The senseless murder of a doctor in Wichita, Kansas has highlighted the fanaticism of anti-abortion activists and effectively weakened their argument for the preservation of life.
Dr. George Tiller, 67, ran one of the nation’s few women’s clinics that performed late-term abortions. He was shot and killed while serving as an usher during morning services Sunday at Reformation Lutheran Church. The gunman fired one shot at Tiller before threatening bystanders who attempted to stop him.
The suspected killer, 51-year-old Scott Roeder, was arrested three hours later. Roeder was a fierce opponent of abortion, posting passionate diatribes on sympathetic websites. One post read: “Bless everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp.”
Another of the few remaining late-term abortion clinics is in Boulder, Colorado, where Dr. Warren Hern denounced Tiller's killing as the "inevitable and predictable consequence of decades of anti-abortion" rhetoric and violence. "Dr. Tiller's assassination is not the lone and inexplicable action of one deranged killer," Hern said Sunday. "This was a political assassination in a historic pattern of anti-abortion political violence."
How upsetting that the group that condemns a woman’s right to choose and demonizes the doctors who help them feels the need to resort to violence. How painfully ironic that the group whose views are based on the sanctity of life and whose opinions are often informed by religion includes a man who took a life in a house of God.
As profoundly different as people’s opinions are in regard to abortion, expecting them to be resolved through violence, even murder, is terribly unrealistic and short-sighted. I just hope incidents like this hobble the pro-life movement instead of galvanizing its most ardent supporters.
Dr. George Tiller, 67, ran one of the nation’s few women’s clinics that performed late-term abortions. He was shot and killed while serving as an usher during morning services Sunday at Reformation Lutheran Church. The gunman fired one shot at Tiller before threatening bystanders who attempted to stop him.
The suspected killer, 51-year-old Scott Roeder, was arrested three hours later. Roeder was a fierce opponent of abortion, posting passionate diatribes on sympathetic websites. One post read: “Bless everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp.”
Another of the few remaining late-term abortion clinics is in Boulder, Colorado, where Dr. Warren Hern denounced Tiller's killing as the "inevitable and predictable consequence of decades of anti-abortion" rhetoric and violence. "Dr. Tiller's assassination is not the lone and inexplicable action of one deranged killer," Hern said Sunday. "This was a political assassination in a historic pattern of anti-abortion political violence."
How upsetting that the group that condemns a woman’s right to choose and demonizes the doctors who help them feels the need to resort to violence. How painfully ironic that the group whose views are based on the sanctity of life and whose opinions are often informed by religion includes a man who took a life in a house of God.
As profoundly different as people’s opinions are in regard to abortion, expecting them to be resolved through violence, even murder, is terribly unrealistic and short-sighted. I just hope incidents like this hobble the pro-life movement instead of galvanizing its most ardent supporters.
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