Reston, Va.: After the Stupak [anti-abortion] amendment victory, can we expect the pro-life community to attach amendments to the Defense budget saying that no public funds can be used to kill people?
Ezra Klein: Oh, definitely. I hear they're organizing on that right now.
Some of the supporters of health care reform have rediscovered worries about crowding out. That's because it now looks as if the bill may not allow Federal subsidies to be used to buy insurance that covers abortions. Suddenly, a big chunk of the left sounds like a bunch of Republicans, warning about what happens to insurance markets when the government gets involved.
[..] Of course, if you think crowding out is real, there are a lot of other problems with the plan. Abortion is just the beginning of the distortions it will create in the health care markets.
You might remember several months ago the case of the nine-year old Brazilian girl who was raped by her stepfather:Ugh. What a nasty religion, treating emphatically justifiable abortions as worse than murder.Weighing just 79 pounds and barely four feet tall, the 9-year-old girl, from Alagoinha, a town in the northeast, underwent an abortion when she was 15 weeks pregnant at one of the 55 centers authorized to perform the procedure in Brazil. Abortion is legal [t]here only in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is at risk.Time picks up the story from there:
The doctors’ actions set off a swirl of controversy. A Brazilian archbishop summarily excommunicated everyone involved — the doctors for performing the abortion and the girl’s mother for allowing it — except for the stepfather, who stands accused of raping the girl over a number of years.
“The law of God is above any human law,” said José Cardoso Sobrinho, the archbishop, who argued that while rape was bad, abortion was even worse.Monsignor Rino Fisichella, a solidly traditionalist Rome prelate considered close to [Pope Benedict XVI], tried to soften the Church’s approach on the Brazilian case by writing in the Vatican’s official newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the girl “should have been defended, hugged and held tenderly to help her feel that we were all on her side.” Two weeks ago, the Vatican announced that Sobrinho, who had been serving past retirement, was stepping down. And that’s where the Church stood. Until now.No word yet on automatic excommunication for those convicted of murder.
In a tucked away “clarification” published on page 7 of a recent edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican produced a document that unequivocally confirmed automatic excommunication for anyone involved in an abortion — even in such a situation as dire as the Brazilian case. It settles any questions about the absolute nature of Church doctrine on the matter of abortion — but could potentially reignite the PR firestorm.
"I’m not a Christian and I don’t believe that life begins at conception...I think it’s far more likely that when a pregnancy is terminated, that soul is simply born to a different mother."Far more likely? How about every bit as fanciful.
"BEREGA, Tanzania — A handwritten ledger at the hospital tells a grim story. For the month of January, 17 of the 31 minor surgical procedures here were done to repair the results of "incomplete abortions." A few may have been miscarriages, but most were botched operations by untrained, clumsy hands.(ht hilzoy)
Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother's life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus. (...)
Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. According to Unicef, unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. (...)
The 120-bed hospital in Berega depends on solar panels and a generator, which is run for only a few hours a day. Short on staff members, supplies and even water, the hospital puts a lot of its scarce resources into cleaning up after failed abortions. (...)
Dr. Mdoe (...) said rumor had it that many abortions were done by a man in Gairo, a town west of Berega. In some cases, he said, the abortionist only started the procedure, knowing that doctors would have to finish the job.
Dr. Mdoe said he suspected that some of the other illegal abortionists were hospital workers with delusions of surgical skill.
"They just poke, poke, poke," he said. "And then the woman has to come here." Sometimes the doctors find fragments of sticks left inside the uterus, an invitation to sepsis."
We who sowed hate share blame in killing of abortion doctor(ht LGF)
My late father and I share part of the blame for the murder of Dr. George Tiller, the abortion doctor gunned down on Sunday.
Until I got out of the religious right (in the mid-1980s) and repented of my former hate-filled rhetoric, I was both a leader of the so-called pro-life movement and a part of a Republican Party hate machine masquerading as the moral conscience of America.
In the late 1970s, my father, evangelical pro-life leader Francis Schaeffer, along with Dr. C. Everett Koop (who soon become surgeon general in the Reagan administration) went on the road with me, taking the documentary anti-abortion film series I produced and directed to the evangelical public. The series and companion book eventually brought millions of heretofore nonpolitical evangelical Americans into the anti-abortion crusade.
In the early '80s, my father followed up with a book that sold over a million copies and which, in certain passages, advocated force if all other methods for rolling back the abortion ruling of Roe v. Wade failed. He compared America and its legalized abortion to Hitler's Germany and said that whatever tactics would have been morally justified in removing Hitler would be justified in trying to stop abortion. I said the same thing in a best-selling book I wrote.
Like many writers of moral/political/religious theories, my father and I would have been shocked that someone took us at our word, walked into a Lutheran Church and pulled the trigger on an abortionist. But even if the murderer never read Dad's or my words, we helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen. In fact, it has happened before. In 1994, Dr. John Bayard Britton and one of his volunteer escorts were shot and killed outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Fla., by Paul Hill, a former minister and an avid follower of my father's.
Angry speech has become the norm in American religion from both the right and the left. Words are spoken which, when taken seriously, lead directly to violence by the unhinged and/or the truly committed.
When evangelicals on the right call President Barack Obama a socialist, a racist, anti-American, an abortionist, not a real American - and, echoing the former vice president, someone who is weakening America's defenses and making us less safe - the logical conclusion is violence.
The anti-abortion crusaders are not the only ones to blame for an extreme and sometimes violent climate around this issue. Roe v. Wade went too far, too fast and was too sweeping. I believe that abortion should be legal. But I also believe that it should be re-regulated according to fetal development. It's the late-term abortions (which Dr. Tiller specialized in performing) that horrify most people. And for the sake of keeping abortion legal, adjustments need to be made.
Regardless, the same hate machine I was part of is still attacking all abortionists as "murderers." And today, once again, the "pro-life" leaders are busy ducking their personal responsibility for people acting on their words.
The people who stir up the fringe never take responsibility. But I'd like to say that I, and the people I worked with in the pro-life movement, all contributed to this killing by our foolish and incendiary words.
I am very sorry.
To the principles of innocence and necessity we need to add a third principle, what the Catholic tradition calls "legitimate authority." The main body of the Christian tradition allows that we have a right to self-defense, and even insists that we have a duty to defend others. However, when it comes to calculated, premeditated, and methodical use of force the tradition is very clear: No individual can take justice into his or her own hands.In other words, if you really believe abortion=murder, then killing Dr. Tiller was morally just in a vacuum. However, it's impractical because it undermines the rule of law and civil society—things you need if you want to go on protecting life.
A number of pro-life groups zeroed in on this aspect of Tiller's murder. From Operation Rescue: "We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning." The National Right to Life Committee condemned "any such acts regardless of motivation. The pro-life movement works to protect the right to life and increase respect for human life. The unlawful use of violence is directly contrary to that goal." The Family Research Council: "We strongly condemn the actions taken today by this vigilante killer."
The emphasis on "unlawful use of violence," the evocation of "vigilantism," and the description of Tiller's killer as a "vigilante killer" are all exactly right. We are all sinners, but it is painfully obvious that Dr. George Tiller acted in wanton disregard for the sanctity of life. Killing him did not violate the principle of innocence. Moreover, he gave no evidence of stopping. As a result, perhaps something like the principle of necessity can be satisfied. But it is certainly obvious that his killer was acting as the law unto himself. He arrogated to himself the roles of jury, judge, and executioner. He violated the principle of legitimate authority.
We live in an age that makes revolutionaries into celebrities and unrepentant terrorists into community leaders. By and large, our progressively minded elites pride themselves on questioning legitimate authority, and antiglobalization zealots can be counted on to riot at WTO meetings. Not surprisingly, therefore, the principle of legitimate authority leaves us cold. Isn't the very notion of legitimate authority part of a complacent, Establishmentarian mentality? Who really cares about narrow, technical questions of legality when fundamental questions of justice are at stake?
[...] Our legal regime clearly suffers from the corruption of human sinfulness. Abortion is legal. As St. Thomas taught, unjust laws have "not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence." So there we have it, a painful fact. In America, abortion is a legalized illegality, a socially permitted injustice.
Eric Rudolph bombed several abortion clinics in the late 1990s. He wrote the following to justify his actions: "The fact of the matter is that if you recognize that abortion is murder but do not recognize the right to use force to prevent this murder, then the only logical conclusion is that you do not consider that the unborn have a legitimate claim to life."
The syllogism seems so pure, so morally heroic, so rigorous-and yet it represents a far greater threat to the culture of life than the shameful fact that abortion is legal in America. To take a gun into your hand and presume to become the instrument of a greater, supra-legal justice represents a fundamental assault on the very idea of legitimate authority.
It is a moral luxury for modern men and women to discount the tremendous importance of the principle of legitimate authority. Go to a collapsed African country where warlords rule and the raw lust for power dominates. There you will see that that the rule of law is not a narrowly technical or complacently legalistic social good. A legitimate, functioning government is the precondition for civilization. It is the very basis for any successful collective effort to respect life.
I have always loathed revolutionary vanguards, terrorists, and assassins. I have never felt any attraction to John Brown. On the contrary, he strikes me as a dangerous man who was capable of horrible crimes. The same holds for Che Guevara and others. They have imagined that the noble truth of their cause justifies their disregard for the laws of society. But law transcended is law destroyed, and law destroyed invites barbarism, as the history of the twentieth century so sadly illustrates.
Pro-life leaders rightly condemn vigilante violence. It is a principled stand, not a public relations maneuver. Legitimate authority restrains the grossest forms of evil. The existence of a civil society allows us to exercise our consciences on behalf of the unborn rather than being absorbed by the cruel need to fight for our own survival. The rule of law provides the fundamental condition for any right-to-life movement that seeks to protect real lives rather than to congratulate itself on its moral purity.
If abortion is murder, the most efficient thing you could have done to prevent such murders this month was to kill George Tiller.Bottom line: If you really think Tiller's murder was reprehensible, and that killing him to prevent abortions was wrong, then you can't really believe abortion is a murder equivalent to killing a born babe.
Tiller was the country's bravest or most ruthless abortion provider, depending on how you saw him. The pregnancies he ended were the latest of the late. If your local clinic said you were too far along, and they sent you to a late-term provider who said you were too late even for her, Tiller was your last shot. If Tiller said no, you were going to have a baby, or a dying baby, or a stillbirth, or whatever nature and circumstance had in store for you.
To me, Tiller was brave. His work makes me want to puke. But so does combat, the kind where guts are spilled and people choke on their own blood. I like to think I love my country and would fight for it. But I doubt I have the stomach to pull the trigger, much less put my life on the line.
Several years ago, I went to a conference of abortionists. Some of the late-term providers were there. A row of tables displayed forceps for sale. They started small and got bigger and bigger. Walking along the row, you could ask yourself: Would I use these forceps? How about those? Where would I stop?
The people who do late-term abortions are the ones who don't flinch. They're like the veterans you sometimes see in war documentaries, quietly recounting what they faced and did. You think you're pro-choice. You think marching or phone-banking makes you an activist. You know nothing. There's you, and then there are the people who work in the clinics. And then there are the people who use the forceps. And then there are the people who use the forceps nobody else will use. At the end of the line, there's George Tiller.
Now he's gone. Who will pick up his forceps?
Tiller's murder is different from all previous murders of abortion providers. If you kill an ordinary abortionist, somebody else will step in. But if you kill the guy at the end of the line, some of his patients won't be able to find an alternative. You will have directly prevented abortions.
That seems to be what Tiller's alleged assassin, Scott Roeder, had in mind. According to the Washington Post, Roeder told other pro-lifers that he condoned deadly violence to stop abortions. He admired the Army of God's "Defensive Action Statement," which endorses the murder of abortion providers on the grounds that "whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child."
Is that statement wrong? Is it wrong to defend the life of an unborn child as you would defend the life of a born child? Because that's the question this murder poses. Peaceful pro-lifers have already tried to prosecute Tiller for doing late-term abortions they claimed were against the law. They failed to convict him. If unborn children are morally equal to born children, then Tiller's assassin has just succeeded where the legal system failed: He has stopped a mass murderer from killing again.
So is Roeder getting support from the nation's leading pro-life groups? Not a bit. They have roundly denounced the murder. The National Right to Life Committee says it opposes "any form of violence to fight the violence of abortion," preferring instead "to work through educational and legislative activities to ensure the right to life for unborn children, people with disabilities and older people." Americans United for Life agrees that it was wrong to kill Tiller because "the foundational right to life that our work is dedicated to extends to everyone."
I applaud these statements. They affirm the value of life and nonviolence, two principles that should unite us. But they don't square with what these organizations purport to espouse: a strict moral equation between the unborn and the born. If a doctor in Kansas were butchering hundreds of old or disabled people, and legal authorities failed to intervene, I doubt most members of the National Right to Life Committee would stand by waiting for "educational and legislative activities" to stop him. Somebody would use force.
The reason these pro-life groups have held their fire, both rhetorically and literally, is that they don't really equate fetuses with old or disabled people. They oppose abortion, as most of us do. But they don't treat abortionists the way they'd treat mass murderers of the old or disabled. And this self-restraint can't simply be chalked up to nonviolence or respect for the law. Look up the bills these organizations have written, pushed, or passed to restrict abortions. I challenge you to find a single bill that treats a woman who procures an abortion as a murderer. They don't even propose that she go to jail.
If you don't accept what he did, then maybe it's time to ask yourself what you really believe. Is abortion murder? Or is it something less, a tragedy that would be better avoided? Most of us think it's the latter. We're looking for ways to prevent abortions—not just a few this month, but millions down the line—without killing or prosecuting people.
I want to reiterate my personal moral opposition to legal late term abortions. I understand the awful tragedies and complexities involved. I know too that most of these children would die soon anyway - or be subject to grueling operations with many risks. I just find the ending of human life to be something we avoid as much as we possibly can. And we need to find many more ways to facilitate contraception, the morning-after pill, and adoption to make these tragedies much rarer than they are.Mark Kleiman is befuddled:
Sorry, I can't make sense of this. "Contraception, the morning-after pill, and adoption" are relevant to the problem of fourteen-year-old girls who conceal their pregnancies until they start to "show." (Even then, it takes a colder heart than I can master to say to a middle-school girl who is carrying her father's child that she has to go through the pain —and, at that age, danger— of childbirth to bear her half-brother.)A Dish reader wrote:
But the whole "safe, legal, and rare" formula offers nothing to women who are carrying fetusus which, if carried to term, would face short, agonizing lives, or women whose pregnancies will kill them if not terminated, or women whose fetuses die inside them. (Yes, doctors are afraid to do dilation and extraction — the famous "partial-birth abortion" — even when the fetus is already dead.) Making late-term abortion illegal condemns them to horrors no one should have to face, and I for one don't have much patience with those willing to impose those horrors on others in order to salve their own consciences.
What Dr. George Tiller was doing (as one of only three physicians in the country) desperately needed, and needs, to be done. An appropriate memorial to him, and rebuke to his killer and those who egged his killer on, would be to enact policies to make certain that the services he had the courage to provide will be provided by others.
When I was pregnant with my second child, this is what happened to me. I was in the middle of the "feel good" sonogram at 21 weeks when the technician made a funny face and said that she was having difficulty getting some measurements. Her supervisor came in and took over, after asking me whether I had any other children and whether they were normal. And then I spoke with the radiologist, who was blunt and dour, and helped me get an immediate referral to Children's Hospital, where, several specialized sonograms later, we got as grim a verdict as I could possibly have imagined: a severe brain defect, a severe heart defect, other highly unusual but not easily interpreted "signs" of impairment, including structural or neurological deficits associated with swallowing and other motor functions. It all pointed to chromosomal anomaly, but, too bad for me, it wasn't possible to get definitive diagnosis in the time frame I had to make up my mind to obtain a legal termination.I found this enlightening, and I urge you to read Mark's first link, by hilzoy, who gathers more such stories.
My choices were to do nothing, undergo termination with less than definitive diagnosis, or wait for the definitive diagnosis, and then go to New York or Colorado, or, I guess, Kansas.
Technology has made the chromosomal test a lot quicker than it used to be. My doctor was very helpful -- telling me to consider what I would do if the amnio cam back normal, because even if chromosomally normal, we were looking at a grim prognosis. I also had the help of a genetics counselor who told me that she often found herself in the position of trying to keep people from overreacting in the face of alarming information -- accentuating the positive, if you will, but she had to admit that in my case, there was no positive information. So we did what we could to sort out the information we had, and we realized that there was almost no chance that the baby would live.
If she lived at all, she was destined for debilitating and probably inexplicable pain and suffering (at least three and probably more major surgeries), and a short life. There would never be any surgery for her brain defect, and if she was chromosomally abnormal, most doctors would refuse to do surgery, and she would simply be allowed to die. When we scheduled the termination, they did an amnio to get the definitive diagnosis, which turned out to be a rare and unsurvivable trisomy (#22 if you are interested -- it is so rare that the geneticist got a little excited because she had never personally seen it). The last time I saw her on the sonogram screen, her heart rate had decelerated to below 100, which is abnormal for a fetus. I believe that she was sustained as far as she was by me, and that she was already starting to die.
I was haunted for a while that I had to decide before I knew for sure that death was inevitable, and once I got over the grief of having done that, the experience only deepened my belief that abortion should be the province of individual men and women. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I have concluded that a decision to undergo abortion or continue a pregnancy is often made instinctively, with a nearly primal conviction that it is the right thing to do under the circumstances. Trying to impose a rigid moral framework based on an extreme notion of equality of personhood doesn't even begin to speak to the complexities of what most people experience when trying to decide this question for themselves.
Someone went unhinged and shot an abortionist. So what? I mean, it’s a terrible tragedy, but what does it tell us about…well…anything? What conclusions are we supposed to draw? It’s not like abortionists are getting bumped off on a regular basis. The last one of these that occured was 11 years ago, back in 1998. What lessons am I supposed to draw from the fact that some lunatic thinks God told him to kill an abortionist that are in any way substantively different than those I would derive when a crackpot kills his pharmacist because the Venusians sent him a command to do so via the transmitter secreted in his skull?If a crackpot kills his pharmacist, do you suppose there would be thousands of approving comments from right-wingers?
"It’s too bad the suspect didn’t poke a roto rooter through his skull and then suck him into a vacuum cleaner instead of just shooting the bastard."A much better response:
"No doubt this ‘man’ is responsible for thousands, maybe tens-of-thousands of needless and wanton deaths. If you think his ‘passing’ is a bad thing in the cause of speaking out and ending the practice of abortion, I don’t know what to tell you. I can only say that I shall not mourn his demise, nor shall I judge others."
"Sounds like a post-birth abortion to me."
"Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him. We are a nation of laws. Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence. Rightly or wrongly, George Tilller was acquitted by a jury of his peers. "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord." For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished. By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller's life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life,"Not as good:
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.
there is one law that we can be most certain of, it is the law that binds people of all faiths and no faith together. It is no coincidence that it exists in Christianity and Judaism; in Islam and Hinduism; in Buddhism and humanism. It is, of course, the Golden Rule - the call to treat one another as we wish to be treated. The call to love. To serve. To do what we can to make a difference in the lives of those with whom we share the same brief moment on this Earth.
Understand - I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it - indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory - the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable.One of faith:
In this world of competing claims about what is right and what is true, have confidence in the values with which you’ve been raised and educated. Be unafraid to speak your mind when those values are at stake. Hold firm to your faith and allow it to guide you on your journey. Stand as a lighthouse.Andrew concludes:
But remember too that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.
This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open, and curious, and eager to continue the moral and spiritual debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame. And within our vast democracy, this doubt should remind us to persuade through reason, through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles, and most of all through an abiding example of good works, charity, kindness, and service that moves hearts and minds
I believe that these sentiments will resonate with all Catholics of good will and serious purpose. When we are called by God to oppose the evils of abortion or torture or terror, we need to remain civil and fair and attuned to the calm that comes from knowing that we fight the good fight...if we do not try to do better, in the passionate and righteous pursuit of peace and justice, we will advance neither one nor the other.Here's what Obama said of abortion earlier in the speech:
That’s when we begin to say, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions. So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.”Contrast with what recently appeared at NewMajority.com, a place supposedly trying to further the right's cause among moderates:
Why are so many Catholics so offended by Notre Dame’s honoring President Obama with a doctor of laws? It is not just abortion (though that matters). It is the threat that the Obama administration poses to Catholic institutions that heal the sick and teach the young. The age old question of how far Catholics must go in opposing evil approved of by the State is present here. Barack Obama threatens the conscience of Catholics, and the mission of the Catholic Church in America, more than any President before him. He threatens by legislation and court appointments, in fact, to be an American Henry VIII, destroying Catholic institutions,"For more nonsense, I direct you to the ever-unhinged Gateway Pundit.
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