The Tiller Murder Wasn't a Lone Killer's Sick Plot; It Came Out of the
Radical Anti-Abortion Movement
By Jill Filipovic, Comment Is Free. Posted June 1, 2009.
The murder of Dr. George Tiller is a logical outcome of increasingly
violent rhetoric from pundits like Bill O'Reilly and radical pro-life
groups.
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George Tiller, a Kansas physician, was shot to death in church on
Sunday. He was one of only a handful of doctors in the United States
providing late-term therapeutic abortions for women in need -- women
whose pregnancies threatened their lives or their health, and women
who learned that they were carrying fetuses with severe abnormalities.
Women traveled across the country to see Tiller when their own
physicians and local medical providers couldn't help them. For many
women, Tiller was, as one of his patients put it, "the one shining
light in the worst week of my life".
He was also a major lightening-rod in the abortion wars. Anti-choicers
harassed his patients, day in and day out. They bombed his clinic.
They shot him once before. They filed lawsuit after lawsuit and even
convinced local prosecutors to launch criminal investigations and
trials (none were successful). They published his home address and the
full names of his family members on their websites. They posted
information about anyone who did business with him, from where he got
his coffee to where he did his dry cleaning.
They had him and his staff wearing bullet-proof vests to work every
day. Tiller drove an armored car and protected his home with a
state-of-the-art security system. And, to better enable stalking and
harassment, they posted his daily comings and goings -- including the
fact that he attended services every Sunday at Reformation Lutheran
Church, the place where he was ultimately shot and killed.
All because he was a licensed physician who performed legal medical procedures.
Not surprisingly, his killer is strongly suspected to be affiliated
with the "pro-life" movement. If that's the case, it makes Tiller the
10th person in the United States to be murdered by anti-choice
terrorists.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Since 1977, there have been at
least 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of
assault or battery and three kidnappings committed against abortion
providers in North America. Tiller himself survived an assassination
attempt in 1993.
Some pro-life groups are issuing statements of condemnation and
attempting to paint this murder as the work of an extremist. But this
latest act of terrorism is, sadly, not an anomaly. It is part of a
clearly-established pattern of harassment, intimidation and violence
against abortion providers and pro-choice individuals. And mainstream
pro-life groups shoulder much of the blame.
Pro-life organizations routinely refer to abortion as "murder", a
"genocide" and a "holocaust". They post the full names abortion
providers on their websites, along with their addresses, their license
plate numbers, their photos, the names of children and the schools
those children attend (sometimes with helpful Wild-West-style "Wanted"
posters offering $5,000 rewards).
When you convince your followers that abortion providers are the
equivalent of SS officers slaughtering innocents by the millions, tell
them that "it's all-out WAR" against pro-choicers and then provide the
home addresses and personal information of the "monster" "late-term
baby-killer" abortion providers you're supposedly at war against, you
can't act surprised when those followers conclude that it's morally
justified to use the information to kill doctors.
These are not fringe groups. Conservative television personality Bill
O'Reilly called Tiller's clinic a "death mill", referred to Tiller as
a "baby killer" who was "executing babies about to be born" and said
Tiller was doing "Nazi stuff" for which he "had blood on his hands".
Frank Pavone, a Roman Catholic priest, member of James Dobson's Focus
on the Family and director of Priests for Life, posted a YouTube video
on Sunday to say that he "abhors" the violence committed against
Tiller but "we just don't know and we shouldn't jump to conclusions"
in assuming that an anti-choice terrorist may have murdered Tiller --
although, he concedes, someone may have assassinated him "in order to
stop Tiller from killing more babies". He continued: "When we talk
about abortion, we are taking about killing. There's no two ways about
it. ... This is a massive holocaust, it is killing."
Pavone is chummy with Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who had
this to say about Tiller's assassination:
George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did
not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more
concerned that the Obama administration will use Tiller's killing to
intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric
and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion
by its proper name: murder.
Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers
according to the law of God. We must continue to expose them in our
communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes,
and yes, even their churches.
That's some definition of "peacefully protesting".
The prime suspect in Tiller's murder appears to have frequented the
Operation Rescue website (which had it's own "Tiller Watch" section),
and took part in some of those "peaceful protests" that anti-choicers
hold so dear. Far from a random extremist, he appears to have been
fairly entrenched in the anti-choice movement.
And if he is the person who murdered Tiller, he isn't alone among
pro-lifers who embrace Terry's directive that "If you think abortion
is murder, act like it." (After all, Terry has posited, "Wouldn't it
have been OK to kill Hitler if you knew you could save millions of
Jews?").
Self-identified pro-lifers have celebrated Tiller's murder, leaving
hundreds of comments on rightwing blogs (and a good number at
progressive and pro-choice blogs, just for good measure). Conservative
writer LaShawn Barber gloated at the "irony" of "Tiller the child
killer, cultivator of death" being murdered at church. A quick perusal
of the front page of ProLifeBlogs.com includes such headlines as
"George Tiller has killed his last baby," "Baby killer Tiller shot,
killed at church," "Tiller the Killer killed," "Today Tiller the
Killer, now a martyr for Molech, met God" and "Tiller shot to death!"
These are not "bad apples". They are symptomatic of (and sometimes the
spokespeople for) a larger a movement that is disturbed and dangerous.
While individuals who self-identify as pro-life may be well-meaning
and against violence, mainstream pro-life groups and the people who
run them do not care about life, before or after birth. And while
today anti-choice groups are half-heartedly condemning Tiller's
murder, they continue to use the same outlandish and inflammatory
rhetoric that inspired and enabled it.
Words mean things. Anti-choicers should certainly have every right to
express their views, but they must also realize that actions have
consequences and their rhetoric is not harmless. If you yell "Fire!"
in a crowded theater, it's reasonably foreseeable that people will
panic and someone will be injured. And if you yell "Murderer!"
"Baby-Killer!" and "Holocaust!" long enough, it's reasonably
foreseeable that someone will take it upon themselves to make sure
that vigilante justice is done (especially if you provide the name and
address of the person who you claim is committing "genocide").
This was not the act of a lone extremist. It is one more act of
violence to add to a long, long list of crimes committed by
anti-choice terrorists, and it is the logical outcome of years of
increasingly violent, dehumanizing and threatening rhetoric and action
on the part of supposedly mainstream pro-life groups. The
responsibility for George Tiller's death surely falls on the shoulders
of the person who actually pulled the trigger. But when pro-life
groups did everything but give him a gun, their hands are hardly
clean.
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See more stories tagged with: abortion, choice, radicals, late-term
abortion, extremists, george tiller, randall terry, frank pavone
Jill Filipovic is a lawyer in Manhattan who formerly served as the
Gender and Reproductive Justice editor at AlterNet. More of her
writing is available online at her blog, Feministe.
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