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NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2009
Woman as Reason
The tragedy of Dr. Tiller's murder
by Terry Moon
The murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic is a tragedy. Tiller was a courageous freedom fighter and by all accounts a kind, generous, dedicated doctor who said, "I am a woman-educated physician in every aspect of my understanding about abortion and about responsibility of women in the family, both socially and financially." His death is also a tragedy for the women he has helped who had life-threatening pregnancies, or pregnancies with fetuses so deformed that if born their lives would have been short, wracked with pain, and devastating to their parents emotionally and financially. And it is especially a tragedy for those women who will need his help in the future and have nowhere to turn, who will die because they cannot get to the two doctors left in the entire U.S. who will perform late-term abortions; or who will suffer unnecessary health consequences; or will be forced to have those deformed babies, born without brains or complete nervous systems or whatever horrendous abnormality caused the woman carrying them to resort to such a soul-wrenching and medically serious decision.
These women have been lost in the noise generated by an anti-abortion movement so riddled with misogyny and so successful in their lies and omissions that the world no longer hears women's voices. Those voices have been trumped by a clump of cells, smaller than a thumbnail, which fanatics conflate with a child. That the anti-abortion movement is riddled with fanatics is seen in how none of them can hide their glee at Tiller's death, can help themselves from using Tiller's murder by one of their own to trumpet to the skies their fanatical belief that fetus=child, fetus trumps woman/mother, that terminating a pregnancy is the same as gunning down an unarmed George Tiller in his church.
Their mantra as expressed by The Most Rev. Carlos A. Sevilla and scores of others, is that they have "respect for all human life, from conception to natural death." While pretending to oppose Tiller's murder, they can't help but broadcast their claim that killing him is exactly the same as an abortion. And these are the ones not considered fanatics, with whom we're supposed to find "common ground." R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was one of the most disgusting: Tiller's murder requires "us," Mohler said, "to make clear that violence in the womb will never be overcome by means of violence outside the womb." But the "womb" is not a disembodied battleground. The womb is part of a live human being who is still allowed--barely--to actually make a decision about her own body.
CONTEMPTIBLE HYPOCRISY
Their contemptible hypocrisy is seen in how none of these good Christians have ever done anything to protest, let alone shut down, the hate speech, the many websites spewed by fanatics like Operation Rescue's "chargetiller.com," the Prayer and Action News that promotes murdering abortion providers as "justifiable homicide," or the hundreds of other sites that give out information on abortion provider's children, doctors' home addresses and the streets they take to work and back. None of them uttered a peep of protest against Operation Rescue's head Randall Terry who, after Tiller's murder, shrilled that "George Tiller was a mass murderer, and, horrifically, he reaped what he sowed"; not a whisper against Bill O'Reilly's rants against Tiller as "executing fetuses," as "a baby killer," or that Tiller "is performing late-term abortions without defining the specific medical reasons why." This is an outright lie since the only legal reason for late-term abortions is to protect a women's life or health.
OBAMA NOT BLAMELESS
And where is President Obama? His two-sentence utterance of "shock and outrage"--followed by not another word or action--rings hollow. Why didn't his administration send someone to Tiller's funeral? That might have meant something. The criminal non-enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act by Obama's and every other president's Justice Department, an act that forbids the use of "force, threats of force or physical obstruction" to prevent someone from providing or receiving reproductive health services including abortion, certainly contributed to Tiller's death. His murderer vandalized another Kansas women's health clinic only a day before he gunned down Dr. Tiller. And while the clinic's manager called the FBI twice as well as the Kansas City PD and included the murderer's picture and license number, they did nothing.
Obama's call for "common ground" between those opposing abortion rights and those for a women's right to control her own body, contributes to a climate where anti-abortion extremism is viewed as normal, as OK. He is wrong to put those who view a fetus's existence as being the same as, or above, a woman's life, on the same level as those who are working for women's freedom as if both are extreme positions. There can be no common ground with fanatics, and Obama's attempt to frame the question in that manner only helps the foes of women's freedom and endangers all those who fight for or work in the area of reproductive rights.
Out of this profound tragedy has emerged a renewed commitment of those in the movement for reproductive justice to make women's freedom a reality. In the depth and breadth of the demonstrations against Tiller's murder that have swept this country from end to end, we see that beginning. In Dr. George Tiller's name and to honor his life, the struggle continues.
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