Category Archives: abortion

Disagreeing With Turley?

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Interesting article by Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent, in which Eviatar reviews the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and other law involving threats to abortion clinics and staff. Courts have ruled that “Nuremberg Files”-type expression, such as wanted posters and lists of abortion providers with the names of murdered doctors crossed out, constitute threats and are not protected speech. This is true even though the sick puppies who create the posters and the lists generally avoid making explicit, specific threats.

Under the FACE Act, doctors and clinic workers don’t have to wait for government to act against extremists making threats; they can sue those threatening them. However,

Some civil libertarians, however, have concerns. George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley on the Rachel Maddow Show on Monday cautioned against prosecution or lawsuits against even those who promote violence. “We have this difficult line to walk between free speech and preventative law enforcement,” he said. “The Supreme Court has said that violent speech is protected . . . and it is in fact protected to say all abortion doctors should be killed.”

I found the transcript of the Monday Rachel Maddow program, and Turley doesn’t dismiss the FACE act entirely. He says that when speech amounts to “an imminent threat of violence” legal action can be taken.

To me — and I’m not a lawyer — FACE is akin to anti-stalking laws. Twenty years ago, a woman might be hounded by a stalker who obviously intended to harm her, but as a rule police could do nothing until an assault occurred. “Even when the suspect had followed his victim, sent her hate mail, or behaved in a threatening manner, the police were without legal recourse,” says this U.S. Justice Department document on stalking laws.

One such stalked woman was Rebecca Shaeffer, a young actress who was stalked for two years before her “fan” shot and killed her in 1989. After that, states began to provide stalked women some legal protection, although those laws also have been challenged on First Amendment grounds.

Florida anti-stalking law, for example, calls out “any person who willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly follows or harasses another … engaging in conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress.” This is harassment, the law says, and the target of the harassment can take legal action to stop it.

Anti-stalking laws aren’t perfect and don’t always stop the stalking. A lawyer quoted in Eviatar’s article speaks of the “delicate balance” between protected speech and incitement to violence. Reasonable people can disagree about whether a particular expression falls on one side of the line or another.

To me, if the inflammatory speech is directed at a particular person, it’s crossed that line. It’s one thing to say that “all abortion providers should be killed.” It’s another to make a “wanted” poster of a particular physician and provide directions to his home. Even if the latter expression doesn’t explicitly direct people to shoot and kill the doctor, the implication is clear.

(If you think about it, what is the point of protesting outside abortion clinics except to harass and intimidate patients and staff? The clinics don’t make law and policy. If you want to change the law, don’t protest the clinics; protest Congress. And I feel the same way about anti-war protests at recruitment offices and other military facilities, btw; it’s misdirected and potentially dangerous. If you don’t like war policy, protest Congress and the White House, not the troops.)

This leaves us with the problem of people in national media who whip up enmity against specific abortion providers, as Bill O’Reilly did against Dr. Tiller. O’Reilly pretty explicitly told his viewers and radio audience that Dr. Tiller was wantonly murdering healthy, viable fetuses for frivolous reasons, which all evidence says is a lie. O’Reilly’s audiences didn’t hear the stories behind the decision to terminate a third-trimester pregnancy, nearly always heartbreaking, nearly always made by women who genuinely wanted the baby.

Surely reckless speech such as O’Reilly’s contributes to sense among extremists that they are entitled to murder abortion doctors. I still cannot think of a remedy other than civil suits filed by people who have been injured by anti-abortion extremists, or their survivors. I’m not sure if there are legal grounds for such a suit, but if there were, a couple of successful prosecutions would make the O’Reilly’s of the world tone down their rhetoric, I suspect.

Suspect Is A Wingnut

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By last night a number of rightie bloggers were bristling with outrage that anyone would assume Dr. Tiller’s murderer was an anti-abortion activist.

This morning I see that the person who has been accused of the murder — let’s not forget the presumption of innocence — was an anti-abortion activist.

Peter Slevin and Robert Barnes write for the Washington Post that the accused man, Scott Roeder, “is known in anti-abortion circles as a man who believes that killing an abortion doctor is justifiable.”

As news of Roeder’s arrest traveled, Kansas City activist Regina Dinwiddie remembered the day a dozen years ago when Roeder hugged her in glee after trying to frighten an abortion provider by staring him down inside a Planned Parenthood clinic.

“He grabbed me and said, ‘I’ve read the Defensive Action Statement and I love what you’re doing,’ ” Dinwiddie said in a telephone interview. She was a signer of the 1990s statement, which declares that the use of force is justified.

“I said, ‘You need to get out of here. You can get in a lot of trouble,’ ” Dinwiddie recalled.

Dinwiddie said she does not consider death of Tiller, the nation’s most prominent provider of controversial late-term abortions, to be a homicide.

Another anti-reproductive rights activist, described Roeder as “anti-government” and recalls Roeder had visited Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon, convicted of shooting Dr. Tiller several years ago, in prison.

Also, in May 2007 Tiller’s place of worship was identified on the Operation Rescue website, with the suggestion that people go there and “ask questions” (i.e., harass) the pastor and church members. Dr. Tiller was killed while handing out bulletins in the church’s lobby.

Today rightie bloggers are bristling with outrage at the suggestion that hate speech they and others have flung at Dr. Tiller over the years had anything whatsoever to do with his murder. Little Lulu:

Every mainstream pro-life organization has unequivocally condemned the killing.

I repeat: Every mainstream pro-life organization has unequivocally condemned the killing.

To me, this is akin to giving a known pyromaniac a can of gasoline and a book of matches and then denying you meant for him to start a fire. Condemning the act after it has occurred does not whitewash one’s complicity in it.

Malkin also is amused that so many of us are calling the murder of Dr. Tiller an act of terrorism. “Interesting how the t-word has been rediscovered,” she says. Malkin, you might recall, was at the forefront of the right-wing hysteria campaign against the recent Department of Homeland Security report to federal, state and local law enforcement regarding the threat of terrorism from right-wing extremists groups.

Malkin bristled with outrage at the suggestion that people such as, for example, anti-abortion activists might be capable of violence, and called the report a “hit job” on conservatives. Seems that it’s Lulu who needed to rediscover the “t-word.”

Today many people are focusing on Bill O’Reilly’s long and highly visible crusade against Dr. Tiller. It’s one thing to declare that one is opposed to third trimester abortions; it’s another thing to lie about them. O’Reilly said this on his radio program last year:

Now, a guy in Kansas, George Tiller, OK, can kill a baby — kill a baby — a half-hour before the baby’s supposed to be birthed for no reason whatsoever other than the mother has a pain in her foot. OK? Mother’s health: pain in the foot, migraine headache, whatever it may be.

That’s an outright lie. Kansas law allows no such thing. O’Reilly can tell one lie after another on radio and television, and call it “journalism,” and there appears to be no way to stop him from doing so as long as his employer, Rupert Murdoch, approves of it.

However, I sincerely hope Dr. Tiller’s heirs take O’Reilly and Murdoch to court and sue their socks off.

This nation has a deep commitment to free speech without government censorship. One of the few values Left and Right hold in common is the right of someone to say any damnfool thing he likes without penalty of law. About the only exception is where personal injury is involved. Many other western democracies place some limits on what people can say when it might incite violence, or sometimes just because — literature denying the Holocaust is banned in some places. I don’t want to go that way.

However, maybe it’s time we revisited libel laws. As a rule journalists — including faux journalists like O’Reilly — have little to fear from libel lawsuits, because the plaintiff has to prove “actual malice.” Publishing or broadcasting an untruth, even when it causes harm, is not necessarily libelous if the defendant can claim it was an innocent mistake. Of course, O’Reilly’s been in “reckless disregard for the truth” territory for some time. Perhaps we need to clarify exactly how far a public mouthpiece can go before he wanders into the litigation zone.

Update: See also “O’Reilly’s campaign against murdered doctor” at Salon.

But there’s no other person who bears as much responsibility for the characterization of Tiller as a savage on the loose, killing babies willy-nilly thanks to the collusion of would-be sophisticated cultural elites, a bought-and-paid-for governor and scofflaw secular journalists. Tiller’s name first appeared on “The Factor” on Feb. 25, 2005. Since then, O’Reilly and his guest hosts have brought up the doctor on 28 more episodes, including as recently as April 27 of this year. Almost invariably, Tiller is described as “Tiller the Baby Killer.”

Tiller, O’Reilly likes to say, “destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000.” He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,” said O’Reilly on June 8, 2005; a moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida, he suggested on March 15, 2006. “This is the kind of stuff happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union,” said O’Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006.

This Is Terrorism

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I’ve been out all day and just heard the news that Dr. George Tiller was murdered outside his church. Matt Yglesias says,

Every time you murder a doctor, you create a disincentive for other medical professionals to provide these services. What’s more, you create a need for additional security at facilities around the country. In addition, the anti-abortion protestors who frequently gather near clinics are made to seem much more intimidating by the fact that the occurrence of these sorts of acts of violence.

In general, I think people tend to overestimate the efficacy of violence as a political tactic. But in this particular case, I think people tend to understate it.

It’s not just violence; the harassment of patients, family members and children takes its toll and really do frighten doctors from working at abortion clinics.

Update: Courtesy of Google cache, a website that has disappeared for some reason.

Joan Walsh:

A suspect is in custody, but even though we don’t yet know his identity, it seems safe to assume that Wichita Dr. George Tiller is the latest victim of right-wing American terrorism against abortion providers and supporters. To underscore the hypocrisy of Christian right terrorists who wrap themselves in Jesus, Tiller was murdered in the lobby of his church Sunday morning, just after 10 a.m.

I don’t have time to hunt them down and post quotes, but some rightie bloggers today lack the sense and grace to pretend to be sorry.

The “Common Ground” Fallacy

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This is a warning I’ve issued before, and now I’m issuing it again: In our ongoing national argument over abortion, be careful of the phrases “common ground” and “abortion reduction.” People using these phases don’t necessarily mean the same things by them.

Right now there’s an ongoing debate on the religious Left (yes, there is a religious Left) on the issue of terms and frames and publicly planting the flag of progressivism on moral high ground. Chip Berlet explains:

Instead of embracing the Democratic Party platform and its call for reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, there is an ongoing effort by some pragmatists to reach out to people of faith by adopting the Christian Right frame of reducing the number of abortions.

This shifts the debate from a framework of human rights for women to a narrower Christian Right framework of labeling abortion as a problem to be solved. Reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies will also reduce the number of abortions, but this tactic also functions as an umbrella, sheltering issues such as access to contraception, sex education, and prenatal care for pregnant women who choose that path.

We are talking about shifting the frame to gain a political advantage. That’s what the Christian Right has foisted on Democratic centrists—a rigged frame. The Christian Right goal has been abortion reduction for decades. On the other hand, the Democratic Party platform developed by Team Obama is framed as reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. Big difference.

President Obama clearly has emphasized reducing unwanted pregnancies over some vaguely defined “abortion reduction.” He did this in the campaign and in the Notre Dame speech last week.

However, the terms “abortion reduction” and “common ground” are interpreted as “criminalizing abortion” on the religious Right.

Today this news item at Human Events, by Wendy Wright of that wretched abomination known as “Concerned Women for America,” has the wingnuts in a lather:

Two days before President Obama’s commencement address at Notre Dame, I was at the White House for one of the meetings that he spoke about. About twenty of us with differing views on abortion were brought in to find “common ground.” But the most important point that came from the meeting was perhaps a slip from an Obama aide. …

… Ask nearly anyone, “What is Obama’s goal on abortion?” They’ll answer, “Reduce the number of abortions.” A Notre Dame professor and priest insisted this in a television debate after Obama’s speech. The Vatican newspaper reported it. Rush Limbaugh led a spirited debate on his radio program the next day based on this premise.

But that’s not what his top official in charge of finding “common ground” says.

Melody Barnes, the Director of Domestic Policy Council and a former board member of Emily’s List, led the meeting. As the dialogue wound down, she asked for my input.

I noted that there are three main ways the administration can reach its goals: by what it funds, its messages from the bully pulpit, and by what it restricts. It is universally agreed that the role of parents is crucial, so government should not deny parents the ability to be involved in vital decisions. The goals need to be clear; the amount of funding spent to reduce unintended pregnancies and abortions is not a goal. The U.S. spends nearly $2 billion each year on contraception programs — programs which began in the 1970s — and they’ve clearly failed. We need to take an honest look at why they are not working.

Melody testily interrupted to state that she had to correct me. “It is not our goal to reduce the number of abortions.”

The room was silent.

The goal, she insisted, is to “reduce the need for abortions.”

BTW, this is directly from President Obama’s Notre Dame speech (emphasis added):

So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions, let’s reduce unintended pregnancies. Let’s make adoption more available. Let’s provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics, as well as respect for the equality of women.” Those are things we can do.

Sometimes during the campaign Obama wasn’t as clear as some wanted him to be, but on the whole he has consistently said that the foundation of his abortion policy would be to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies. But wingnuts hear the words “common ground” and “abortion reduction” and somehow think this is going to translate into a program of criminalizing abortion. And when someone explains to them that is not what he meant, they get all huffy about it.

But the Right has a pattern of feigning shock and outrage whenever President Obama goes ahead and does something he clearly said he would do. Either that or they’re just damn bad listeners.

Wendy Wright’s out-of-hand dismissal of contraceptive programs is based on nothing but woeful, and willful, ignorance. The money spent on contraceptive programs (I don’t know if it’s $2 billion now; it was $1.4 billion in 2004) has provided a handsome return, according to an unbiased scholarly study:

Using a methodology similar to prior cost-benefit analyses, we estimated the numbers of unintended pregnancies prevented by all U.S. publicly funded family planning clinics in 2004, nationally (1.4 million pregnancies) and for each state. We also compared the actual costs of providing these services ($1.4 billion) with the anticipated public-sector costs for maternity and infant care among the Medicaid-eligible women whose births were averted ($5.7 billion) to calculate net public sector savings ($4.3 billion). Thus, public expenditures for family planning care not only help women to achieve their childbearing goals, but they also save public dollars: Our calculations indicate that for every $1 spent, $4.02 is saved.

See also Steve Waldman, “The Truth About Contraceptives Stimulating the Economy.”

Wendy Wright at Human Events continues:

Note what Obama said in his speech at Notre Dame:

“So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions. …”

Notice how the wingnut left out the rest of the sentence, “… let’s reduce unintended pregnancies.”

Abortion advocates object to the phrase “reducing abortions.”

That’s because, as Chip Berlet says and as I have said before, when the Right talks about “reducing abortion” they mean criminalizing abortion. We on the Left are fine with reducing the number of abortions, but we want to be crystal clear that the means to do that is primarily through reducing unintended pregnancies.

Howard Dean, then head of the Democratic National Committee, validated my concern. He told NBC’s Tim Russert: “We can change our vocabulary, but I don’t think we ought to change our principles.”

By all his actions so far, Obama is following this plan.

Obama needs to be honest with Americans. Is it true that it is not his goal to reduce the number of abortions?

More importantly, will he do anything that will reduce abortions? Actions are far more important than words.

The irony is, as I’ve said many times before, that criminalizing abortion does not reduce abortion. It only drives it under ground. On the other hand, there is copious empirical evidence that increased use of contraceptives really does drive down the rate of abortion, whereas criminalizing it does not.

What was that about actions being more important than words, Ms. Wright?

In fact, the “common ground” of which the Obama Administration speaks is reducing the number of abortions through reducing the number of unintended pregnancies. But wingnuts like Wright do not want to reduce the number of abortions; they just want to make abortion a criminal act. So there will be no common ground with them, unless they move out of Crazyland and decide to accept reality.

The Notre Dame Speech

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I read the text of President Obama’s Notre Dame graduation speech, and as usual it was a fine speech.

I’m glad he spoke directly to abortion, and that he made it clear that when he speaks of reducing the number of abortions he means to do it primarily by reducing the number of unintended pregnancies. So often “abortion reduction” and “common ground” are code words for “we’re going to nibble Roe v. Wade to death with stupid abortion restrictions.”

Frances Kissling writes,

By stressing a long-standing Democratic Party commitment to preventing unintended pregnancy and supporting pregnant women who continue pregnancies under a new name — “reducing the need for abortion” — he got most of these Catholics to vote for him in 2008.

Still, Obama yoked the strongest possible feminist affirmation of the right to choose abortion to his message of abortion reduction — and many pro-life Catholics voted for him anyway, a sign of how disgusted they were with the Republicans. At an April 29 press conference the president explained why he is pro-choice in terms that most feminists would applaud. “The reason I’m pro-choice is because I don’t think women take [abortion] casually. I think they struggle with these decisions each and every day. And I think they are in a better position to make these decisions ultimately than members of Congress or the president of the United States.” A feminist theologian might tweak the language, but the bottom line is that the president’s theology is feminist. Women are moral adults and agents; they think about abortion in complex and thoughtful ways and they should be trusted to make the decision. The president has not waffled on abortion.

I’ve said many times that what really separates people who want to criminalize abortion and those who don’t is not whether they think a fetus is a person. It’s whether they appreciate that a woman is a person. “Women are moral adults and agents; they think about abortion in complex and thoughtful ways and they should be trusted to make the decision.” Exactly. To me, terminating a healthy pregnancy is a sad thing, but reducing women to the status of brood animals is a lot sadder.

Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times that the President “appealed to partisans on both sides to find ways to respect one another’s basic decency and even work together to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.” Baker also said,

Anti-abortion leaders protested his appearance at the University of Notre Dame and he was heckled four times during a commencement address by protesters yelling slogans like “abortion is murder.” But the audience shouted down the hecklers and cheered Mr. Obama as he called for “open hearts, open minds, fair-minded words” in a debate that has polarized the country for decades.

Meanwhile, Randall Terry was seen on campus pushing a baby carriage occupied by a doll covered in blood.

Peter Baker mentioned a recent Gallup poll that shows a rise in the number of people calling themselves “pro-life.” Ed Kilgore and Matt Yelgesias explain why the poll is misleading.

Personally, I liked this part of the President’s speech, even the “G” part:

But remember, too, that you can be a crossroads. Remember, too, that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It’s the belief in things not seen. It’s beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us. And those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own.

And this doubt should not push us away our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, cause us to be wary of too much self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open and curious and eager to continue the spiritual and moral debate that began for so many of you within the walls of Notre Dame.

Reinhold Niebuhr, big time.

Update: See E.J. Dionne:

The thunderous and repeated applause that greeted Obama and the Rev. John I. Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president who took enormous grief for asking him to appear, stood as a rebuke to those who said the president should not have been invited.

One-Way Bridge

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This article from Wall Street Journal illustrates by alarm bells should go off whenever anyone speaks of “common ground” on abortion. Laura Meckler writes that President Obama is inviting advocates from across the political spectrum to try to find common ground on abortion. And that’s grand. But notice where the “common ground” is:

Ms. Barnes told participants that the White House is interested in hearing ideas in several areas, among them: sex education; responsible use of contraception; maternal and child health; pregnancy discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere; and adoption.

Those are all ideas any good feminist/liberal/progressive/pro-choicer can accept easily. That’s including adoption, as long as the decision to give up maternal rights is made without coercion of any sort.

The White House position is to reduce the number of abortions in America by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in America. Again, that’s a position any feminist/liberal/progressive/pro-choicer is comfortable with. We’ve been making the same argument for years.

Now, who is not in favor of better sex education and greater access to contraceptives? The so-called “right to life” movement is not in favor of those things. Anti-choice organizations run the gamut of taking no position on contraceptive use to being actively opposed to contraceptives. They’re all opposed to sex education, preferring the sham substitute, “abstinence only.”

I talked about the alarm bells — there are some allegedly “progressive” religious leaders making noises about common ground on abortion, and they talk about reducing abortion rate. But when you hear the term “abortion reduction,” look under the hood to see what’s running the engine. Sometimes “abortion reduction” is a code word for reducing the number of abortions by chipping away at abortion access through creative legal restrictions.

So, I prefer to talk about reducing unwanted pregnancy, not reducing abortion, although fewer abortions certainly is one of the outcomes of reducing unwanted pregnancy. And providing material support for women who don’t want to abort but are in a place in their lives where pregnancy and child care are untenable is fine with me, too, as long as reducing unwanted pregnancy is the first priority.

I’ve long argued that the way the abortion controversy is presented in media is a false dichotomy. The conventional wisdom is that the pro- and anti-choice sides are equally extreme and must meet in the middle. Although you can find people with all manner of extremist positions, if you look at the major pro- and anti-choice organizations, you are not looking at two equally extremist sides. One side —

  • Supports avoiding unwanted pregnancy as much as possible through contraceptive use and informed sexual behavior. This in turn will reduce the rate of abortion.
  • Supports Roe v. Wade, which includes the provision that states may prohibit elective third-term abortion as long as exceptions can be made for life and health of the mother.
  • Supports the decisions of women who choose to carry pregnancies to term.

The other side —

  • Either refuses to support contraceptive use or is actively opposed to it.
  • Wants to criminalize all abortions, even very early ones, including non-elective abortions in cases of medically compromised pregnancies.
  • Wants to take the ability to make reproductive decisions away from women.

This is just not two equally extreme sides.

As Lynn Harris writes at Salon, media lazily equate positions such as those advocated by the White House as a “compromise” with anti-choice positions.

… it’s not necessarily accurate to portray such framing — no matter who does it and what issues one may have with the particulars — as a “compromise.” Especially given the increasingly vocal opposition to contraception, since when is supporting it a compromise? When it comes to abortion, lots of us have been talking about prevention, and about how “it’s not just about Roe” — or, for that matter, “choice” — for a good while. I’d call this expanding the debate, not ceding ground. And now that legislators and journalists have picked up on it, the longer the focus on prevention and healthcare gets misrepresented as “compromise,” I say the longer we’ll be fighting.

Update: Obama budget eliminates funding for “abstinence only” education. Time for the dancing banana —

Believe It, or Not

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A couple of days ago I lambasted this guy for being an idiot, but I realize now I was mistaken. He is a satirist. He is a brilliant satirist. A brilliant liberal satirist. It’s the only possible explanation for this.

Once you recover from reading the piece linked above (take your time), check out the Politico story that goes with this headline:

“Obama boosts anti-abortion efforts“

WTF, you say. Well, if you read the article, you find out that Obama has not betrayed his pro-reproduction rights campaign positions. Rather, he is “boosting” anti-abortion efforts by being pro-choice.

In that case, boost away, Mr. President.

Dr. Tiller Update

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Here’s an update on Dr. George Tiller, who is on trial for violating Kansas abortion law. A reporter for television station KAKE, Cayle Thompson, is live blogging the trial. From the blog —

Monnat asks why so few doctors perform abortions now. Tiller says it’s because of the threat to the doctor’s families, themselves and their lives. He recounts how his clinic was bombed in 1986. “It takes people who are dedicated to the care of women and their health care rights after such a bombing,” Tiller says. The bombing caused around $100,000 in damages.

In 1991, Tiller’s clinic was the sight of the Summer of Mercy, where hundreds of protestors gathered to picket. Tiller says on days when women would come to his clinic, protestors would block the entrance and have to be forcibly removed by police for patients to get through. Tiller says police made approximately 2,000 arrests during the protests. …

… In 1993, Doctor Tiller was shot by an abortion protestor. It happened as he left work. Tiller said he saw somebody approach his car. He thought it was an abortion opponent preparing to hand him literature. But when he saw her clearly, he realized she was carrying a gun.

“She shot at me five times,” Tiller told jurors. “She hit me in each arm. It was attempted murder.” …

… In 1994, one year after Tiller was shot, FBI investigators learned he was the #1 target for assasination by radical abortion opponents. He was given protection by federal US Marshalls from 1994 to 1997.

This is terrorism. Why isn’t the government treating it as such? Well, I know why. Let’s go on.

Tiller tells the jury how some abortion protestors have broken into his church during services and disrupted worship. He tells them his staff has been picketed outside their own homes, with photos of aborted fetuses plastered around the neighborhood. …

… He also tells jurors how protestors would picket the hotel where his out-of-town patients stayed. Some would even follow patients to their rooms, and slip anti-abortion literature under the doors.

State and federal governments have coddled these people. Anti-abortion extremists are dangerous, and it is way past time they were treated as such.

Update: I see that in the afternoon testimony, the prosecutors asked Dr. Tiller how much money he makes. This is one of the obsessions of the Fetus People; that the abortion “industry” exists because it’s a big money maker.

Dr. Tiller, whose practice includes more difficult late-term abortions, says the average abortion in his clinic costs $6,000. But if he were just in it for the money, he’d do a lot better delivering live babies.

For patients not covered by health insurance, the typical cost of a vaginal delivery without complications ranges from about $9,000 to $17,000 or more, depending on geographic location and whether there is a discount for uninsured patients. The typical cost for a C-section without complications or a vaginal delivery with complications ranges from about $14,000 to $25,000 or more.

Monsters Without Hearts

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For years anti-reproductive rights goons have been trying to take out Dr. George Tiller. His Kansas clinic was bombed in 1985. A “pro-life” fanatic shot him in both arms in 1993. Patients trying to enter his clinic are viciously harassed.

Now the state of Kansas is trying to convict Dr. Tiller for violating Kansas abortion law, and opening arguments in the trial began yesterday. Robin Abcarian writes in the Los Angeles Times, “by day’s end, it was clear that the case could hinge on such nonmedical issues as who paid for copy paper and toner, the meaning of a hug and whether selling a beat-up sedan to a colleague can constitute proof of guilt.”

Copy paper? Hugs? Indeed, yes.

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