Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Editorial: 'Pro-life' murder
Tone down the rhetoric after the cold-blooded murder of Dr. George Tiller.
From the RoundTable blog
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"Tiller the baby killer" is what many anti-abortion Web sites called him. Even after his murder Sunday, commenters on The RoundTable, our editorial page blog, were likening Dr. George Tiller to Jeffrey Dahmer, Hitler and other murderers.
Many anti-abortion groups denounced Sunday's murder of the most vilified abortion provider in the nation, though Operation Rescue's Randall Terry managed to begin his denunciation of the murder with this phrase: "George Tiller was a mass-murderer."
Terry also used his statement to worry that the Obama administration would use the killing "to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions." Toning down that rhetoric isn't an option, Terry said. "Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name: murder."
This is just one reason that President Obama called for a change in the tone of the abortion debate at his controversial University of Notre Dame commencement speech. That will be difficult to achieve. It is no accident that Obama posed this as a question: "How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?"
Tiller, one of the few physicians in the nation who specialized in late-term abortions, didn't see himself as a baby killer. He saw himself as a physician helping women forced into awful decisions late in their pregnancies.
The moral certitude that leads to blanket statements such as those by Terry makes it easy to demonize someone like Tiller and impossible to even attempt to see his perspective. And that, sadly, appears to have made it easy for some misguided soul to conclude, with the same moral certitude, that killing Tiller was both just and justified.
Tiller -- who had been shot before and had his clinic bombed -- knew the risks of what he did. Even now some will say he proceeded despite those risks because he was a monster who liked to kill babies, or he was in it for money. Either scenario seems as unlikely to us as the notion that significant numbers of women don't decide until the eighth month of their pregnancy that they want a purely elective abortion.
Tiller's murder doesn't tarnish the entire pro-life movement. But it should give that movement's leaders cause to reflect seriously on Obama's call for a more civil tone.
