Tag Archives: abortion

Sons of Terror

Posted on by ninjanurse

For a while, it looked like assassin Scott Roeder might get away with murder. His defense lawyer Mark Rudy tried to get the charge reduced to manslaughter. Roeder’s victim, Dr. George Tiller, had been threatened and slandered for decades for providing late-term abortions to women at his clinic. Rudy continued along the same lines.

Rudy tried to convince the jury that Roeder was a martyr for a righteous cause. It took them less than an hour to find him guilty.

One of the most outrageous aspects of the defense argument was a comparison of Scott Roeder to the late Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

During closing arguments earlier Friday, Rudy urged the jury to reject the murder charge, saying, “no one should be convicted based on his convictions.”
Rudy mentioned leaders who stood up for their beliefs, including civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. They were “celebrated individuals (who) stood up and made the world a better place.”
“They leave their marks based on their words and deeds,” Rudy said.

Is our collective memory so short that we could forget that King, like Tiller, was murdered by an assassin’s bullet? Have we forgotten that King was a leader of nonviolence, in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi and America’s own Henry David Thoreau? Was the jury supposed to overlook that fact that Roeder had broadcast his convictions all his life protected by the first amendment– that he was on trial because he sneaked up on an unarmed man and shot him in church? That the deed for which he will be remembered is the cowardly murder of a doctor, father and grandfather in front of his family and friends?

But following the logic of the anti-abortion movement, Roeder’s action makes sense. Real life is full of trouble and difficult moral choices. If you believe that the woman concerned is best able to make that choice you will not be trying to make abortion illegal. You might organize support services for women with a crisis pregnancy, you might use persuasion, you might counsel young men on responsibility and respect for women. You might support education and availability of contraception.

The anti-abortion movement, as opposed to individuals who have moral objections to abortion, has taken an extreme stance, declaring that women who have abortions and doctors who perform abortions are committing murder. By this logic, Roeder was acting consistently.

“I don’t condone what Scott Roeder did, but I cannot condemn the consistency of his logic,” said Randall Terry, a founder of antiabortion group Operation Rescue. “George Tiller killed 60,000 innocent human beings in barbaric ways, and Scott felt the way to protect more babies from a grisly death was to kill Tiller.”

The anti-abortion movement is not the first extremist group to claim a moral stance to justify violence and terrorism. All of them do. Roeder’s spiritual home is not the Civil Rights movement, but the Ku Klux Klan.

At times the women’s Klan sought to portray itself as an organization of social work and social welfare. One national WKKK speaker announced that she left social work for the “broader field of Klankraft” because of the Klan’s effectiveness in promoting morality and public welfare. Many chapters claimed to collect food and money for the needy, although these donations typically went to Klan families, often to families of Klan members arrested for rioting and vigilante activities. A powerful Florida WKKK chapter operated a free day nursery, charging that Catholic teachers had ruined the local public schools.
Some WKKK chapters ran homes for wayward girls. These homes served two purposes: to protect the virtue of Protestant women who were tempted by a life of vice and to underscore the danger faced by delinquent girls placed in Catholic-controlled reform schools.
‘Women of the Klan’, by Kathleen M. Blee

Most members of the Klan did not directly commit acts of violence. The Klan was not seen as a terrorist group. They infiltrated government, church and law enforcement. They claimed to answer to a high moral standard and to protect the innocent. Their violent rhetoric allowed the assassins among them to hide in plain site, uttering threats and spreading terror in the name of free speech.

When speech did not suffice, there was the gun. That is the truth behind the rhetoric of the anti-abortion extremists today…

The Rev. Donald Spitz, of Chesapeake, Va., who runs the Army of God Web site supporting violence against abortion providers, said the rejection of that argument has upset those who view Roeder as a hero.
”I know there is not a lot of good feeling out there — everybody is pretty angry,” he said.
Spitz was the spiritual adviser to Paul Hill and was with him at his 2003 execution for the killing of a Florida abortion provider and a clinic escort in 1994, an event that led to a lull in violence at abortion clinics. While saying he knows nothing of impending plans by others against abortion doctors, Spitz scoffed at suggestions that Roeder’s conviction will have a similar effect.
”Times change,” Spitz said. ”People are not as passive as they have been. They are more assertive.”

When argument fails, there is the gun. Terrorism is most effective when it disrupts the most with the least violence. When armed militias claiming to be the only true patriots march in plain sight, not even bothering with hoods, it’s sure that individuals will decide to embrace martyrdom.

Martin Luther King loved his life and his family. He led Americans who had been deeply wronged in a movement of nonviolent resistance.

Good people can disagree. Dr. Tiller was murdered in church, where he served as an usher. Anti-abortion activists don’t represent all Christians. Abortion is not an easy moral issue. People of conscience who oppose abortion can aid women in need and children in poverty, they can use their freedom of speech to persuade, they can vote as they choose. They should reject the criminals who are using this issue to continue the tradition of domestic terror in the name of patriotism.

UPDATE: A convicted arsonist and shooter is promising more violence in emails from prison.

On Demand

Posted on by ninjanurse

I was visiting a nice elderly lady and she had a poster on her wall soliciting donations to stop ‘abortion on demand’. It’s the kind of phrase like ‘strident feminist’ that bursts into the conversation ready for a fight.

Let’s be realistic. You don’t get your teeth cleaned ‘on demand’. If you don’t believe me, try stomping into a dentist’s office demanding to get your teeth cleaned and see how far you get.

There’s other propaganda points. The use of the word ‘convenience’ as if the decision whether to have a baby is not a profound and permanent one, with consequences that affect generations. ‘Just give it up for adoption’ as if that decision is no more important than distributing a litter of kittens.

And ‘unplanned pregnancy’. That’s most pregnancies. It’s an unwanted pregnancy that is a crisis.

What got me on this track is a post where Frederick Clarkson makes some important points about loaded language in the abortion debate, especially as it has taken over the health reform debate.

The anti-abortion Congress members have succeeded in getting themselves labeled ‘pro-life’ by all the press, including NPR. There’s not even a moment’s thought. Their concern for life might not exist in any form except making abortion illegal, but they get to wrap themselves in the mantle of life-lovingness no matter how many Americans die needlessly for lack of access to medical care.

The supporters of the public option, Medicare expansion or single payer have gone from being part of the discussion to being the ‘liberals’ to ‘the left wing’. It’s amazing how far to the left you can move when the rest of the party shifts to the right.

Does anyone care that Americans line up around the block to get into a free clinic– and it’s not a disaster, just another day in a broken system? Is it politically correct to say we need to fix this, or is that being strident?

Conscience Clause Part II

Posted on by ninjanurse

I grew up on tales of civil disobedience, I absorbed the belief that we answer to a higher standard than man’s law. I admired the Freedom Riders and Conscientious Objectors. They put their comfort, and sometimes their lives on the line.

Everything that goes around comes around. While there are many people who will follow their principles no matter what the cost, there are those who use conscience as a justification for pushing their standards on others. They feel pure, the people they are trusted to serve are subject to their judgment and bear the consequences.

The Bush administration, with its fondness for vague piety, gave cover to any pharmacist or health care provider who decided to refuse service, as long as they claimed religion. Oh, excuse me–I meant Faith. Religion is too specific, let’s not be clear when we can be evasive.

I’ve been watching this court case move slowly through the system. A nurse is being sued because she pulled out a patient’s intrauterine device without permission, and then lectured her. An IUD prevents fertilization and alters the uterine lining to make it less receptive to sperm and implantation. This is what some define as abortion. In fact, some believe that the birth control pill is abortion, and there are legal strategies in progress to separate contraception from other health care and remove it from insurance coverage.

The Freedom Riders faced dogs and fire hoses, the Conscientious Objectors went to prison or served in the hardest unwanted jobs. They stood up to power and faced the consequences. This new definition of conscience is all about the person in power exercising their conscience at the expense of the person who trusts them to provide a skilled service. Unlike the Freedom Riders and the C.O.’s, the providers are well protected by the law. But this nurse may have pushed it too far.

She could have told her employer at hire that she had a list of birth control methods she personally found unacceptable, and would not cooperate in providing care that violated her standards. She could have refused to see the patient with the IUD, and claimed conscience and let another nurse or doctor see her. She’ll have a chance now to say whether she was acting on principle, or was just clumsy. Here’s some testimony…

“[Nurse] Olona then stated, ‘having the IUD come out was a good thing.’ She asked (the plaintiff) if she wanted to hear her ‘take’ on the situation. Without receiving a response, Defendant Olona stated, ‘I personally do not like IUDs. I feel they are a type of abortion. I don’t know how you feel about abortion, but I am against them. What the IUD does is take the fertilized egg and pushes it out of the uterus.’
“Defendant Olona stated, ‘Everyone in the office always laughs and tells me I pull these out on purpose because I am against them, but it’s not true, they accidentally come out when I tug.’

The thing about conscience is that good people can disagree in important matters. I do think that medical people have a right and necessity to follow their conscience, but they have an obligation to be truthful to their patients. They do not have a right to impose their beliefs on people who are trusting them to provide care. If they need to opt out, they should make sure the patient has an alternative. Because she has a conscience too. And it’s her life and body on the line. Doctors and nurses have no right to sabotage medical procedures from some notion that they know better than the patient.

UPDATE: Apparently the case was settled out of court. Darn. I was wondering what Nurse Olona, (or Physician’s Assistant Olona in some news accounts) would have said with her hand on the Bible.