George Tiller: "Saint," "Martyr"
Tuesday, June 2, 2009 at 08:01AM As a Conservative Episcopalian, one has to swallow a lot of stuff to stay in the church. I do all kinds of things for the sake of mental hygiene, although I suppose there are people who would criticize my membership in an institution that I think has gone gravely wrong on matters of moral import. I find, mostly, that the leadership is rather self-oriented overall. I will say, though, that this remark, made by a cleric of my church, sickens me.
"This is about the loss of a man who was a saint and a martyr," [the Very Rev. Katherine Ragsdale] said in an interview before the service. "He was a prayerful man who put his life at risk to protect others and died for it. People are in shock, outrage and mourning. They need a place to go."
A rabbi said that Dr. George Tiller ""joins the list of martyrs for ethical decency and human rights, killed for healing with compassion."
I remember reading an article in a "woman's magazine" that indirectly involved George Tiller. It was a story about his clinic that transformed me from someone who had a rather pragmatic view about abortion to one who is decidedly pro-life. I read this story probably 15 years ago. It was written in the first person about by a woman who was pregnant with a baby who was microcephalic. She opted for a late term abortion so that she wouldn't have to spend six more weeks gestating, go through labor, and give birth to a baby that would likely die shortly thereafter. She described the terrible sadness of the baby's deformity and her trip to the Kansas clinic, and walking past the protesters (who didn't harass her) and of going through a three day ordeal to abort the baby.
The narrative was careful to include elements of her personal situation that would banish all elements of qualifying judgment from the reader's mind, and instill empathy in the target audience: she was married, the pregnancy was wanted, she was mature, middle class.
What I gleaned from this article was that there was no medical necessity for the abortion, at least with respect to the mother's health. The medical necessity, it seemed to me, was to ensure the death of the baby. Even with ultrasounds, doctors can't really predict the viability of a microcephalic, and once a baby is born, the possibility of having to deal with a seriously disabled baby who defies the odds would be the real problem, and indeed, a frightening prospect. I don't remember now if she actually said that or implied it, but that was what I got out of the narrative. The facts otherwise made little sense with respect to her decision, to travel, by herself, and spend a week aborting her baby at a remote location. In fact, the narrative had a quality of "not exactly true, but it could be true" scenario created for the readers of Women's World, or Ladies Home Journal. We now know that some hospitals and doctors allow women who are pregnant with defective babies to have a "therapeutic" abortion, in which case the mother's cervix and vagina are treated with a medicine that causes the cervix to dialate to the extent that it can no longer retain the fetus. I don't know if this method was available fifteen years ago, or if its use has simply become more common as the culture has become more casual about life and anxious about less-than-perfect outcomes.
Or, the other possibility, that has only recently occured to me, that stories like this are planted in magazines to increase the receptivity of mothers to the possibility of ending a pregnancy by defining their own pain or inconvenience as a medical necessity.
There are circumstances in late term pregnancy that require the delivery of the baby early to save the mother's life, but it's very rare indeed that the mother's health is contigent on the killing of the baby. The idea that George Tiller killed to save lives is a terrible lie.
Episcopal Church, George Tiller, abortion