Doctor’s death prompts questions

Much of what has been written since the death of abortion provider George Tiller at the end of May has awakened me to how audacious my views on abortion seem to some who champion abortion rights.

I’m against abortion. I do not believe abortion can ever be considered good.

Even in cases of rape or incest, I don’t believe abortion is an ethical choice. Given the chance, I would implore any woman to allow a child conceived through rape or incest to live.

I believe that is what loves demands. And I believe it’s love, not killing, that heals, however deep the wound.

When a pregnancy is terminated to save a mother’s life, I think it’s a tragedy. As much as any killing in self-defense, it is at best the choice of a lesser of two evils.

It wounds the heart. It haunts the mind. It leaves a lifelong scar.

The notion of ending a pregnancy for psychological reasons rests on far shakier ethical ground. We would not, after all, encourage anyone to kill for his mental health’s sake.

A fetus, I believe, is in essence a person. Terminating a pregnancy extinguishes a human life. It kills.

All the same, I was — I am — dismayed, to put it mildly, by the killing of Tiller. I am not dismayed merely because of the damage his violent end may render to the abortion debate in this country.

I’m dismayed because someone — allegedly a man named Scott Roeder — thought that murder could be good and justifiable in this case.

Roeder’s complaint that he is being treated like a criminal surely provides some insight into his muddled thinking, if not his flawed morality.

This man is not, though, by any stretch of imagination or ire, representative of the majority of those who believe abortion takes human life and should therefore be more regulated and restricted than it is.

Nonetheless, various blog posts, commentaries, editorials, news reports, editorials and letters to the editor have associated Roeder’s alleged actions in a wholesale way with those who oppose abortion, however nonviolently.

Abortion opponents were characterized as intolerant and as violent as the Taliban, the nation’s up-and-coming domestic terrorists. “The main difference between the American anti-abortion movement and the Taliban is about 8,000 miles,” late-term abortion provider and friend of Tiller, Warren Hern, told MSNBC.

On June 2, I was heartened to see the headline of an editorial in the Los Angeles Times that read plaintively: “Don’t exploit a tragedy.”

It noted that while Tiller’s killer is not “one of a kind?.?.?.?neither is he typical of the anti-abortion movement.” And I thought, “Amen.”

Tiller is the sixth abortion doctor to be slain in the United States since David Gunn was shot in 1993. Two receptionists and one security guard were also killed at abortion clinics.

Needless to say, each of these deaths is reprehensible. But if violence were truly the medium of choice for the majority with a “pro-life” or “anti-abortion” message, it is hard to fathom how many more deaths there would have been by now.

The editorial chastised Randall Terry, former head of Operation Rescue, for his quip that Tiller “reaped what he sowed.” The Times called it “tasteless.” I call it hard-hearted.

Certain pro-choice activists were taken to task for suggesting the broader anti-abortion movement shared responsibility for Tiller’s death by inflaming emotions with “violent language” and “dangerous rhetoric” that dehumanizes abortion providers.

In fairness to People for the American Way and NARAL Pro-Choice America, former self-described “religious right” evangelical — now Orthodox Christian — Frank Schaeffer, said as much in harsher and more sweeping terms in an essay on the Huffington Post titled, “How I (and Other ‘Pro-Life’ Leaders) Contributed to Dr. Tiller’s Murder.”

Schaeffer fingers not only “the religious right,” but (apparently) the whole of “the Republican Party, the pro-life movement and the Roman Catholic Church” for complicity in Tiller’s death through their use of “foolish and incendiary words.” But, hey, anyone who’s read Schaeffer long enough knows he has a way with hyperbole.

What got my goat was the second sentence in the last paragraph of the Times opinion. On the first read, I thought I’d surely misread it.

The third time through, I knew I hadn’t. In addressing the issue of rhetoric that dehumanizes abortion providers, Times editors wrote, “The basic premise of the anti-abortion movement — that a fetus is a person — is by definition a ‘dehumanization’ of abortion providers, even if it’s expressed in decorous language.”

So, at the heart of the abortion debate is whether a fetus is — or is not — a person. And according to the Times, if I simply say what I believe (and what my faith has taught for two millenniums) — that a fetus is a person — I dehumanize any person who provides abortions.

Yet those who insist a fetus is not a person or, in other words, is something less than human, apparently do not, by virtue of saying so, dehumanize the fetus.

That must be because, um, one can’t dehumanize what by [one’s own] definition is not a person?

Damon Linker, blogger at the New Republic, calls the notion that a fetus is a person and that abortion takes an innocent human life “radicalizing logic.”

If that is true, he asks, “Doesn’t morality demand that pro-lifers act in any way they can to stop this violence?”

I guess that depends on whose morality, Linker. As I understand Christian morality, it allows one to risk one’s life for the sake of another.

But it never sanctions — never blesses — the taking of a human life, however necessary doing so may seem in certain circumstances.

“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends,” says Scripture in John 15:13. Think, for example, of Catholic Irena Sendler, who risked her life and endured torture to rescue 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto while killing no one.

I’ve been looking for some folks with better theological chops than mine, willing to take on Linker’s question. If I succeed, I’ll share with you what they have to say.

(If you are one, please, send me an e-mail at the address below.)

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected] .