how can a murderer be pro-life?

[cellio]

I keep starting and abandoning posts about the murder of Dr. Tiller. I guess I'm still a little dumbfounded by the fanaticism involved.

It's not about pro-choice versus pro-life; the people I know who oppose abortion are not cold-blooded murderers, and we can disagree thoughtfully and respectfully. And most of the people I know who oppose abortion still grant that under some circumstances it might be the least-bad path, if the life of the mother is at stake (and with it the life of the fetus anyway, in some cases). I don't like abortion, but I feel it can be necessary sometimes. People like Randall Terry call Dr. Tiller a butcher; what do you call a doctor who stands idly by while a woman dies from a pregnancy gone horribly wrong?

But as I said, this isn't just about abortion. The person who murdered Dr. Tiller committed the same kind of terroristic act as the unabomber or the Oklahoma City bombers or any number of other people trying to advance a position by inciting fear and committing violence. No matter what the issue is, the method is unacceptable. As with treason, terrorism is about more than the specific acts committed by the wrongdoers. It doesn't seem like our legal system has a good way to deal with that, and indeed it would be hard to write the relevant laws, but I sure hope this factor is taken into account when Dr. Tiller's murderer is convicted and sentenced. The murder of any individual is sad; this was not just the murder of one individual. It needs to be discussed and, if possible, prosecuted as the larger crime.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

It's hard to wrap one's brain around.

The 'logic' route I can find is this:

1. Abortion is wrong.
2. ...Because it's killing a person.
3. It's evil to kill people.
4. People who do evil are "Evil people".
5. "Evil people" aren't people.
6. It's okay to kill "evil people".

This also explains how pro-'life'rs can be pro-death penalty, another paradox. See, you're not killing "real" people or innocent babies, you're killing evil doers! You're actually doing the world a favor!

(...It also points to how misleading the term "pro-life" is, and why I basically never use it without sneer quotes. Save a life? No... just justify making a decision for someone else. But it's not a nanny state! we hate those.)

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I was about to write in three paragraphs what you covered more fully in the three last lines of your comment. *concurs*

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Step 3 can actually be "it's wrong to kill an innocent person". Focus on innocence too much, and you aren't going to care about actual people because they aren't that innocent.

[indigodove.livejournal.com]

As a faithful Catholic, all I can say is that a person who makes a choice like this, killing another human being in cold blood (and in his CHURCH...don't get me started there), well, he isn't pro-life, or acting in a Christian manner.

It just makes me sick.

[cellio]

This is what I've heard from pretty much all the Christians I've heard speak about this, and it's what I would expect from those I know. A few wingnuts do not define your religion.

[alaricmacconnal.livejournal.com]

This comment is being really tough to write as I just can't seem to write down what I'm thinking. Here's a stab that is less bad than the others (and one possible line of reasoning might explain, but not justify, Mr. Terry's actions):

I think part of the issue here is that, a murderer who gets the death penalty has had the benefit of a trial, whereas the victim of an abortion has had no such benefit.

The murderer, in this case, is being a vigilante as he is stepping in because he believes that the state has failed in its duty.

This, of course, brings up the issue of when (and how) it is appropriate for an individual to step in when the state is failing (or an individual believes it is failing) in its duty ...

[cellio]

Thank you for your comment.

Yes, the vigilante issue is also an important one. Under what circumstances is one permitted to override the law, to say it doesn't apply because the state is wrong and you are right? Messy stuff.

Is the fetus always a murder victim? If I kill a person in self-defense (and the court agrees) then I have not committed murder, though someone ended up dead. Can this not be true with a fetus too? I think there are a lot more shades of gray here than either side would prefer.

Speaking more generally now and not specifically to you: If we could all agree to use less loaded words (in both directions) I think it would improve the discourse. "Murder" is inflammatory; so is "eviction", or comparing an abortion to a haircut or plastic surgery. Can we agree that the fetus that ends up dead has been "killed" and not ascribe intent that might not be there? I've heard of too many people who mourned abortions they found necessary to assume the intent for murder has been formed.

[hildakrista.livejournal.com]

Ah, but there are even more shades of grey here... "Can we agree that the fetus ends up dead...?" No, I don't think we can. To end up dead, something has to be living in the first place, and at what point does life begin? I would absolutely agree that the possibility of life begins at conception, but the possibility of life is NOT life. Is every masturbatory emission considered child abandonment? I think not.

Though to be fair, that statement has a slippery slope fallacy, but it kinda illustrates my point. We just don't know enough to be sure when life begins. We can't even agree on what life IS! What about Terry Schaivo? Was it right to take her off the equipment keeping her breathing? Was she alive? There is as much controversy in artificially extending "entities that may or may not have life" as there is in artificially truncating such entities. The point is that we just can't say for sure. All we have to go on, on either side, is belief. Neither side has good proof one way or another.

And when one version of a belief systems tries to stamp out their "opponents", it never, never ends well.

To go a little of topic, I should disclaim here that I am fervently (yes, I know, ironic) Pro-Choice. I do not advocate abortion, but I am against people trying to impose their belief system (in absence of good proof) on me such that it removes my choice. As an anti-abortion law would. To me, making abortion illegal because "it's wrong" is akin to making Judaism illegal because "it's not the right religion".

[cellio]

I too am adamantly pro-choice. From a civil-liberties perspective, it's her body, period. From a church-state perspective, no one gets to impose any particular religious view on the rest of us. From a Jewish perspective, our tradition teaches that abortion is permitted and could be mandatory in certain cases.

I am looking for a way to have the discussion without immediately jumping to the inflammatory rhetoric on both sides. By "ends up dead" I did not mean to imply a state transition. Just that, in the end, it is not alive.

All we have to go on, on either side, is belief. Neither side has good proof one way or another.

And belief is a lousy way to try to run a civil government, yes.

[alaricmacconnal.livejournal.com]

I consulted with my rector (priest) regarding the Terry Schiavo case, as it really bothered me. Here's a summary of the response he gave (errors in writing down are mine, but I hope I captured the intent):

Once the decision has been made to artifically extend an individuals life, it is wrong to remove that life support until the individual dies. However, it is perfectly ok to not artifically extend life as it allows the individual to die a natural death.

Does this help? I don't know, but it did help clarify a viewpoint but it raises other questions:

When is a person dead? Who can make the decision for them? Yuck.

[fauxklore]

The comparison to self-defense is also an apt one in Jewish thought (which does not consider abortion murder).

The anti-choice crowd (and I do not intend by that all people who are "pro-life," just a subset of them) has a tendency to assume all abortions are frivolous. I read an article that interviewed ond of Dr. Tiller's patients, discussing the circumstances of her late-term abortions. Even though the article was explicit about what happened (a wanted pregnancy, an ultrasound revealing anencephaly at 24 weeks) there were some comments on the article which said "oh, so you suddenly decided you didn't want to be pregnant and murdered your baby."

If we don't listen to one another, we'll never make progress.

[cellio]

Yes. Some people surely make the decision frivolously, but some do not, and to tar all patients with the "frivolous" brush is equivalent to tarring all Christians with the "murderer" brush.

[alaricmacconnal.livejournal.com]

No, the fetus isn't always a murder victim (I agree with you there - I was attempting to look at things from Mt. Terry's point of view). I've always understood that murder implies some intent (that's why, I believe, we have manslaughter in the legal system and don't always prosecute in the self-defense cases).

Once we can define when a fetus becomes a human being (and has the same rights as an adult), things become clearer, but then it comes down to a conflict of rights (who gets to decide, the individual or the state). Can the individual also decide to give up their own life such that their childs lives (and can the state, or another individual, override that)? Like you said ... messy stuff.

[sethg]

If I kill a person in self-defense (and the court agrees) then I have not committed murder, though someone ended up dead. Can this not be true with a fetus too?

AIUI, the official Catholic position is that since the fetus is not intending to kill anyone, it is innocent even if its presence is causing a hazard. Thus, for example, in El Salvador, where thanks to Church influence abortion is absolutely forbidden across the board, if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy the doctors have to check the embryo for a heartbeat before they can remove it. If there's a heartbeat, aborting the fetus is illegal even if the pregnancy, left unchecked, would kill the mother.

This contrasts with the Jewish position, which is not only more flexible about when human life begins, but allows for the possibility that the law of a rodef [a person creating a danger to someone else's life, who may be killed by a third party if necessary] applies even when someone is creating an unintentional hazard.

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

One could distinguish between self-defense and killing a person to save one's own life. The former has some connotation of killing intent on the part of the other party which does not exist in a case of abortion.

Say Bob needs a heart transplant. The only person known to be a compatible donor is Joe. By Joe continuing to live, he is ensuring Bob's death. Can Bob or his relatives kill Joe to take his heart? If a fetus is less of a person, or less deserving of life than its mother, than this is not analogous. However, if a fetus and its mother are considered equal under the law/morality, then why is the case of Bob & Joe different from abortion?

[hildakrista.livejournal.com]

This is going to sounds strange, but I don't think the murder was about abortion at all. I think that people who kill on purpose are likely unbalanced and very easily misled. Such people fall into many, many different situations in this world, and it's a combination of luck and environment that leads them to their eventual ends.

If the good doctor's killer was mentally unbalanced and easily misled, then a different combination of events would have led him to hurt someone else for a different reason, but the damage to someone else (whether murder or not) was probably inevitable.

These are the people that are this world's fanatics. What form the fanatics take depends, I think, mainly on environment. Some fanatics straps bombs to themselves and blow up in busy train terminals. Some of them are widely respected and revered religious leaders. Some have 120 cats in their houses. All these people scare me.

When fanatics are bought up in an intolerant household, they become very, very dangerous. Tolerance is key to diffusing these sorts of people, and it's a damn shame that so many religions, including the murderer's brand of Christianity, regularly steep children in intolerance.

[subdivisions.livejournal.com]

I can't really comment on the Tiller case, because that guy might actually have some mental problems (they apparently run in his family or something?).

But the available social science research on the motivations of terrorists more generally indicates that in fact they are typically quite "normal", and no more likely to be mentally ill than other members of the population.

That research also identifies some of the reasons why so-called normal people engage in acts of terrorism, which are too complicated to go into in detail in a comment, but essentially boil down to "unmet expectations". Human beings don't have to be mentally ill to kill on purpose - they just have to experience the right combination of circumstances in life. Disturbing thought, but true. Sorry. :-(

[dragontdc.livejournal.com]

One person's terrorism is another person's asymetric guerrilla warfare. When "normal" people are engaging in terrorism, they usually consider themselves (and describe themselves as being) "at war" with a vastly more powerful and numerous foe. The methods of terrorism are those of force-multiplication taken to extremes that carry them outside the bounds of conventional warfare.

Abortion--Worth Killing For?!

[anniemal.livejournal.com]

I have always been careful to avoid pregnancy. Rubbers on all but three. I don't spread disease willingly. I don't take new lovers idly. But pre-menopause, I was so careful. No insemination, no abortion. No nasty parasite in my system. No labor, no birth. I'd never have regarded it as a life. Just a bunch of cells proliferating inside me. With a gross result if I were obliged to bear the process.

I realise that this feeling is abnormal. Tough. I didn't want any of it. No babies, none of that. I never felt worth reproducing, had a suitable man, or ynogh money at the dame time.

Killing a thoughtful human being is grounds for death. Just a first thought. I could reconsider. But we want to keep him around? I'm betting the doctor thought hard about the work he did. It had to be ugly and hard. He had to think hard to be a doctor in the first place.

Other folks think otherwise. Fine.

Re: Abortion--Worth Killing For?!

[dringle.livejournal.com]

Hello. I just wanted to say hi to you because I feel the same way as you do about having sex. I have my own reasons - I was raped so I'm sensitive to things like that and what happens to my body. I just wanted you to know that you're not alone in your feelings.

[byronhaverford.livejournal.com]

I would love to sit down with you and Alaric to work through ideas on this (we're queuing up a list of such discussions). In this forum, I will say that, IMHO, "pro-choice" is a more misleading term than "pro-life", so I don't describe myself as pro-choice. I think that abortion should be legal, just as virtually any medical procedure should be legal (see: assisted suicide) when performed by individuals trained in medicine AND ethics. Congress is completely unable to judge the ethics of an individual case.

[alaricmacconnal.livejournal.com]

That sounds ominous :).

I think it would be neat, though, and will most likely produce many other questions :).

[cellio]

I would enjoy that conversation.

Aren't all (US, licensed) doctors trained in ethics both in med school and as part of continuing education?

I'd like to understand your objection to "pro-choice". "Pro-legal-abortion-via-licensed-medical-providers" is a little unwieldy, and "pro-abortion" is incorrect. (I am not "pro-abortion": I am "pro--option-for-abortion".)

[byronhaverford.livejournal.com]

Ethics in med school: in theory, yes. But it was pretty darn superficial at mine.
Ethics in CME: not so much.

I feel that "pro-choice" avoids the core question of whether abortion is murder. If you believe that abortion is murder, then choice is irrelevant. Thus, the term "pro-choice" prevents one side from addressing the core issue and leads to a communication failure. "Pro-life" isn't perfect, but it's closer.

How about "I support RvW" vs. "I oppose RvW"?

[nickjong.livejournal.com]

I too wish the discussion surrounding this crime more closely examined its connections to terrorism and hate crimes. In practical terms, the important differentiating factor is that a large fraction of the population shares the criminal's ideological position against abortion, if not his methods. Unfortunately, this factor severely constrains how public personalities cover this story. Even so, it's clear to me that any portrayal (including the eventual prosecution) of the crime as a "mere" murder misses a critical consideration.

I believe the first step is to expand the lexicon (or to take a stand and fully label this crime as a terrorist act). A lynching is more than just a murder. Rape is more than just assault and battery.