked that is illegal in this country."
This is about as morally warped and sick as anything I have ever read. Unwanted pregnancy is now a form of slavery and therefore the mother has the right to kill an innocent human being who has done nothing to deserve it? And you call us fanatics?
Gordon,
It's been said, and I believe it, that if men got pregnant abortion would be a sacrament. You insist on pushing the unprovable assumption that a collection of cells without a personality is as fully human as the person you would force to incubate it. The prolife movement long ago abandoned the middle ground here, so don't presume to measure extremes. As I said, if the prolife movement got behind a sensible birth control and contraception education and distribution program, this is a problem that would shrink nearly to insignificance. But you have lumped it all into the same basket and labeled it all immoral. Since you take away so much middle ground, you should hear, by example, what you sound like to us.
Is it just me, or is this truly one more example in which the least-informed are the most outraged? I've spent a lot of time since this incident reading the stories of the women who went to Dr. Tiller, and researching the most-cited reasons for their late-term abortions. The disconnect between reality and anti-abortion propaganda is vast. The protesters wave signs of mangled babies, but the pictures of these aborted babies show sometimes horribly disfigured, but always intact bodies. The anti-abortionists rage about fetuses being thrown out in the trash, but Dr. Tiller's patients were asked about their preferences for funeral arrangements as part of the admissions process. We hear about brains being suctioned out of live babies, babies born alive being killed. . .but the process Dr. Tiller used was much more like the way we euthanize our beloved pets – a shot that puts the child to sleep, then slows the heart until it stops, then a procedure to induce natural labor after death is confirmed.
The worst howling comes from the parents who have children who are impaired to one degree or another by the conditions that testing detects after 21 weeks. They imply that the women who aborted could have raised these children with downs syndrome, anencephaly, spina bifida, various organ defects, as if there were guaranteed, predictable outcomes of survival and quality of life. The parents who decide that they cannot afford to give life to a child who might or might not survive birth, who will need state-mandated surgery that might kill them later and won't be covered by insurance, are told they are simply selfish. Not one of these women decided casually that a "mongoloid" child would be unfashionably out of place in the designer stroller they'd ordered. If there are women out there who felt nothing about aborting a child they'd carried long enough to name, they're not saying – but denying this option to the families who need it because a few don't is incredibly wrong.
I suppose that when you've spent enough time discarding evidence that doesn't support your opinions, it becomes second nature to make a beeline for falsehoods without even being aware that other possibilities could exist.