Killing in the name of

It would be hard to overstate the significance of the late Francis Schaeffer when it comes to the shape, tone, agenda and influence of evangelical Christianity in America.

In 1970, the Rev. Billy Graham was the face of American evangelicalism. He was a preacher and an evangelist. Graham served as a kind of unofficial -- and nonpartisan -- chaplain to the powerful, but he was largely non-political. When Billy came to town it wasn't for a partisan political event, but for one of his unfortunately named "crusades" -- huge mass-revival meetings in stadiums that drew support from a broad spectrum of Christian churches, including mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. His message was upbeat, hopeful, inclusive and inspirational. (Plus he had really good music -- Johnny and June and Ethel Waters.)

But by the 1980s, Graham had been eclipsed by new faces and very different voices with a very different agenda -- men like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Evangelicalism had become fiercely partisan, polarized and polarizing. It had become more a political movement than a religious one and the dominant issue -- the only shibboleth or litmus test that seemed to matter -- was opposition to legal abortion.

The founding myth of this new, stridently political faith says that this politicizing arose in reaction to the Roe v. Wade decision acknowledging the legal right to abortion. After "activist" judges "legislated" from the bench, evangelicals recoiled in horror and rose up, in Falwell's phrase, to "take back America."

But that's not what happened. Evangelicals did not recoil in horror from Roe v. Wade. There was no outcry, scarcely any reaction at all. Randall Balmer discusses this in his book Thy Kingdom Come (see a longer excerpt here):

In the 1980s, in order to solidify their shift from divorce to abortion, the Religious Right constructed an abortion myth, one accepted by most Americans as true. Simply put, the abortion myth is this: Leaders of the Religious Right would have us believe that their movement began in direct response to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Politically conservative evangelical leaders were so morally outraged by the ruling that they instantly shed their apolitical stupor in order to mobilize politically in defense of the sanctity of life. Most of these leaders did so reluctantly and at great personal sacrifice, risking the obloquy of their congregants and the contempt of liberals and "secular humanists," who were trying their best to ruin America. But these selfless, courageous leaders of the Religious Right, inspired by the opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century, trudged dutifully into battle in order to defend those innocent unborn children, newly endangered by the Supreme Court's misguided Roe decision.

It's a compelling story, no question about it. Except for one thing: It isn't true.

Although various Roman Catholic groups denounced the ruling, and Christianity Today complained that the Roe decision "runs counter to the moral teachings of Christianity through the ages but also to the moral sense of the American people," the vast majority of evangelical leaders said virtually nothing about it; many of those who did comment actually applauded the decision. W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press wrote, "Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision." Indeed, even before the Roe decision, the messengers (delegates) to the 1971 Southern Baptist Convention gathering in St. Louis, Missouri, adopted a resolution that stated, "we call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." W.A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, expressed his satisfaction with the Roe v. Wade ruling. "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," the redoubtable fundamentalist declared, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed."

In 1973, most evangelicals regarded opposition to abortion as a Catholic Thing -- and therefore vaguely suspect, as though it might lead to praying to Mary or something. But throughout the 1970s and into the '80s, that changed. The person most responsible for that change was Francis Schaeffer. He persuaded evangelicals to adopt this issue and to get so angry about it that it would come to replace even evangelism as their hallmark concern and their pre-eminent defining characteristic. The language, the rhetoric and arguments, the moral reasoning, political tactics and activist strategies of the anti-abortion movement over the last 30 years all originate with Francis Schaeffer.

This is why, out of all the voices condemning and grappling with the meaning of the murder Sunday of Dr. George Tiller, none is more significant that that of Frank Schaeffer, Francis' son. Without his father, there would be no Scott Roeder.

Here is Frank Schaeffer last night on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show, following up on his commentary from the Huffington Post:

Here's a bit from that HuffPo essay:

Like many writers of moral/political/religious theories my father and I would have been shocked that someone took us at our word, walked into a Lutheran Church and pulled the trigger on an abortionist. But even if the murderer never read Dad's or my words we helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen.

In fact that very thing has happened before. In 1994, Dr. John Bayard Britton and one of his volunteer escorts were shot and killed outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida. Paul Hill, a former minister, was convicted of the killings and executed in 2003. Paul Hill was an avid follower of my father's.

In 1994, as now, the mainstream evangelical groups responded to the slayings in Pensacola by saying all the right things -- offering a raft of statements unambiguously denouncing the violence and condemning Paul Hill's actions.

I remember those statements very well because I wrote one of them. In the '90s, I was the staff writer for an evangelical -- and, therefore, anti-abortion -- nonprofit, and so it fell to me to write the first draft of a statement after Paul Hill's killing spree.

The statement we wrote was consistent with what our group had been saying all along. My boss, in whose name this statement was released, was a lifelong pacifist, a devout Mennonite who has, for decades, unfailingly opposed all forms of violence. And as a good Mennonite, his rhetoric too was always studiously nonviolent -- peaceable to the point of blandness, actually.

But at the same time we were drafting and issuing this statement, I was reading dozens of similar statements from other evangelical groups whose rhetoric had never been marked by anything like my boss's Mennonite pacifism. These were groups that routinely spoke of abortion as "murder" or "mass-murder," and that routinely spoke of legalized abortion as an "American Holocaust." They had, for years, been using precisely the same rhetoric and making exactly the same arguments that Paul Hill was now using to attempt to justify his double homicide.

Those groups' condemnations of Paul Hill then -- like their condemnations of Scott Roeder now -- ring hollow. Such condemnations seem to be self-refuting. How can they condemn men like Hill or Roeder just for taking their own arguments seriously?

Paul Hill argued that abortion was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust -- just like the National Right to Life Committee, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and dozens of other evangelical groups said it was. If that's true, Hill said, then he wasn't merely justified, but obligated to take up arms against abortionists. If you're confronted with an evil equal in magnitude to that of Adolf Hitler -- as all these groups insisted was the case -- then surely one is obliged to do more than vote Republican every four years in the hopes of one day appointing enough judges to change the law of the land. Confronted with what all of these groups assured him was the Holocaust, he decided to become Claus von Stauffenberg.

Yet when Hill repeated their own argument and their own rhetoric back to them, these groups all recoiled. They all claimed to share Hill's premise, but not to share his conclusion. That won't work. Hill's violent conclusion arose logically from that shared premise. If he was a madman to be condemned -- as all those groups suddenly insisted he was -- it was because of the madness of that premise. So how was it possible they could repudiate him without also repudiating that rhetoric that compelled him to act?

What I realized then, in 1994, as I watched these groups line up to condemn violence against "mass-murderers" and to renounce armed opposition to "the Holocaust," was that these folks didn't really mean any of it. They were horrified by the spectacle of someone taking their own rhetoric and arguments seriously. "We don't really mean anything we say," these groups rushed to announce. "We don't really believe any of that."

And since they no longer bothered to claim they believed it, I stopped trying to believe it too.

Now here we are again, 15 years later, as the arguments of the anti-abortion movement are again being proved disingenuous by their own self-refuting statements condemning the latest lethal fruit of their rhetoric of "mass-murder" and "Holocaust." Once again some sad, disturbed man has committed the error of taking their rhetoric more seriously than it was ever meant by the people who supposedly believed it to be true.

Didn't Scott Roeder realize that it was all just a game? Didn't he appreciate that all this talk of Holocaust was just a gimmick to get his fellow Kansans to support a repeal of the estate tax? Didn't he understand the difference between really believing that abortion is "mass-murder" and just indulging in the smug posturing of self-righteousness that makes the members of the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition feel a little better about themselves?

No, apparently, he didn't. Apparently he was just crazy enough to believe that these people meant what they said, crazy enough to believe that they believed their own words and that he should believe them too.

To believe these people -- to believe that their words matter or that their words are truthful or that their arguments are made in good faith -- is madness indeed.

Comments

[Jon]

Didn't he appreciate that all this talk of Holocaust was just a gimmick to get his fellow Kansans to support a repeal of the estate tax?

As the saying goes, THIS.

[Jake]

It's a rare person who can admit they're wrong and change their beliefs and the way they live their life. Thank you, Fred, for being such a person

[Personal Failure]

Fred keeps being the better man.

Thank you for the fascinating look inside the debate, Fred.

[Diez]

I'm working on my friends. Slowly but surely, I am engaging them on their positions and opening their eyes... or so I'd like to beliefe. They could just all be humoring me, but the more I engage them on this issue, the more they begin to realize the truth behind it, and that their positions are given nearly the consideration they should be. They are pro-lifers only because those around them are. For the most part, they just haven't thought about these things. They assume that being pro-life is a necessary part of being Christian, like believing in Jesus. Like I said before, I don't know if they are just humoring the crazy liberal or really thinking things through, but I'm trying to get them to consider this stuff more carefully, and I think it might be working.

[Hobbes]

Very good post, Fred!

I had not realized that the opposition to abortion didn't go all the way back to Roe v Wade in evangelical circles. Of course, just because the Catholics were the only ones opposing the ruling doesn't mean that they were wrong. I suspect that that's what you would hear from suddenly very conflicted evangelicals ("Can I say that evangelicals were wrong and Catholics were right?") upon being presented with this information.

The whole creationism beast started similarly. As early as the 300s AD (Augustine), people were speculating that the account in Genesis was not literal. St. A himself thought that creation was instantaneous, and that Genesis 1 was just a catalog of the things created sorted by category. (All of this is in May's Christianity Today.) But over time, the literalistic view became popular, and Darwinism suddenly shot that down. It's amazing how much of modern evangelicalism is related to the Enlightenment deposing of medieval Christian inventions...

[Original Lee]

Excellent post, Fred. Thanks.

[Pecunium]

I don't think, per se, Fred's position is said to be changed. Fred can be anti-abortion, and pro-choice. What he's said here is that opposition to it can't be worked in the public sphere with the rhetoric of violence.

More to the point (IMO) is the effects of the people who have moved the rhetoric from the fringes, to the mainstream. The O'Reilleys, and the Coulters (the former who said he wanted to "get my hand on" Tiller the Killer,the latter who said; in a speech she was paid for, "you could say he had a 'procedure' performed on him with a rifle).

By moving that to the mainstream, they make it seem that large swathes of the public supports them, which gives them the moral courage to actually carry out the things the preacher's sermons endorse, sub rosa.

[MikeR]

Thanks for the comments, Fred. I'm one of your regular non-religious readers (whoops, don't want to land you on another list of atheist blogs!) and had been waiting for your thoughts. It's nice to hear from someone who has some serious insight into the evangelicals.

[topher]

I think the saddest thing I have seen about this whole issue are the Christian blogs with a statement decrying the killing and the barely contained glee from the commentators below.

[Jessica]

I'm impressed by the excerpt from the son of Schafer's HufPo essay. It sounds like he realizes the error of saying something that other people might take seriously, as Fred so eloquently points out.

Well done, Fred!

[Daughter]

I have some concerns about rhetoric coming from the left regarding this. My understanding is that the vast majority of Americans have mixed feelings about abortion: they don't want us to go back to the days of illegal, unsafe abortions, and don't feel they can judge someone who chooses to have one, but they also don't feel like abortion is a good thing. The "safe, legal and rare" theme speaks to many of these people (myself included).

However, I've seen a great deal of talk on the left about this saying such things as, "This is why we can never compromise!" and indicating that even saying you want abortion to be "safe, legal and rare" is a compromise that doesn't recognize the bodily autonomy of women and that still leads to violence.

The problem is, the people you can't compromise with are the fanatics, who unfortunately get the attention because they're screaming on the airwaves and committing heinous acts such as Dr. Tiller's murder.

The majority of Americans are not fanatics, however, and if pro-choicers on the left respond this way, they could loose the vast middle.

[Ross]

What I realized then, in 1994, as I watched these groups line up to condemn violence against "mass-murderers" and to renounce armed opposition to "the Holocaust," was that these folks didn't really mean any of it. They were horrified by the spectacle of someone taking their own rhetoric and arguments seriously. "We don't really mean anything we say," these groups rushed to announce. "We don't really believe any of that."

Have you considered -- as I am horrified to consider -- that maybe you've got it the wrong way 'round. Maybe it's not "we don't really believe abortion is the American Holocaust Of Mass Murdering Babies, we just find it politically expedient to pretend we do."

Maybe what's really happening is "We REALLY DO believe that abortion is the American Holocaust Of Mass Murdering Babies, and we REALLY DO believe that hunting down and murdering abortion doctors in a house of worship is a heroic act. But it's politically inexpedient for us to be associated with a guy who got caught."

I'm horrified to consider the possibility that the reason they are so quick to denounce the murder isn't that he crossed the line -- but that he acted *too soon*, before their movement was strong enough to rise up and murder their political enemies with impunity.

[Daughter]

Let me just add an addendum: I know that most pro-choice folks don't think abortion is a good thing either (and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise), just that many believe a woman's bodily autonomy is so important that the right to abortion has to be absolute. That's why some, such as Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, who I admire greatly, says that anything that even hints at any limitations on abortions (such as the already mentioned "safe, legal and rare" theme), shouldn't be entertained. But that's a view that I think will hurt the pro-choice cause with many Americans.

[sofia]

Great post, Fred.

[shannon]

Daughter, I think the problem is that what sort of limitations are we talking? I don't want any limitations that would cause maternal death, for example.

[Pecunium]

I think abortion should be safe, legal, and done whenever a woman wants to do it.

I hope that will be rare. I believe that to get to the state of rare requires making sure as many pregnancies as possible are wanted pregnancies.

I don't want them rare because they are hard to obtain. I don't want them rare because of social stigma.

I want them rare because they are seldom needed.

So color me an absolutist. Reproductive choice is a right, right up there with all the other rights, and so not to be compromised.

[Daughter]

What I've seen is people saying that even discussing questions such as, "What can we do to reduce the number of abortions?" is a compromise that shouldn't be entertained because it plays into the hands of the extremists on the right. They're right in a sense: the extremists will try to use such discussions to further their agenda of making abortion illegal. But the majority of people who engage in such discussions don't want to change the legal right to abortion, but to reduce the need for it, through such things as increased access to birth control, better family leave policies and health care options, and comprehensive sex ed.

The problem now on the left is the overreaction: the fear that any outreach or attempt to reach out to the moderates or the ambivalent about this issue just plays into the hands of the extremists, and look where that gets us--more murders and violence. But I disagree. I think that it's the extremists you want to isolate more than ever now, not the folks in the middle.

[lonespark]

I'm with Pecunium one thousand percent. Perhaps I should have posted the "sacred act of choice" quote on this thread instead.

Restricting the right of bodily autonomy to anyone is wrong and enshrining such restriction into law is abhorrent. The things people do with that right can be disturbing, ill-advised, etc. That changes the right not at all. We should not be making law based on anyone's religion. If your beliefs tell you abortion is wrong, there are a lot of ways to on reducing how often it happens without throwing obstancles against women and families who need it.

[lonespark]

And, lest this be construed as "of course the Pagan freaks don't care about fetus rights," I learned that at my mother's knee and she learned it at her parents' and her dad was a minister. The beautiful, wonderful church I grew up in was a huge supporter of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. That old-school Baptist opinion sounds exactly right to me. If God is Love, he doesn't want women to suffer or be shamed.

[Spearmint]

Well said, Fred. I keep having to point this out to people: if you truly believe that abortion is government sanctioned mass-murder of children, shooting doctors is a logical course of action. Domestic terrorism is a reasonable answer to the Wannsee Conference. If you don't think domestic terrorism is a reasonable answer to Roe v. Wade, you probably don't actually think that abortion is a second Holocaust. (Or maybe the actual Holocaust wouldn't have bugged you much either, who knows.)

However, I've seen a great deal of talk on the left about this saying such things as, "This is why we can never compromise!" and indicating that even saying you want abortion to be "safe, legal and rare" is a compromise that doesn't recognize the bodily autonomy of women and that still leads to violence.

The trouble is, that sort of compromise can lead to things like the Partial-Birth Abortion ban, which didn't protect healthy fetuses, since most states already had bans on aborting healthy late term fetuses, but did prevent women who needed abortions for health-related reasons from getting proper medical care. There actually is a slippery slope here and we're sliding down it, so you can see why the people on the far left are clinging so tightly to the grass at the top of the hill.

I'm horrified to consider the possibility that the reason they are so quick to denounce the murder isn't that he crossed the line -- but that he acted *too soon*, before their movement was strong enough to rise up and murder their political enemies with impunity.

They have guns, but they're not very numerous and the recent months have proven they're not very politically astute, either. I wouldn't lose too much sleep over this scenario.

[Spearmint]

I think if people framed it as "how can we have fewer unwanted pregnancies?" rather than "how can we have fewer abortions?" it would be easier to get the Left on board.

The problem is that then Sarah Palin and the Pope get all "Condoms!? Where!? Show me them so I can BURN them!" and we lose half the coalition on the other side.

Basically trying to collaborate with people who share your goals based on antithetically opposed motives is tricky, and probably beyond even Obama's songbird, chipmunk and rainbow attracting powers.

[ako]

Those groups' condemnations of Paul Hill then -- like their condemnations of Scott Roeder now -- ring hollow. Such condemnations seem to be self-refuting. How can they condemn men like Hill or Roeder just for taking their own arguments seriously?

And then you get stuff like Randall Terry's recent statement, which refutes itself even as he's speaking. Seriously, once you get to "He shouldn't have been killed like that, he should have been tried and executed in a court of law", you're no longer meaningfully opposing the actions of the murderers. Because vigilantism kicks in where the law fails to protect people, and if you encourage the inaccurate idea that each aborted fetus was a brutally and gratuitously murdered baby and Dr. Tiller deserves to die, and the law defends him instead of stopping him, you've got the perfect set up for someone to put two and two together and wind up trying to enforce the idea of justice the pro-life movement's been selling them all these years.

That's why some, such as Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, who I admire greatly, says that anything that even hints at any limitations on abortions (such as the already mentioned "safe, legal and rare" theme), shouldn't be entertained. But that's a view that I think will hurt the pro-choice cause with many Americans.

It's tricky. A lot of people on the left feel betrayed by the Democratic party's seemingly constant efforts to push people to be 'more mainstream' and 'more centrist', and how it frequently leads to compromising people's rights (see the gay community, and how many prominent Democratic politicians pick positions that are slightly less bad than the Republican ones, because they know how much of a captive base they have). So when talk of compromise comes up, I do have a bit of fear that what will end up compromised is the bodily integrity of poor and desperate women.

But I do agree that anything that smacks of consensus shouldn't automatically be rejected. "Safe, legal, and rare", from what I've heard, is pushing to reduce abortions by increasing access to birth control and providing accurate information about sex, so more women can make the choice to not get pregnant in the first place (a choice nearly everyone finds preferable to abortions). That seems like a good idea. Possibly, if you want to make arguments to people taking more extreme positions, you can focus more on how to keep the essential rights intact while trying to reach out, so people can understand that what's compromised isn't necessarily going to be the healthy, safety, and freedom of women?

[lonespark]

Interesting about Pandagon and Amanda. When she posts about feminism I want to shout "hell yes!" when she posts about religion it makes me spitting mad, and when on random subjects like music or movies (or blankets with sleeves) she comes across to me as very snobbish. But I go there for the feminism and other liberal stuff and I'm trying to gain enough self-control to just not read the religion posts. I like it because it's a liberal blog that's femiminist, rather than a blog on feminist issues.

[Lynn]

Thanks Fred, I was waiting to read your reaction to Tiller's murder.

Daughter: the main problem is the legal definition of rare. I would personally like what surgical procedures I need to be defined by medical staff, not as a bid for a voting bloc.

This article gives a good idea of the mothers, doctors, and children involved and how they are affected by poorly drafted anti-abortion laws: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2004/01/25/my_late_term_abortion/

[walden]

Frank Schaeffer's book "Crazy for God" suggests that he actually dragged his father Francis into the whole anti-abortion issue. It wasn't the senior Schaeffer's main concern -- he was more interested in the decline of western civilization and art since the Renaissance, and in making evangelicalism intellectual respectable. Young Frank apparently knocked up his girlfriend, married her, and almost immediately thereafter when pursuing a film career, realized that some of his funders had an interest in opposing abortion (which fit with his own sense of gratitude for the miracle of his child and young wife), and so persuaded his father to convert what had been a series of movies on art and music into a denunciation of abortion.

It clearly became a great divide in the 1980s, because the young evangelicals after 1980 were almost all reflexively anti-abortion, where in the 1970s it was much more of a mixed, complex, nuanced set of concerns. So for pundits like Michael Gerson -- it's the sine qua non of morality, Christianity, and governance.

[Neohippie]

What I've seen is people saying that even discussing questions such as, "What can we do to reduce the number of abortions?" is a compromise that shouldn't be entertained because it plays into the hands of the extremists on the right

Perhaps then, that should be rephrased to, "What can we do to reduce the number of unwanted pregancies?"

An ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure and all.

[Dylan]

What I realized then, in 1994, as I watched these groups line up to condemn violence against "mass-murderers" and to renounce armed opposition to "the Holocaust," was that these folks didn't really mean any of it. They were horrified by the spectacle of someone taking their own rhetoric and arguments seriously. "We don't really mean anything we say," these groups rushed to announce. "We don't really believe any of that."

Reminds me a lot of the clip from Glenn Beck, with the actor playing Thomas Paine and urging the American people to fight back against tyranny... by honking their horns at noon on April 15.

It was intentionally written to skirt the edge of revolutionary, inflammatory rhetoric (and thus to be interesting), while still carefully allowing everyone involved plausible deniability if someone actually blamed it for violence.

[Neohippie]

Anyway, thanks for the post, Fred. It was very interesting.

This whole Tiller thing has got me very upset. Reading gory stories of women who needed late-term abortions from Tiller hasn't helped my mood either!

And it reminds me of the kinds of lies people throw around about how abortion clinics really work and what it's really like to get an abortion. Fox News trying to make it sound like he was aborting healthy, viable babies all the time. That's not what I heard! What I heard is when you're carrying a fetus with a tumor bigger than its head, or its brain formed on the outside of its head, or it died and is in your body right now putrifying, Tiller was the only guy within hundreds of miles who could help you.

Maybe the anecdotes are just so GROSS that people don't talk about them. I know it can make my stomach turn when I read about the things that can go wrong with a fetus to make a late-term abortion necessary. But finding a gynocologist to do the procedure is hard to do, because most of them won't do it out of fear.

Which is why I don't think there should be any laws saying under what circumstances an abortion is ok and when it's not. If I need a medical procedure done, I don't want my doctor to hesitate on it because he's afraid of forgetting to dot an i or cross a t and end up on trial for murder because the procedure wasn't medically necessary enough.

[Daughter]

I think if people framed it as "how can we have fewer unwanted pregnancies?" rather than "how can we have fewer abortions?" it would be easier to get the Left on board.

The problem is that then Sarah Palin and the Pope get all "Condoms!? Where!? Show me them so I can BURN them!" and we lose half the coalition on the other side.

"Fewer unwanted pregnancies" rather than "fewer abortions" makes sense to me. The concern about the Popoe and Palin is again the problem with the loudest voices (and unfortunately, sometimes most powerful) being the most extreme. Stats I've seen indicate that even a majority of American Catholics (and probably even higher numbers of evangelical Protestants) use some form of artificial birth control. The sticky part is probably when it comes to giving teens information about and access to BC, because people are uncomfortable with the idea of teen sexuality.

The trouble is, that sort of compromise can lead to things like the Partial-Birth Abortion ban, which didn't protect healthy fetuses, since most states already had bans on aborting healthy late term fetuses, but did prevent women who needed abortions for health-related reasons from getting proper medical care.

How do you address this? I come from a place of being strongly anti-abortion at one time, in large part because of my faith (although I was always pretty liberal about most other issues), to now understanding more of the importance of abortion rights, while still being uncomfortable about it. However, even when I was most strongly anti-abortion, I understood the need for late-term abortions because I couldn't understand why any woman would have a late-term abortion unless it was absolutely necessary. It's hard for me to even conceive that some people can't see that.

[Matt]

You express something I've been feeling a while, but haven't been able to find the words for. Thanks.

[ako]

How do you address this?

That's the difficult question. Putting facts first and image second seems like a good start (because the best response to the whole 'partial birth' abortion issue is to rely on the strength of the truth and tell people who's really going to get an abortion at seven months, and why they choose to have one). Not giving up on image, but being careful not to become so enamored with what sounds good and reasonable that you lose sight of what the real consequences are. Most bad laws I've heard of that actually get passed make exceptionally good sound bites.

[Neohippie]

The sticky part is probably when it comes to giving teens information about and access to BC, because people are uncomfortable with the idea of teen sexuality.

My gut reaction to this is somewhere along the lines of, "tough shit, I don't care if the thought of teens having sex is icky to you, give those kids some condoms, dammit!"

But I guess that's not a very compelling argument. :-/

However, even when I was most strongly anti-abortion, I understood the need for late-term abortions because I couldn't understand why any woman would have a late-term abortion unless it was absolutely necessary. It's hard for me to even conceive that some people can't see that.

I don't get it either. I also don't understand why Tiller was so much worse just because he did late-term abortions. If life absolutely begins at conception, then early abortions are just as bad. Add in the fact that the early ones are often more "elective" than the late ones, and all these (much more numerous) early abortion providers are the ones they should really be going after!

There's got to be a logical explanation for this. Took me a long time to figure out the logical explanation for "except for cases of rape", but now that I got that one done, I guess I'll have to work on figuring out this bit of hypocrisy next.

[Lynn]

That's interesting, Daughter, because I'd say that's exactly where I come from.

It seems like a terrible choice to have to make, and I am fortunate that I have never been in a position that made it seem the better of a set of horrible choices. But at the same time, I won't support taking that decision away from another woman. I think the balance has to fall in favor of the freedom of the autonomous human being and her OB/GYN, because there is never going to be a law that accurately navigates all 'valid' exceptions.

[CombatQueer]

Fred, I think you're really on this. I deal with a lot of hard core fundies in the military, but the thing is that once you get their own descriptions of how devote they are, there's really not much evidence. The cheat on their wives, go to topless bars, get piss drunk every night, and do everything but try to follow the way of Christ. But they sure do like thinking of themselves as good, strong Christians(yeah, it's weird how they always toss "strong" in there. I suspect it's a little bit of their shame peeking through.)

On the abortion issue they really like to get all hot and bothered, they like t feel outraged, but they don't really care. If they care so much about the lives of babies, why don't they pay their child support? Why do they hate their wives and girlfriends for spending a single cent of their children?

It a shame.

Of course, that is a pretty small segment of my unit. The vast majority of people do their jobs without feeling the need to use their religion as a way to show off how much value they think they have.

[Lori]

Daughter: the main problem is the legal definition of rare. I would personally like what surgical procedures I need to be defined by medical staff, not as a bid for a voting bloc.

What Lynn said.

The problem with "Safe, legal and rare" is that plenty of people would want to enforce some particular definition of "rare". That doesn't actually reduce the conflict at all. Should we consider "rare" to be X abortions per 1000 population, or should we look at it on a per woman basis. The later would mean making it law that any given woman can have say two abortions over the course of her life, but no one may legally have any more than that. How do we enforce that? Would we see a black market in abortion "credits" where women sell the ones they don't personally use?

I want abortion to be safe, legal & rare but I want women to have the ultimate say in how many is enough. The only way to make those two ideas compatible is, as several people have noted, to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.

I stopped having any respect at all for the whole political "pro-life" when they started opposing sex education and readily available birth control. I have yet to meet anyone who is both in favor of abstinence only education and against abortion who has been able to convince me that it's about anything other than controlling women.

[topher]

@Neohippie

I wonder if the lack of knowledge about what really goes on in an abortion clinic like Dr. Tiller's is similar to the idea Fred has pointed out in the "Left Behind" posts. There LaJenkins can't even be bothered to find out the most basic information on the UN and how it really works. The same with abortion clinics they can't learn the reality because it may cloud up the clean, easy, condemnation thing they have going on.

[Cerberus]

Daughter-

Well I think a lot of the response is how much we have lost since the Fundies went all in over using women's bodies to try and lend some moral high ground to their largely immoral beliefs.

For instance, just by shootings, intimidations, and a virtual blackout on any public information on women's sexual health, there is now one doctor left in the entire country to perform the medically necessary late-term abortions. One. In the entire country.

Many states only have one doctor left and these heroes that do work under this constant threat of death and harassment for way below standard doctor pay are further demonized because the debate has become all about the fetus rather than the mother's rights, including the right not to be used by another person or object without permission and the right to pursue legal medical intervention. Even if a fetus was a person, it does not have extra rights by virtue of its "innocence" and the woman doesn't lose rights because she was "naughty".

The problem I think is the attempt to compromise with the stated goals of the opponent's leaders, which are disingenuous.

What I think is needed more than compromise is education. What we have now is the compromise. The right exists so that the abortions people were performing before won't kill people and no one has to morally agree with that or pursue one if they don't want one. That is the compromise. But unfortunately spin and a not unreasonable amount of social anxiety about sexual women not having "consequences" for breaking social taboos have distorted the picture.

I think it's not a time for reaching out and compromising, but more a coming out process, where the 1/3 of women in America who have had abortions tell their stories openly without shame.

Abortions are not a horrible thing when the alternative is worse, just like the hideously disgusting process of open heart surgery is not a bad thing, when the alternative is painful death by heart attack.

Also, I think a big problem is that a lot of people are somehow under the impression that abortions will suddenly stop if made illegal. If anything, making abortion illegal only increases the amount of abortions performed and the abortions performed are far more dangerous to the women involved, many of them already mothers. It's a lot like pot. When it was made illegal, it didn't stop people from smoking it, but now there's also a criminal network profiting of it that often partakes in extreme violence in our cities.

[Technomad]

Where did you find that Sarah Palin was against condoms? I know the Pope is, but what has she ever said about that?

There's a book called Wrath of Angels about the early years of the anti-abortion movement, and it does mention that at first, the evangelicals were by no means unanimously opposed to legalizing abortion.

I'd also like to point out that unstable individuals taking rabid rhetoric too seriously is by no means confined to this issue...the animal-rights and extreme "deep" ecology movements have plenty of people of the same ilk. Not to mention John Brown...

[Leum]

The problem now on the left is the overreaction: the fear that any outreach or attempt to reach out to the moderates or the ambivalent about this issue just plays into the hands of the extremists, and look where that gets us--more murders and violence. But I disagree. I think that it's the extremists you want to isolate more than ever now, not the folks in the middle.

The problem is that the pro-life organizers* don't just oppose legalized abortion, they oppose sex education and contraception. So it's really hard for us to trust them when we know they aren't going to consider "safe, legal, and rare" to be a compromise. We know they won't because they consider the two main things that make those possible (i.e. sex education and contraception) to be immoral.

*I do not mean most pro-lifers. I mean the ones who draft the policy statements for the big groups that organize massive demonstrations, rallies, and lobbying efforts.

[lonespark]

Property destruction = killing people? I totally did not know that.

I would like to learn more about John Brown. Nat Turner, too.

[Spearmint]

Where did you find that Sarah Palin was against condoms? I know the Pope is, but what has she ever said about that?

Technically she's only against telling people who clearly need them that they exist. But I consider that to be in the 'against' camp.

[Karen]

Yet when Hill repeated their own argument and their own rhetoric back to them, these groups all recoiled. They all claimed to share Hill's premise, but not to share his conclusion. That won't work. Hill's violent conclusion arose logically from that shared premise. If he was a madman to be condemned -- as all those groups suddenly insisted he was -- it was because of the madness of that premise. So how was it possible they could repudiate him without also repudiating that rhetoric that compelled him to act?

The rhetoric of anti-choice leaders makes me think of a Tom Lehrer song:

"the rockets go up; where they come down
is not my department, says Werner von Braun."

[Spearmint]

the animal-rights and extreme "deep" ecology movements have plenty of people of the same ilk

How many people have environmentalists shot recently?

There are degrees of domestic terrorism. Breaking into buildings to liberate lab animals is illegal, but it's not the same as shooting a doctor in his church foyer.

Even the Weather Underground weren't actually trying to kill people for the most part, but we've had two crazy rightwing nutjobs haul out a gun and start blasting people in the last year. This is a much more serious threat than anything the radical Left has done in this country in the past 40 years.

[Karen]

This without comment. These guys have embraced the murderer.

[Mabus]

The argument Fred makes fails to understand the internal fundamentalist logic of submission to the government.

The use of violence is the one thing that fundamentalist churches all agree must always be confined to the state and to immediate self-defense. It is the state's monopoly on violence that keeps justice from turning into private vengeance. Occasionally one finds divergences from this position where fundamentalism has hybridized with survivalism, but these are very much in the minority.

Consider this an unrealistic position if you like. It appears to be a remnant of pacifism, at least in some traditions, and there's no question how unrealistic that was.

[Lori]

I also don't understand why Tiller was so much worse just because he did late-term abortions.

@Neohippie: I agree with you that the rhetoric on late term abortions are illogical, but I think there are a couple reasons people feel that way. First, the description of the procedure is fairly off-putting. That's especially true because most people only hear about it from abortion foes who wring it for every last ounce of drama and horror. The second is viability. People know that healthy fetuses can survive at that point and that makes the notion of “baby” much more concrete. They either don't know or failing to process or are lying about the fact that the procedure is not used on healthy fetuses.

[victoria]

What Spearmint said. Setting fire to an inanimate object (like the Earth Liberation Front set fire to environment-damaging SUVs) is not the same as taking a human life. I'm not saying I agree with their tactics, but I do think it's important to not the difference--esp. when the groups themselves take pains to carry out actions that, while destructive, do not and are never intended to harm human beings.

[Josh]

OK, so. I read Karen's "link without comment" and I really, really, really don't get those guys.

I happen to be a Christian who thinks abortion is wrong (pause so y'all can cut me into pieces and vacuum me into a dumpster), but there ARE some people who think, like Fred's former boss, that ALL violence is wrong. While I am regularly troubled by the things that church people in this country say, I'm not one of those who thinks this was ever a Christian country (in the best sense of that word), or that it is now, or even that most of the people in those churches are actually following Christ. Christ was a shit-disturber, yes, but he disturbed the shit of self-righteousness most of all.

These church fools are religious nutjobs: you know it, I know it. Anybody who doesn't know it is not reading this site - at least, not for long.

That doesn't mean there isn't a place for a response from people who love Christ and also are deeply sorrowed by abortion, as I am. I'm not sure about the most effective way to bring those numbers down and I'm absolutely positive that trying to legislate good behavior is a fool's errand that misses the point. But I am equally troubled by all the talk that goes on here about all our RIGHTS, and all the hatred that gets spewed back at the haters. Those guys sadden me, too, but surely this isn't the way to win. You're definitely not convincing ME that it isn't right to try struggle in any way, interpersonal AND legal, to stop abortion.

You just end up sounding like over-privileged, spoiled, entitled, Ugly American's. As someone who pledges allegiance to no man's flag, it depresses me that I have to come to Fred for an incisive word about the hypocrisies in my own religious tradition, and then listen to so much hatemongering in the comments. I suppose I could just butt out, but I'm still hoping for a peaceable middle way. Is that too much to ask?

[Llelldorin]

I think firebombing the house of a researcher while he and his family were inside goes rather beyond setting fire to inanimate objects.

Yes, it's less bad than actually shooting people, but I'm not going to whitewash the nuts on my side of the aisle.

[Daughter]

Josh,

You're an example of what I meant when I said that there are many people who are troubled by abortion who are not extremists. However, your comment troubles me as well. You wrote:

But I am equally troubled by all the talk that goes on here about all our RIGHTS, and all the hatred that gets spewed back at the haters. ... You just end up sounding like over-privileged, spoiled, entitled, Ugly American's. As someone who pledges allegiance to no man's flag, it depresses me that I have to come to Fred for an incisive word about the hypocrisies in my own religious tradition, and then listen to so much hatemongering in the comments.

I went back and read through the comments that preceded yours. Yes, there is a discussion of rights, and we could have a discussion about that.* But I saw nothing hateful in the comments. No one (on this comment thread, anyway) is calling for anyone's death, or labeling those they disagree with as evil. About the worst accusation I've seen here is that of hypocrisy (a term you yourself have just used). In fact, as someone who is also troubled by abortion, I appreciate the fact that I've been able to talk about it here in a civil atmosphere. If there really is hatemongering going on here, care to cite some examples?

* For an interesting discussion about this (with strong representatives from both sides of the abortion debate), I refer you to Ta Nehisi Coates' blog post on this topic, and all the comments that follow: http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/06/i_am_a_man.php