Death in the Midwest
Never mind the obvious disconnect between being "pro-life" and trying to make your point by killing someone in cold blood. Let's put that to the side for the moment and focus on something else: Dr. Tiller, shot to death this past weekend, was one of only three physicians in the country who provided abortions for women after the 21st week of pregnancy. Now there are two.
Two doctors in a nation of 300 million people. Some people seem to think that seeking an abortion after the 21-week time point is the pastime of lazy, demonic, murderous women and these blood-dripping doctors who abet them. The reality, however, is different. The reality is about gut-wrenching, heartbreaking decisions that have to do with death in the middle of life, of hopes battered and buried.
There are stories popping up now on the Web from people who learned that they needed Dr. Tiller, people who discovered later in a pregnancy that there was something lethally wrong with the pregnancy, with the fetus or the mother or both. Sometimes, even with all of our modern technology, these discoveries don't happen on a timetable with an arbitrary demarcation at 21 weeks. Sometimes, a happily pregnant woman learns that all the future and her womb hold is pain and death. That's when we need doctors like Dr. Tiller.
Dr. Tiller had already been shot in the arms for helping women in these situations of desperate need. Yet he returned to what he was doing. Do you wonder why? Here he is, in his own words. Do you wonder why he was shot again?
Of course, the primary blame goes to the murderer who killed him, shot him in cold blood inside of Dr. Tiller's Lutheran church as the doctor served as an usher. Shot him in cold blood while Mrs. Tiller sat in the choir, unknowing. Left him to die as another usher quietly fetched Mrs. Tiller from her seat in the choir and led her to where her husband lay. Where this father of four and grandfather of ten, this churchgoing Air Force veteran, died.
But who else is to blame? Let's point some fingers. How about starting with a society where a major presidential candidate feels comfortable mocking, with "air quotes," the need for women's health. Where it's OK to assume that women are lazy, stupid, uninformed, childlike creatures incapable of understanding a decision to terminate a pregnancy without the paternal helping hand of government and men and forced ultrasounds. Where it's OK to cry "murder" when a woman must make the gut-wrenching, horrific decision to terminate a late-term pregnancy that is lethal to the fetus and/or the mother. When it's OK for people to intrude themselves on the healthcare decision-making between a woman and her doctor because of an attitude that women simply cannot be trusted--weak, heartless, indecisive, selfish creatures that they are--to make these decisions like a grownup should. And finally, of course, there is the rhetoric of the anti-abortion movement, the bloody, homicidally drenched terminology that leads some of its followers to believe that interfering with these personal, heart-wrenching decisions is some form of holy war.
What do we have left now? For women and couples who learn that their late-stage pregnancy is lethal or destined for a brief life of intense pain and heartbreak, all we have left is two doctors, living under threat themselves. In a nation of 300 million people, is this the best we can do for women in their times of most heartbreaking need?
Emily Willingham, PhD
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What an air-brushing of George Tiller! He was a notorious proponent of partial birth abortion, something you neatly pass over, as do most of your colleagues who are abortion apologists. The vast majority of his late-term abortions were on perfectly healthy babies who sometimes were older in gestational age than some of their counterparts in Intensive care neonatal units in the same city.
The strong eugenic theme that runs through your article, that those deemed "unfit" to live should be eliminated, would sit comfortably with Hilary Clinton's heroine, Margaret Sanger, and the Democrats, including the Presidential incumbent, but not with those who sense that a right to be protected from lethal violence applies not just to George Tiller, but also to those very vulnerable members of the human family, the unborn.
- by Dr John James on Jun 6, 2009 at 5:37 AM | link
I am not an abortion apologist (what is that, actually?) and am unaware of who these colleagues of whom you speak might be. It's ironic that you accuse me of being a eugenicist, given that I (a) have a special-needs child whom I would have all over again were I to know ahead of time, (b) would not personally consider aborting a child who has special needs or a chromosome abnormality, and (c) am closely involved in my local special-needs community and in the "neurodiversity" movement that calls for acceptance of people with different abilities. I think that extreme attitudes coming in to discussions like this can lead to such misapprehensions in the complete absence of real data to support them.
But developmental "differences" are not I described here anyway. What's under discussion here are fetal abnormalities that would not survive birth or that threaten the life of the mother. The fact is that women in these situations now have one less doctor to turn to, and that's because someone who was an avowed member of the pro-life movement chose to take someone else's life. More irony, that.
I don't pretend that abortion is a simple issue one way or the other; in fact, that is my point. Some people who use the extremist rhetoric of either side of this issue tend to paint only in black and white, when the reality is so much more complex, idiosyncratic, and personal. Tiller provided a necessary medical intervention to women and families who needed it after making one of the most tragic and heartbreaking decisions they'll ever have to make. He provided the most difficult intervention in women's healthcare. And now, there are only two left who will.
- by Emily Willingham on Jun 15, 2009 at 4:13 PM | link