Seeking common ground on murder and following in the footsteps of George Tiller

I have kind of been beating the same drum over and over here, but this whole tragic event surrounding George Tiller has served for me as a stark reminder of what is going on all around us. I opened up the Lansing phone book this morning and glanced at the glossy color ads for abortion providers touting their services, no doubt kept busy by the college students in the area. There is a Planned Parenthood clinic right on the main drag on the north side of the campus of Michigan State, right amidst the coffee shops and bookstores. I have eaten at Buffalo Wild Wings just a block or so away from an innocuous looking door, behind which young women in the earlier 20’s are make life-altering decisions to kill their own children. It can be easy to get caught up in everything else and really to start feeling hopeless about abortion, but the need is as great today as it has ever been for us to fight. We may not be in a position to overturn Roe v. Wade, but abortion is a war we can fight one woman, one unborn child at a time. We might not be able to save them all but we can spare no effort to see one child live that otherwise would have died.

The latest impetus for a rant was just a horribly disturbing article in the Wall Street Journal this morning, Common Ground on Late-Term Abortion: Anguish. What was so distressing about it was the sheer hypocrisy it exposes among abortion on demand advocates.

I have already made the statement, which I will reiterate now, that there is no place for “common ground” when it comes to abortion. Abortion is not a political issue. It is a fundamental issue of humanity, how do we view children in our society even the smallest and most defenseless ones? The idea that we can find areas for agreement on abortion is ridiculous on its face. People who oppose abortion typically oppose abortion because we consider it the murder of a defenseless human child. When you start from that position, your room for “common ground” evaporates. The entire conversation with pro-abortion folks is so full of misrepresentation and outright dishonesty as to make discussion, much less “common ground”, unfathomable. For example, when you look at the shenanigans that abortionists and their profiteering lawyers engage in to get around the laws, it ought to make you nauseous.

Thirty-seven states, including Kansas, prohibit late-term abortions. But under Supreme Court precedents set in 1973 in Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, state restrictions on abortion must generally include exceptions for the woman's life and health, which includes mental and emotional health.

Medical records subpoenaed by prosecutors in Kansas indicate Dr. Tiller approved some late-term abortions on the grounds that the women suffered from anxiety or depression. To opponents, those are shockingly flimsy excuses. But several attempts to prosecute Dr. Tiller for violating the law failed.

So the law is framed in such a way that a woman can pay someone to kill her unborn child late in her pregnancy because she is “anxious”? How many women are NOT anxious during pregnancy especially in the later stages?

What was really unfathomable is that one person cited in the article has decided on a career in killing because of the slaying of George Tiller.

Dr. Tiller's killing has pushed some young doctors to commit to a career in abortion. Lisa Hofler, a medical student at Emory University, had been mulling over the idea for some time despite her husband's concern for her safety. Now, she said, she's determined to offer abortions as part of her practice.

Still, she expects to limit her practice to first-trimester abortions. She doesn't feel comfortable, she said, pushing the boundaries.

I really have a hard time believing that a substantial number of med students are going to be inspired to abandon healing and take up being an abortionist based on this event. The report cites just this one person and in reading her comments I could only think: What a twisted worldview. Abortion is so important that she wants to take her intellect, a pile of student loan debt and probably nearly a decade of college, med school and internships and put that education to use ending pregnancies. But just in the first trimester, anything later and she might start to feel guilty about it. Why is it OK on one day but not the next?

Even many ardent supporters of abortion look at late second trimester or third trimester abortions, up to and including partial birth abortions, and get squeamish. Being “pro-choice” makes for a swell political slogan, looks great on t-shirts and bumper stickers but when the reality of what is going on hits you in the face, it sort of muddies the waters. If it is just a medical procedure, why not publicize it? A picture of a spleen being removed might be icky but it is not morally offensive. Show someone a picture with the results of making a “choice” and the image of a dismembered baby will shake you, not because of the medical ickiness but because the picture of a tiny child dismembered stirs something fundamental in what it means to be a human. It just screams out that it is wrong. I know we don’t like using a word that is so inflexible like “wrong” today, but some things just are “wrong” and we cannot be afraid to say so.

What is the difference between a first trimester and a third trimester unborn child? Viability is a bogus argument. Can a first trimester baby live outside the womb. Of course not. Could a third trimester? Not without the nearly constant attention of her mother. In fact, a baby after birth requires a lot more time and attention to survive than a baby in the womb. My one and a half year old is smart as a whip and mischievous as the day is long, but even 18 months after she was born she is not “viable” without the care and attention of her mom and siblings to keep her fed, changed, rested and (more or less) clean. So it must be something else, something else that causes people to draw an imaginary line in the sand where a child goes from a mere blob of flesh to something we feel uncomfortable killing.

I am glad for one thing. Even today, thirty years after the gross injustice of Roe v. Wade and the ensuing bloody decades of “choice”, even after the deaths of millions of babies, even after a whole generation has been conditioned to see abortion as a fact of life hidden behind vague terminology and slogans to hide the horror, even after all of that people still feel a sense of revulsion when they think about a child mere weeks or days from being delivered having a doctor end their life. That isn’t much to be glad about but it is something.