by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
A year ago today, Dr. George Tiller was murdered in the foyer of his Wichita church. His death was the culmination of a lifetime of threats and violence because of his work as one of the few late-term abortion providers in the United States. And after a year of increasingly serious inroads on abortion rights and accessibility, both on the state and national level, it’s more important than ever to honor his life and work, and the efforts of the countless pro-choice activists who strive to give women full reproductive freedom without shame, trauma, or needless expense. These people work daily under the risk of real physical violence, perpetrated by a well-organized network of people who will seemingly stop at nothing.
There are an incredible number of meaningful reflections on Dr. Tiller’s life, and I’ll link to a few of them here. Robin Marty collected a round-up of reactions at RH Reality Check, NARAL Pro-Choice America’s Nancy Keenan called on us to, like Dr. Tiller, trust women, Harry Reid spoke out against Dr. Tiller’s murder on the Senate floor, one woman wrote about her own experiences as Dr. Tiller’s patient, over 20 years ago, and at Alternet, Amanda Robb reminded us to remember the fact that Roeder was not working alone.
You can add your thoughts and reflections at IAmDrTiller.com.
My thoughts and reflections are that the conspiracy element of this is a little hysterical. The guy had some pre-existing psychiatric problems that seem to account for the fact that he actually did what some of his buddies said it was right to do. And as far as that (the saying it was right to do part) goes, in their minds Tiller’s murder was and is entirely justifiable on (act-)utilitarian grounds, given that they regard each late-term abortion as a murder. You disagree with this premise, and perhaps with act-utilitarianism too, but sane people can and do believe one or both of those things. What sane people do not do is act like this guy did.
But let’s say Roeder was sane and was part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. In that case, the lesson one should draw from the murder is that one should not be so confident in one’s political and moral opinions as to murder someone because he does something you think is horribly evil. If nothing else, the intense and widespread disagreement about an issue gives a rational, sane person a reason to lower his confidence in hiscorrectness. As his confidence decreases, so should his willingness to engage in extreme actions on the basis of your belief. Presumably, to kill someone he would need to be about 100% certain that the murder was justified.
In an entirely unrelated matter, what probability do you assign to the possibility that late-term fetuses are not persons or morally equivalent to persons? If sane, Roeder apparently thought it was 100% certain that late-term abortion was equivalent to murder. Are you 100% certain it’s not? If so, you are similar to Roeder, just on the other side, and assuming he is sane, which I do not assume, in principle you would be willing to commit as extreme actions. If not, then following the above rule, that to kill someone one must be 100% sure that it is justified, it would be hard for you to justify abortion.
Dr. Tiller is no hero. He performed thousands of late-term abortions, many almost certainly illegally. He was murdered in cold blood by a lunatic–does that make him a martyr? Here’s what one of his “patients” had to say about the “procedure”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMC_70oYV8U
So many women who have abortions do not even know what they entail, or what the lasting effects will be. This is not choice–this is liberal indoctrination. I will only take pro-choice people seriously if A) they have had an abortion, and B) they know all the medical facts.
Sadly, not one pro-choice person I have ever encountered has met both of these criteria. In fact, many insist on striking down laws aimed at educating young women about the realities of abortion. People making uninformed decisions that could potentially cost innocent lives is unacceptable in free a society. Would you not agree?
here’s what’s wrong with what you wrote (other than, of course, how inappropriate it is to deflate someone who was assassinated on a blog post commemorating his life)
1. you write that “[h]e performed thousands of late-term abortions, many almost certainly illegally.” this is only compelling if you believe that legality is tantamount to morality. (were people working on the underground railroad immoral? no.) third trimester abortions (which, by the way, are a miniscule percent of all abortions–i believe it’s less than 1%) are only performed in the most compelling of circumstances, as in the cases of women with estrogen-dependent cancers (pregnancy hormones can fatally exacerbate tumor growth), or people whose lives would otherwise be destroyed by having the child (as in 13-year-olds, or people who were raped… and it’s these people who often are too ashamed or scared to tell anyone until it’s late into their pregnancies).
2. great use of scare quotes around “patient” and “procedure.” a youtube video taken from the o’reilly factor will never, ever count as credible evidence of what a procedure is like in any legitimate debate. third trimester abortions do not involve pooping babies into a toilet. to insult abortion in theory is one thing–to insult the legitimacy of this dr. tiller’s medical skills is another.
3. you write: “So many women who have abortions do not even know what they entail, or what the lasting effects will be.” i have several responses. first, you must ask for and then consent to a medical procedure before it is performed. if you do both of these things without knowing what they entail or what the lasting effects will be, that’s definitely your problem. (and, i should add, every medical practice inherently includes risks. you could die from anesthesia while getting your wisdom teeth pulled.) second, i’ll agree with you that what they entail is often a big mystery to many women–but only because many women think abortion is terrifying and painful. it’s usually described as hurting only as much as a bad menstrual period; it is performed with a miniscule tube/vacuum, pain killers, and a few minutes. look it up on any site that actually performs them.
4. you also write: “I will only take pro-choice people seriously if A) they have had an abortion, and B) they know all the medical facts.” it doesn’t matter that not all people who support abortion haven’t had them. i support gay marriage and i’ll never have one. well, i guess you don’t support that either–but the point is that you can believe in people having rights that don’t benefit you, per se.
in conclusion, i agree with you that people SHOULD be more educated on what abortion is–including you–because i don’t know a single person who knows anything about embryology and anything about how abortions are actually performed (both the situations that require them and the medical procedures that are used) that is anti-abortion.
You guys sure manage to make a mess of refuting a guy whose main argument is that people who thought abortion was permissible (evidenced by the fact that they had one) think that abortion is not permissible. I love how everyone on this thread pulls out the “I don’t know anyone–who knows anything at all–who doesn’t agree with me”, like it’s a point in your favor. It’s not. It’s a sign of how little thought you’ve given to the issue. It’s embarrassing.
“this is only compelling if you believe that legality is tantamount to morality”–well no, it could be the case that violating the law is bad in itself, regardless of what the law is, but that if the deed were good enough (underground railroad, perhaps late abortions) then it would still be moral even though you violated the law in doing it.
“(which, by the way, are a miniscule percent of all abortions–i believe it’s less than 1%)”–don’t know how many abortions there have been, but .5% of that would still be a lot. And if I think each takes a human life, and that nothing is more valuable than human life, then that number is way way too high, and it doesn’t matter to me what the (non-)extenuating circumstances are.
Actually I agree with you that nothing from the O RLY factor is good evidence–but no other talk show would be better.
“if you do both of these things without knowing what they entail or what the lasting effects will be, that’s definitely your problem.” A call for personal responsibility from an equal writes commenter–I’m gonna say…Jillian (the pseudonym and the “you can believe in people having rights that don’t benefit you, per se. ” are the giveaways). Don’t see that every day. This is actually even harsher than I would go for, well done.
@ Aaron, no. Just no.
1. Of course I believe that abortion is immoral. The only reason I appeal to its illegality in certain cases is that most pro-choice people do exactly the same. It is important that we are arguing on the same basis. You write that, “third trimester abortions (which, by the way, are a miniscule percent of all abortions–i believe it’s less than 1%) are only performed in the most compelling of circumstances.” There is evidence that points to Dr. Tiller performing late-term abortions when the circumstances were not the “most compelling.” Did you follow his 2009 trial? And honestly, do you think Dr. Tiller would refuse a patient that drove 1000 miles to see him, even if the circumstances were not the “most compelling?”
2. It is sad that you would dismiss the personal testament of someone who actually had an abortion, simply because they were a guest on the O’Reilly Factor (although I am certain that was not your main motivation). Unless you were a patient of Dr. Tiller yourself, you have no right to question the credibility of her account.
3. Do you think that an abortionist is really going to tell a potential “patient” that as a result of her abortion she may be infected, become permanently barren, develop cancer, die, among other complications, physical and otherwise: http://www.afterabortion.org/physica.html? Please go to a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, and then get back to me.
4. I make my claim because unless you have actually had an abortion and lived through the consequences, you do not truly know whether to be for or against it. It is completely different from gay marriage, since marriage in and of itself has no personally physical consequences—other than a ring cutting into your finger. One can be seriously for or against gay marriage without ever having taken part in it, because one is capable of knowing all the social consequences.
5. You boldly state, “i don’t know a single person who knows anything about embryology and anything about how abortions are actually performed (both the situations that require them and the medical procedures that are used) that is anti-abortion.” This is a clear and utter falsehood, unless of course you live a sheltered life and only associate yourself with pro-choice people.
In conclusion, I must again signal my concurrence that we all should be more educated on the realities of abortion–especially from those people who have experienced it firsthand. I would recommend that you listen to the words of Norma McCorvey (Roe) from Roe v. Wade, the one responsible for protecting a woman’s right to have an abortion. For she is far more qualified to speak on the matter than either of us.
Though I have some sympathy for your position, the arguments you present are not persuasive. Your insistence on personal experience is over the top. As noted, we don’t demand that standard of evidence for most issues, but even if we did, it all depends on how finely you cut experience. X has one kind of abortion in the first trimester by one doctor in one state on one day, Y has a different kind in the third trimester by a different doctor in a different state on a different day: both have had abortions, but they may have had quite different experiences. Would you count them as the same? Then maybe Z takes a morning after pill when she may or may not have been fertilized–does she count? And so on. The classes into which you sort people can be sliced and diced as the argument requires, which leaves the propriety of such a tactic in doubt.
Setting that aside though, I don’t really see the importance of having had first-person experience of abortion to”truly knowing” its moral status. (“Truly know” in quotes because of its no-true-Scotsman echo.) The only thing a first-person awareness has that a medical expert can’t have is the phenomenal experience of undergoing the abortion. But no one thinks that that experience is what determines whether and when abortion is right or wrong. Your insistence seems to be a rhetorical tactic to build up the testimony of two people–out of how many that have had abortions? Being sensitive to this issue, you include the second requirement that a person “know all the medical facts”, which cuts down the number of experts to only those doctors who specialize in abortions and who have had abortions themselves. Somehow I doubt that those people are likely to talk about what a bad thing abortion is. It would be rather surprising to meet a “pro-life” person who is an expert in your sense; in any event, neither of your expert witnesses meets your own requirement. The more famous/notorious of them seems to have changed her mind, highlighting the fact that, even if she were an expert in the facts of abortion, she might not be an expert in metaphysics or ethics, so her views about the moral status of abortion, or whether a fetus is a person, would not be within the realm of her expertise. So in fact McCorvey is no more, and probably rather less, qualified to speak on these ethical or metaphysical matters than we are.
“People making uninformed decisions that could potentially cost innocent lives is unacceptable in free a society. Would you not agree?” I do not. And not only do I not agree, I think that this is a contradiction. A free society is one where people can make some decisions that “could potentially” result in terrible consequences. Abortion is not really the central case, though, because the dispute is not about the result of an abortion but rather about the meaning and moral significance of that result. And it’s needless to say that labelling something a “reality of abortion” does not mean that it would make someone better informed.
The testament of that girl is not how abortions are performed. Every medical procedure including abortion is debriefed before and after and must be consented to. Every medical procedure including abortion can result in terrible mishaps including infections, death, etc.
That website you posted is not value-neutral and looks like it was created by a ten-year-old; it looks like you just searched for something that fit your Christian values and posted it. Maybe you should search some value-neutral and credible websites like MayoClinic and WebMD, which will both tell you that abortion is /as/ safe (which isn’t to say 100% safe) as any other invasive medical procedure: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/abortion/AN00633 and http://women.webmd.com/tc/abortion-topic-overview?page=2
Your arguments about how you have to experience abortion and implicitly be scarred by it, physically and mentally, is really dumb. Do you understand that that means YOU can’t be for or against it either? And that also means people can’t make decisions about a lot of other “physical” things, or things with physical consequences: wars, health care, speed limits.
Norma McCorvey now opposes abortion because she converted to Christianity. It’s fine with me that you’re Christian, but don’t act like you oppose abortion for any reason other than that. I affirm the earlier statement that no one who actually approaches abortion service from a value-neutral perspective can find serious reasons to oppose it. No, Robert George or Leon Kass’ writings about how embryos have human life do not count as serious studies of embryology.
You seem to have the bad if common habit of thinking that if your opponent is religious, then in ethical matters he slavishly believes whatever his religion tells him to believe. In point of fact, you are undoubtedly correct, most of the time. You presumably also believe that your ethical views are the result of hard, independent, “value-neutral” thinking–particularly if you are an atheist (as am I). So maybe you feel that it is enough to have explained the origin of your opponent’s views, and once you have done that you don’t need to bother with refuting them.
The first problem with that approach is that it’s an instance of the genetic fallacy–claiming that the origin of belief is good/bad, so the belief is true/false. Secondly, it’s just lazy and disrespectful. There are highly intelligent people who believe all sorts of things that you or I find obviously false, so it might be worthwhile to at least consider what they have to say. Third, it makes you look bad, and fourth, it’s pointless. There are people who oppose abortion who are not religious at all, and it is possible that a Christian could have secular arguments against abortion, even though if he didn’t have those arguments he would still believe, on religious grounds, that abortion was wrong. Flawed as Aaron’s arguments may have been, I saw no reference in them to God or Jesus or anything religious.
It’s kind of amusing to see you pursue that line while lauding “value-neutrality”. You don’t actually mean that, since value-neutrality would mean not believing in the rightness or wrongness of any action. So I guess what you mean is you like secular value systems But why are religious value systems so much worse than, say, a capitalist value system, or a socialist one, or an Aristotelian one, or a progressivist one? In short, tu quoque–what about your ideology?
You claim that there are no secular reasons to oppose abortion. I stated such a reason in my first post on this thread.
Upon re-reading I see that you said no “serious reasons”. I refer you as well as Aaron to the “no true Scotsman” wiki page: “When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of assertion to tautologically exclude the specific case or others like it.” This is what you have done.
George gets a lot of your toothless criticism. But I took his natural law class and the arguments he advanced did not draw on religious premises and were pretty difficult though not impossible to refute. Also his writings are not attempts to be studies of embryology, they’re moral philosophy papers that draw on empirical observations. So your criticisms are not very effective against him. Leon Kass, however…Leon Kass is a fucking clown. Hate away.
@I work for an abortion clinic. Let me clarify a few things.
Pardon me, let me clarify a few things.
If you actually knew me, you would also know that I’m not Christian, nor am I even religious. You might want to read this interview I did on the Secular Pro-Life movement: http://theprincetontory.com/main/interview-with-founder-of-secularprolife-org/
Since you work in an abortion clinic, you must know all the long-term effects of abortions. After all, you do routine physical and mental check-ups with women whose fetuses you have aborted for years after the procedure; it is by no means a one-day deal. My apologies there.
Some contradictory WebMD info:
http://www.webmd.com/baby/news/20051212/abortion-impact-long-term-stress
A book that you as a conscientious employee of an abortion clinic ABSOLUTELY should purchase:
Women's Health After Abortion: The Medical and Psychological Evidence
As far as my point about having an abortion, I never said that one could not hold a position one way or another; I simply stated that one’s position should not be considered completely credible. Since I never have nor never will have an abortion, nor do I know the complete medical facts, I would admit that you should take my view on the matter lightly. As I mentioned, however, we should defer to those who meet both of the aforementioned criteria as those with the highest authority on the subject. This is because they have actually made the choice, they have lived with the consequences, and they have complete knowledge of the situation.
Aaron, did you even read that WebMD article? It pretty squarely contradicts your position:
“There is no denying that the experience of unwanted pregnancy is very stressful for most women, and so is the decision about what to do about it. But we are not seeing evidence of long-term trauma at the clinical level.”
Yale University psychiatry professor Kimberly Yonkers, MD, agrees. She points out that both groups in the study showed improvements over time in most measures of psychological stress. She also expressed concerns about the study’s small sample size but said one of the study’s strengths was that it followed the women for so long.
“I don’t think it is much of a surprise that there was residual guilt and shame following the voluntary termination of a pregnancy,” she says. “This is not the kind of thing that someone does and never thinks about again. But I don’t believe in postabortion syndrome because I haven’t seen it. And I don’t think these data show it in any way, shape or form.”
@Skimpole
While I do agree with you on the moral issue of abortion, I am not really making any moral claims in my posts. The only argument I have made, in fact, is that women have far from perfect choice when deciding whether or not to have abortions.
And Jillian and whoever else from EW has been posting anonymously, please do not mistake my intentions as those of a moral crusader. I’m not saying that my view is morally superior to yours; I’m simply saying that calling your position “pro-choice” is categorically incorrect. It’s no different from saying that a blind man with a rifle has a choice where to shoot.
But I must say, well done. You gals and guys (I’m hoping that there’s at least one) have really exhausted me. Have a great summer, and keep working on your arguments against us “anti-choicers.” We all have the same goal, after all–to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and consequentially abortions, to zero.
Just to be perfectly pertinacious here, let me assure you that you actually do not agree with me on the moral status of abortion, and that I do not join you in your goal of reducing unwanted pregnancies to zero.
Also I must have missed the part where you responded to my criticisms of your criteria for being qualified to describe the physical and emotional effects of abortion–not, of course, its moral status since you clearly weren’t talking about that–so I remain in doubt as to whether there is any such expert. Although, now that I think of it I expect there probably are women who have had an abortion and are doctors who know everything there is to know about abortion–except, of course its moral status, which we are most certainly not discussing. What I can’t figure out is why you mention McCorvey as someone worth listening to on this topic, since she meets neither of your criteria. She’s not a doctor and she’s never had an abortion.
Since your argument is unambiguously not in any way about morality, I guess it’s about how much information a woman has and how much is enough. You claim she doesn’t have enough to make an informed decision. Of course, the very claim that the informed consent standard of normal medical procedures is not sufficient in abortion cases implies that there is something special about abortion, that it’s for some reason more important, or more dangerous, or more–ah! I just caught myself, I was about to say “more morally charged”, but then I remembered you’re not talking about morality. My bad.
I wonder what you would consider sufficient information for a woman to make a choice to abort. Evidently the things a doctor and clinic have to tell the patient under Casey are not enough. You seem to think that personal experience is essential for knowing the physical and emotional effects of abortion–which after all is the only thing we’re talking about here–and that having the information secondhand just isn’t the same. If that’s what’s required for merely *saying* with some authority that abortion is such and such, then surely the bar must be set at least as high for those who are deciding whether or not to *actually initiate* an abortion. Thus, by your logic, in order to make an informed choice to have an abortion a woman must already have had an abortion.
I have to say that the label “pro-choice” or “anti-choice” and the slogans about “reproductive freedom” are kind of absurd (personally, I prefer the name “pro-death”). But only in some strange definition of “choice” is the so-called pro-choice side not interested in choice. Maybe it’s an arbitrary choice, maybe a poorly informed one, but it’s still a choice as that term is usually meant. So again I find your criticism puzzling.
(hey EW bloggers, see how much more persuasive I sound when I’m on your side? funny how that works)
Just to clarify, the comment credited to me by skimpole was not, in fact, my own. Though I’m glad that someone associates my comments with encouragement of personal responsibility. In any event, I’ll add my two cents regarding long-term psychological/physical effects of abortions…These effects- whatever they may be- cannot be viewed in a vacuum, but must be considered relative to the psychological/physical effects of NOT having the abortion. That is, a woman might be traumatized due to her experience with late-term abortion, but she might have also been dead without it. This is an extreme example, but I’m just using it to point out the importance of looking at the consequences of alternative courses of action.