Blogs Comment On Tiller's Murder, Supreme Court Nomination

Main Category: Women's Health / Gynecology
Also Included In: Abortion;  Litigation / Medical Malpractice
Article Date: 03 Jun 2009 - 6:00 PDT

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The following summarizes selected women's health-related blog entries.

~ "The Murder of Dr. Tiller, a Foreshadowing," Cristina Page, Birth Control Watch: Page writes, "For those who would like to think" that the "murder in church of Dr. George Tiller ... is an isolated incident, here's the horrifying news: You are wrong." She continues, "The pattern is clear and frightening." According to Page, there were several murders of abortion providers and even more attempted murders during the administration of former President Clinton, the first president to support abortion rights. However, during the Bush administration, "not only were there no murders, there were no attempted murders," save for a single bombing of an abortion clinic, according to Page. She writes that Tiller's murder occurred five months into the administration of President Obama, the nation's second president who supports abortion rights. Page adds, "One can only conclude that like terrorist sleeper cells, these extremists have now been set in motion. Indeed the evidence is already there. The chatter, the threats, the hate-filled rhetoric, are abundant." According to Page, "The pro-choice movement, specifically our abortion providers, are in the greatest danger of violence when we take power." She adds, "The murder of Dr. Tiller suggests that violence against abortion providers may be far more linked to the power, or lack thereof, antiabortion groups have politically than to laws designed to increase penalties against such acts." Page continues that abortion-rights opponents "will put out carefully worded press statements condemning the murder of Dr. Tiller, as became routine for them during the Clinton years." Page concludes, "But unless the rhetoric they choose from now on becomes careful too -- they may be the enablers of murder and terror" (Page, Birth Control Watch, 5/31).

~ "Where Will Women Go Now?" Kate Harding, Salon's "Broadsheet": "If any good can come of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, ... perhaps it's the opportunity to have a conversation about the reality of termination in the second and third trimesters," Harding writes. She adds, "Anti-choice activists often cast late-term abortions as the murder of a viable baby at the whim of a woman who doesn't wish to be inconvenienced, carried out by a doctor who looks at her and sees only cartoon dollar signs." According to Harding, "such misinformation and outright lies about procedures that are in fact rare and only performed when medically necessary are what led anti-choice activists to call Tiller 'America's Doctor of Death' and accuse him of running a 'murder mill.'" The "reality" is that Tiller helped "women in absolutely desperate circumstances, when almost no one else would," Harding writes, adding, "Since the news of Dr. Tiller's murder broke, personal narratives from people who used his services have been appearing around the Web." Harding talked to Susan Hill, president of the National Women's Health Foundation, which referred girls and women to his clinic. Hill said, "We always sent the really tragic cases to Tiller." Harding reports that these included "women diagnosed with cancer who needed abortions to qualify for chemotherapy, women who learned late in their pregnancies that their wanted babies had fatal illnesses and rape victims so young they didn't realize they were pregnant for months." According to Harding, "The trauma of receiving such a diagnosis is only compounded by the difficulty of obtaining a late-term abortion." Harding asked Hill "where women who need late-term abortions can go now," and says that Hill's "response was bleak." Hill added that she doesn't know where she will send "those really tragic cases"(Harding, "Broadsheet," Salon, 6/1).

~ "How I (and Other 'Pro-Life' Leaders) Contributed to Dr. Tiller's Murder," Frank Schaeffer, Huffington Post blogs: "My late father and I share the blame (with many others) for the murder of Dr. George Tiller," Schaeffer writes, adding, "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." According to Schaeffer, his father, the "evangelical pro-life leader" Francis Schaeffer, in a book published in the early 1980s "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." Schaeffer adds that he "said the same thing in a book [he] wrote that the right-wing evangelicals made into a best seller." Schaeffer writes, "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 Tiller. He adds, "But even if the murderer never read Dad's or my words, we helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen." According to Schaeffer, "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 on this day after a man was murdered in cold blood for performing abortions that I -- and the people I worked with in the religious right, the Republican Party, the pro-life movement and the Roman Catholic Church -- all contributed to this killing by our foolish and incendiary words" (Schaeffer, Huffington Post blogs, 6/1).

~ "A Wicked Deed in Wichita -- A Test for the Pro-Life Movement," R. Albert Mohler, Washington Post's "On Faith": Tiller's murder "presents the pro-life movement in America with a crucial moral test -- will we condemn this murder in unqualified terms?" Mohler, a former editor of the Christian Index, asks. He writes that "violence in the name of protesting abortion is immoral, unjustified and horribly harmful to the pro-life cause," adding that the "horror of abortion cannot be rightly confronted, much less corrected, by means of violence and acts outside the law and lawful means of remedy." He concludes, "Murder is murder. The law rightly affirms that the killing of Dr. George Tiller is murder. In this we must agree. We cannot rest until the law also recognizes the killing of the unborn as murder. The killing of Dr. George Tiller makes that challenge all the more difficult" (Mohler, "On Faith," Washington Post, 6/1).

~ "An Abortion Provider Reacts to the Murder of Dr. George Tiller," Feministing: "It is a dangerous mistake for [abortion providers] to feel a false sense of security," particularly in the wake of Tiller's murder, an abortion provider writes in the blog entry. The entry questions whether abortion providers can give "quality health care to patients and simultaneously protect them and ourselves from anti-choice extremists," adding that the "reality is that we need volunteer escorts to help patients get inside clinics safely" and "health educators to give women and girls accurate information about abortion." The entry says that "we cannot be paralyzed by the acts of terrorists. ... Instead of being afraid, instead of being angry, talk to your local abortion clinics and ask them what they need" (Feministing, 5/31).

~"Source: Amicus Brief Proves Sotomayor is Pro-Choice," Bonnie Erbe, U.S. News & World Report's "Thomas Jefferson Street": Erbe writes that a "well-known leader of a major progressive women's rights group" has said that Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's nominee to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, is "pro-choice." According to the source, while Sotomayor sat on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in the late 1980s, the group filed an amicus brief that proves Sotomayor supports abortion rights. According to Erbe, the brief argued that if the Supreme Court used the case Webster v. Reproductive Health Services to reverse Roe v. Wade, "poor women of color" would be disproportionately affected by a lack of access to abortion services. Erbe writes that the brief said those women would then resort to illegal abortions, as they did before Roe. According to Erbe, as a member of the board, if Sotomayor "had objected to any of this," she could have "attempted to stop the group from lending its name to the amicus brief, and she did not." Erbe concludes, "Big sigh of relief from the pro-choice crowd!" (Erbe, "Thomas Jefferson Street," U.S. News & World Report, 5/29).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.nationalpartnership.org. You can view the entire Daily Women's Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery here. The Daily Women's Health Policy Report is a free service of the National Partnership for Women & Families, published by The Advisory Board Company.

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