Sunday, May 31, 2009

Comment Elsewhere: Murder Movement

Describing the murder of Dr. George Tiller, one-third of the doctors in the US who could and would provide late-term abortion procedures when necessary, Ann Friedman said "It is the culmination of an ongoing campaign of intimidation and harassment against someone who was providing completely legal health-care services."
My response
My only question is why would you call this "the culmination" of anything? For the last quarter-century there's been a fairly steady stream of intimidation, harassment and violence directed at abortion providers. True, assassination murders have been rare compared to, say deaths in traffic (but not compared to Muslim-originated terror attacks in the US) but Tiller himself was the subject of a half dozen physical and vandalism attacks since the last abortion doctor assassination murder. The killing is a tragedy, but entirely within the normal range of operations for the movement which has been pushing against reproductive rights for the last 25 years or more.

This isn't an "end" or "peak" in any meaningful sense, unless there is some kind of political and cultural shift which actually pushes these radicals out of the mainstream.

To clarify, I'm quite sure that the anti-rights movement is going to move on to another target, which will inevitably "culminate" similarly, then another, and another....

For more, I recommend Sara Robinson and Digby. Meanwhile, over at Terry's I said
You know what I just realized?

Operation Rescue had an immediate statement ready, with just the right mix of violence-rejection to cover their asses and not-backing-down-abortion-is-murder brimstone to let us weak-kneed liberals know that they aren’t going to let some negative attention shift their rhetoric or tactics. They knew something like this was going to happen, and they don’t care.

1 comment:

Not Important said...

The damn stupid thing is that the demonization of pro-choicers by anti-choicers seems to make the far right view this atrocity as some kind of necessary evil. The "It's a shame it happened, but he deserved it" sort of thing should really scare anyone with a modicum of intelligence.