Thoughts on the death of Dr. George Tiller

I found this out by accident Monday night while reading a friend's comments on Facebook about an unrelated subject. Abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered Sunday morning while serving as an usher at his Lutheran church in Wichita, Kansas.

Dr. Tiller and his clinic were controversial in part because he was a provider of late-term abortions--abortions performed after the fetus is supposed to be able to survive outside of its mother's body. These are the abortions that the Christian Right uses as "proof" that the right to choose is the same as "baby killing." Even Frank Schaeffer, a former Christian Right leader who has recanted many of his former positions, claims that the availability of late-term abortions is partly to blame for Dr. Tiller's murder:

Contributing to an extreme and sometimes violent climate has not only been the fault of the antiabortion crusaders. The Roe v. Wade decision went to far, too fast and was too sweeping. I believe that abortion should be legal. But I also believe that it should be re-regulated according to fetal development. It's the late term abortions that horrify most people...(T)he Roe ruling was an over broad court decision that makes abortion legal even in the last weeks of pregnancy. Take away the pictures of all those dead late term fetuses and everything changes emotionally. Democracy and civil debate is messy but if abortion had been argued state-by-state abortion would be legal in almost all our states today and probably the laws would be written more like those of Europe, where late-term abortions (of the kind Dr. Tiller specialized in performing) are illegal and/or highly discouraged.

Schaeffer is seriously oversimplifying Roe v. Wade, the 1972 Supreme Court decision that affirmed--with some serious qualifications--a woman's right to choose. Writing for the court, Justice Harry Blackmun summarized his opinion as follows:

1. A state criminal abortion statute of the current Texas type, that excepts from criminality only a lifesaving procedure on behalf of the mother, without regard to pregnancy stage and without recognition of the other interests involved, is violative of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician.

(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health.

(c) For the stage subsequent to viability, the State in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother.

In other words, under Roe v. Wade, once the stage of viability has been reached, abortion is legal only to protect the pregnant woman's life or health. According to Wikipedia, the law in Kansas, where Dr. Tiller's clinic is located, "prohibits aborting viable fetuses, which is generally midway through the second trimester, unless two doctors certify that continuing the pregnancy would cause the woman `substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.'[25]"

Opponents of abortion rights often argue that late-term abortions are often performed for trivial reasons, such as "temporary depression" on the part of the pregnant woman. Barack Obama, during the recent presidential campaign, famously said that pregnant women should not be allowed to obtain late-term abortions for reasons of "mental distress." But as one woman described eloquently on RHRealityCheck.org, this mental distress is most often caused by the discovery by the mother that she is carrying a fetus that has such serious problems that it will never be able to survive outside her body.

RHRealityCheck.org has many excellent posts on Dr. Tiller and his murder, including a forum on which women are sharing their personal experience of late term abortion, and also this report that Tiller's colleague Leroy Carhart is working to ensure that Tiller's practice continues.