Terrorism & martyrdom

After the killing of the heroic Dr George Tiller last week, I've been pondering abortion (again).

Mostly, I've always just been grateful not to have to make a personal decision about it, but I've always been basically pro-choice: as a man, it's not something I will ever have to confront viscerally (so to speak), and what right do I have to make a moral choice for another person? Is a damp squib of cells a person with rights? at what point does it become one? Unless you buy into some ridiculous religion, there's no definitive answer to those questions, that I can see: so let any woman who needs to, make her own decision.

Plus, on top of that, there are the (realpolitik) social effects of abortion or its' suppression: the real-world effects of the legal position, either driving abortion underground (as it's not something that has ever been successfully suppressed, just somewhat reduced), so that nice middle-class girls get safe, illegal abortions, and poor working-class girls mostly get dangerous, homemade abortions, or things that supposedly produce abortions but fail.

Whereas permitting abortion, judging over the last 40-odd years, seems to have led to a lower population, fewer unwanted & tormented children, and a lower overall crime rate - and I don't mean just because abortion isn't classed as a crime.

I might have more sympathy for the anti-abortion side of the argument if I saw any evidence that they were seriously concerned with the welfare of babies, rather than being totally committed to the control of women and the destruction of feminism (or rather, the feeble shards of feminism that are all that seem to exist in the USA). But as they oppose sex education and readily-available birth control, their rank, indigestible hypocrisy is evident. And as for more expansive and generous ideas, from something as simple as Plunket Nurses, to financial support & subsidies for pregnant or nursing women, well, those aren't even thought about (by either side, alas - and I will admit that politically they are so far out of reach that you may as well suggest giving each newborn a piece of Mooncheese).

* * * * *

And once I started reading about Dr Tiller, it brought home something else to me. I hadn't really read about late-term abortions at all, and I guess had passively accepted the lunatic anti-abortionist assertions, that late-term abortions are of viable babies and it's just lazy women who didn't get an abortion soon enough that seek them out.

Then I started thinking about it, and the implausibility of that stuck: how many women are willing to go through 20 or 25 or 30 weeks of increasing discomfort and unpleasantness, only to terminate 'on a whim'?

Then I read about what the law actually requires: namely, that a late-term abortion will only be granted for medical necessity: now, that is a term that could be subject to abuse and manipulation, and I guess a few times it has been: but the doctors who have the steel and determination to perform this procedure, despite the horrific warfare of terrorism being waged against them, are not likely to be easily swayed, duped, or induced into that.

And then I read about some of Dr Tillers' actual cases. Fox News, and that terrorist pig Bill O'Reilly, trying to make it sound like he was aborting healthy, viable babies all the time. That's not what I read - When you're carrying a fetus with a tumor bigger than its head, or its brain formed on the outside of its head, or it has no face, no chance of ever taking a breath, or it died and is in your body right now putrifying, Tiller was the only guy within hundreds, or thousands, of miles who could help you.

And this is the man that got viciously assassinated. I don't know where he found the guts to carry on, after being harassed for so many years, bombed, shot, but he clearly had a determination to help women who needed it, that I could only class as saintly.