George Tiller

I haven’t said anything about the murder of George Tiller. I am shocked, outraged, and speechless before this senseless act of domestic terrorism. Such acts should not be possible in our “land of the free.”

Mostly I am just very, very sad. And disappointed that some things never seem to change.

I will let this statement speak for me. It is a letter to the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal from three organizations I support: The ACLU of Kentucky, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and Planned Parenthood of Kentucky:

We honor Dr. George Tiller’s legacy of compassion and care throughout his life. Dr. Tiller devoted his life to ensuring that all women have access to comprehensive reproductive health including safe and legal abortion. As a highly qualified health care provider, his life’s work was dedicated to helping women facing problem pregnancies and difficult decisions. Those of us who support quality health care for all women admire his dedication and courage. Our thoughts and sympathies go out to his family, friends, staff, and colleagues.

Sunday’s murder of Dr. George Tiller serves as a shocking and tragic reminder of the risks health care professionals face providing legal reproductive services to women in our country today. Regardless of how one feels about the subject of abortion, we can all agree that women have a right to health care free from harassment and intimidation and that health care professionals have a right to provide services free from violence.

Dr. Tiller believed women deserved kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect. He believed in the emotional and spiritual heart of each woman. Because of these beliefs he faced years of harassment and violence. He continued to serve women even after he was shot in 1993. He refused to cave into the relentless harassment and threats that he faced at his home, his clinic, and finally even his place of worship.

Dr. Tiller wore a button bearing his motto…”Attitude is everything.” It is time for every person, no matter their political or ideological beliefs, to seek the common ground of kindness, courtesy, justice, love and respect.

Derek Selznick
Reproductive Freedom Project Director, American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky

Judi Jennings
Executive Director, Kentucky Foundation for Women

Shirley Jones
President and CEO, Planned Parenthood of Kentucky

Read this if you want to know what it was that George Tiller did.

Our understanding of what late abortion is like has been almost entirely shaped in public discourse by the opponents of abortion rights. In recent years, discussions of the issue have been filled with the gory details of so-called partial-birth abortion; the grim miseries that drive some women and girls to end their pregnancies after the first trimester have somehow been elided.

�Late abortion is not a failure of contraception. It�s for medical reasons,� Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who has worked to defend abortion providers like Tiller against harassment and violence since the mid-1980s, told me this week. �We�ve made pregnancy a fairy tale where there are no fetal complications, there�s no cancer, no terrible abuse of girls, no cases where to make a girl go all the way through a pregnancy is to destroy her. These are the realities of the story. That�s what Dr. Tiller worked with � the realities.�

I See Invisible People is all over this here and here. See also.

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And it turns out there’s a down-side to killing off all you enemies. Leaves you with no reason to exist.

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Read this one too.