An Abortion Doctor's Murder Sets an Evil Precedent

It takes a cowardly, sick, low-life person to murder someone in cold blood while he tries to serve his church. It takes an even more disgusting piece of filth to justify the murder as if it serves some divine purpose.

Just as foul are those who give audience and cheerlead such an action because of their political views or because they believe that God will make exceptions for their vitriolic hate.

But that's what the broad-daylight murder of abortion doctor George Tiller amounted to: someone so obsessed with his own point of view that he was willing to kill another human being because he thought he had holy providence on his side.

Tiller, 67, medical director of an abortion clinic and one of the few doctors who performed late-term abortions, was gunned down on May 31after years of threats and attempts on his life while he served as an usher in a Wichita, Kan., church. He was the target of anti-abortion extremists, one of whom shot him in both arms in 1993.

Now, any woman seeking an abortion has to be worried about a homicidal maniac looking to punish people on behalf of other psychopaths.

Do I sound unkind? GOOD!

Tiller was performing medical services within the confines of state and federal law. Hundreds of women would seek his particular services when they found out that their pregnancies would produce a child that would not survive or would be born with severe complications.

But let many on the far right tell it, Tiller would scope out innocent pregnant women, tackle them and scrape their wombs clean with a butter knife. They compared him with Hitler and Pol Pot. They accused him of murdering "thousands of innocent children" when none had ever produced such a statistic. But the real truth lies in the story of women like Lynda Waddington, who wrote a letter to President Barack Obama during his campaign about her experience with late-term abortion.

By the time we had gone through it all, I finally understood. The child I carried remained alive only because of his connection to me. For all practical purposes, I was serving as a life support system and, as soon as that system was removed, he would die. Several days passed while my family debated the decision on whether or not to terminate the pregnancy. In the interim the doctor from the university hospital took my case before a state medical board for permission. Because the term of my pregnancy was well outside the state's legal limits for abortion, a special ruling had to be made. The doctor explained that receiving such approval would not require me to go through with terminating if I decided not to do so, but would save time if I decided that was the route I wished to take. We did eventually make the decision to terminate the pregnancy instead of carrying to term. It wasn't a decision we made lightly. It wasn't a decision that brought us relief or joy. We just knew that for us -- for our family -- it was the best of several horrific options.

Waddington's baby suffered from anencephaly, a defect that prevents brain and skull development, and she came to Tiller for help. Choices like these, on child care, on their own health and the well being of their families (more than 60 percent of women who have abortions are already mothers), must be made by women every day. How dare ANYONE feel that their fanatical beliefs supercede the personal decisions of a woman who must make the most difficult choices of her life?

In fact, how dare any politician actually lobby to etch a law into a woman's uterus? How dare any priest or clergyman, preacher or self-righteous religious zealot criticize an abortion doctor when they haven't stood in the door of an abortion clinic offering to adopt and care for an unwanted child?

How dare any television pundit spend night after night bashing Tiller and doctors like him while at the same time scandalizing poor minority women for having children out of wedlock without ever having looked at their personal situations or advocated the use of contraceptives. (For the record, I think people like Bill O'Reilly, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage are the sleaze buckets who stoked the flames that resulted in Tiller's death -- they are no better than the radio despots who started the massacre in Rwanda.)

To look at it from a black perspective, the unfortunate truth is about 37 percent of pregnancies among black women ended in abortion. The prolife movement might say this is because there are so many abortion clinics available to black communities, as if sistas just use them as a form of birth control. But when you look at the fact that 25 percent of all black women in America are living in poverty, abortion needs to remain a choice.

Now, let's be clear. I'm not saying abortion is a good thing. On the contrary, nobody likes abortion. It should be a decision of last resort. It is never an easy decision for any woman. There is also room for the prolife perspective in that abortion is the ending of a potential human life. From that standpoint alone, it's easy to see why some (not all) want to save the lives of these babies.

But here's the absolute truth: I'm a man. I will never be pregnant. I will never conceive a life within my body. I will never know what it is to have my body change because another human is growing inside me. Hence, I have no business at all trying to decide what only a woman can know about.

If you want something immoral THAT is immoral.

And so is the murder of a person who was brave enough to help women who had to make the very hard choice of terminating a pregnancy.

A man was arrested for and charged with Tiller's murder. I won't print his name here because I don't want fruitcakes to get his name from this blog and extol him as a hero. The alleged killer is no hero. He's a coward who deserves to be put away for the rest of his sorry life.

Yes, the abortion debate should go on. But the goal should be the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and options outside of abortion. To take away the lamentable option is to take away a woman's right to make a decision with her life and is tantamount to female genital mutilation.