Abortion, Dialogues, And The Murder Of Dr. Tiller

Bruce Lee once said that "the greatest response to a punch is to not be there." In my life, being a guy who is considered reasonably funny, jovial with an opinionated backdrop, I have tried to apply this axiom when someone attempts to hem me in publicly over a hot button issue. What can be easily turfed off as dismissive sarcasm really acts as a valve; a sort of verbal disarmament that allows me to reduce the rancor to tolerable levels of audibility.

When I read that high-profile doctor and gleeful performer of partial birth abortions, Dr. George Tiller had been gunned down by an at-the-time-unknown assailant, I knew I would be called upon by a certain acquaintance to square my unequivocal opposition to abortion to the fact that Mr. Tiller was ushering in his house of worship. I was right on time about it, too.

"So, does the fact that Tiller was shot at church strike you as the least bit ironic?" he asked.

"Bet they had a small nursery," I said.

He just stared at me and then said "Man I hate you sometimes."

Now, left to itself, the acidic irony of my response alone is a shutter-upper. I did it precisely to stop what he thought would be a public garroting of me in front of others. But that wasn't my entire goal. I of course immediately condemned the murder of this man. But it allowed me the opportunity to take the lead. Because my pro-life position neither caused this, nor fomented an atmosphere that condones it. And they that obsess over killing babies are not going to get away with being that intellectually lazy about their obsession when using me as their whipping boy. If they're going to paint me as a supporter of violence on this level, then they simply are going to have to work for it. And that includes my friends.

"The problem is, between the two of us, I am the only one with a consistent belief about this situation." I said. "I believe Dr. Tiller was murdered. I also happen to believe he was a state-sanctioned killer himself. So I am valuing human life on both ends of the equation. You can't even solve for 'x' on this one."

He denied the inequality, on the usual grounds, but admitted I was more consistent. And really, his Darwinistic worldview would be more consistent if he simply found nothing wrong with doctor Tiller's murder, which of course, he doesn't (nor would I admire for consistency's sake). And I am becoming more and more convinced that the almost infernal fervor that surrounds the abortion advocacy can have much of its DNA traced to The Origin of the Species. Even Darwin himself complained of nausea, and cold chills by even contemplating the complexity of the human eye. Advocates take on a palpable tremor, a vociferating glottal fry to their passion that transcends a simple concern for the sovereignty of the body. Prostitution advocates, recreational drug-use advocates and the like do not raise the urgency of their causes to preposterous levels of spiritual gravity.

But then again, they are not staring right into the womb, and thus right into the face of God. Abortion is a futile attempt to nullify the creative process at the only place it can originate; a feckless and deadly attempt to burn down the Garden of Eden.

Some news organizations have said this occurrence has the pro-life community on edge about their latitude to discuss the issue. I happen to feel just the opposite is true. Despite Mr. Tiller's devout adherence to a Reformed Lutheran faith, he took a particular, Sweeny Todd-like joy in dispatching over 60,000 babies--many of them in fashions and at stages that made even many in his own camp wince.

It is therefore, the discomfort of the pro-choice community, to have to re-explain and re-convince an increasingly pro-life culture that a woman can contract a disease--incurable by any hippocratic medical standards, and unmanageable by any medicinal mitigation, that requires vacuuming the brains from a fully-developed infant, delivered breach save for it's head, in order to save a mother's life.

And this--is where the dialogue needs to stay.