Ezra Klein, in addition to being one of the leading progressive healthcare journalists, has long been one of the leading male voices in the blogosphere in support of feminism. It’s no surprise that his response to the murder of Dr. George Tiller really drives home some of the lessons that I both think America should be taking from this and steps to ensure hateful, violent right wing activists like Scott Roeder do not win in the battle for protecting the right to choose. Ezra nails what I think is a critical point: the murder of Dr. George Tiller was a political killing. It was politics by another means, meant to produce a political and effectively legal result related to the ability of a woman to obtain an abortion in the United States. Ezra writes:
As The American Prospect‘s Ann Friedman writes, this has to be understood in context. It is the final, decisive act in “an ongoing campaign of intimidation and harassment against someone who was providing completely legal health-care services.” That campaign stretched over decades of protests, lawsuits, violence, and, finally, murder. The different elements were not always orchestrated. But the intent remained constant: To counter the absence of a statute that would make Tiller’s work illegal with enough intimidation to render it impossible.
This was, in other words, a political act. Tiller was murdered so that those in his line of work would be intimidated. In conversations with folks yesterday, I heard well-meaning variants on the idea that it would be unseemly to push legislation in the emotional aftermath of Tiller’s execution. I disagree. Roeder was acting in direct competition with the United States Congress. And it’s quite likely that he changed the status quo. Legislative language and judicial rulings had made abortive procedures legal and thus accessible. Yesterday’s killing was meant to render abortive procedures unsafe for doctors to conduct and thus inaccessible.
Ezra suggests Congress and Duncan Black suggests that President Obama should view this as an opportunity for to step forward and defend the rights already exist, to ensure their continued existence. From increased protection for abortion providers to increasing access to comprehensive reproductive treatment in hospitals to incentivizing the training of doctors who can provide late term abortions (and thus directly ensuing Dr. George Tiller’s murder will not effect the availability of late term abortions in the long term).
Dr. George Tiller was murdered because there are people in this country who have been told for years that “abortion is murder.” It’s no shock that in the self-proclaimed “pro-life” movement’s efforts to stop abortion from being legally available to women while describing it as “murder,” their members might resort to violence to prevent abortion from taking place. Tiller was previously the target of politically motivated violence – he was shot twice and his clinic was bombed and as a result, wore a bulletproof vest daily. The AP has put together a timeline of over a dozen instances of rightwing violence targeting abortion doctors over the last two decades. The pattern is clear: violence has accompanied legislative, judicial, and ballot initiatives by the “pro-life” movement to limit American women’s access to abortions.
It’s time for a bold, moral defense of the right to choose through legislative action. Anything less constitutes caving in the face of the violence of terrorists.
Hold Fast 