[On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court released the Roe v. Wade decision. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that case and a handful of other histories and stories of abortion in the U.S., leading up to a weekend post on the current laws and debates.]
On two
important broader takeaways from a horrific act of domestic terrorist violence.
On May 31st,
2009, the physician and abortion provider Dr. George Tiller was murdered in his
Wichita Lutheran church (where Tiller was working as an usher at the time
of the shooting) by anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder. (This was
not the first time such an extremist
had shot and attempted to kill Dr. Tiller, a fact to which I will return in
my third paragraph.) Perhaps in our current moment of frustratingly and
terrifyingly frequent mass shootings and other acts of gun violence this murder
would have been less nationally noteworthy (I hope not, but I live in our world
like all the rest of y’all), but in 2009 it most definitely dominated the
headlines for quite some time after, and occasioned vigils
and protests around the country. Roeder was apprehended in Kansas City a few
hours later, brought to trial later in the year, and convicted of first-degree
murder and aggravated assault in January 2010;
he is currently serving a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility
of parole before 25 years (meaning he will become eligible for parole in 2035,
when he will be 77 years old).
Both that
horrific crime and the life and work of Dr. Tiller deserve attention on their
own terms. But for the final post in this week’s series, I wanted to highlight
two broader takeaways that represent key elements in the histories of and
ongoing debates over abortion in America. One is just how fully myths,
misrepresentations, and outright lies have tended to overwhelm basic facts,
with always disastrous and sometimes (in cases like Tiller’s) tragic results.
Tiller was one of a
handful of physicians providing late-term abortions (there are even fewer now, for
understandable reasons), a medical procedure performed
extremely rarely and always in cases in which the fetus is unviable and/or
the life of the mother is significantly at risk. Such procedures require extensive
testing before they are even considered, as well as agreement between multiple
physicians, and are inevitably hugely fraught
and traumatic for the women and families that have to undergo them. But the
narratives around this particular form of abortion have consistently used
inaccurate terms such as “partial-birth
abortion,” have described events that never take place like the murder of
living babies, and have characterized
physicians like Tiller as blatant and cavalier murderers. Those mythic
narratives didn’t pull the trigger, but they sure as hell contributed to the
mindset of Scott Roeder.
Roeder and
Roeder alone pulled the trigger in that Wichita church on May 31st,
but I nonetheless would argue that he did not act alone. Police found on a
post-it on Roeder’s car dashboard the name and cell phone
number of Cheryl Sullenger, the vice president of the anti-abortion
organization Operation
Rescue West; at first Sullenger denied any contact with Roeder, but she
eventually admitted to having talked with him frequently and even giving him
detailed information about Roeder’s schedule. I would thus say the same about
Roeder that I did about Timothy
McVeigh in this post—seeing him as a “lone wolf” domestic terrorist
requires eliding the broader networks and communities of which he was part and
which facilitated his radicalization and terrorism alike. The same could be
said of Shelley Shannon, the woman who shot
Tiller five times in August 1993 (and who was
released from prison and presumably right back into the anti-abortion
movement a few years ago). Not all anti-abortion activists are domestic
terrorists, to be clear; but there is, and has been for decades, a large and
powerful network of such terrorists, and we can’t talk about this issue and its
histories (nor its current debates) without engaging that difficult but crucial
reality.
Contemporary
reflections this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment