The death of abortionist George Tiller has put the scholarship of Jon A. Shields, CMC professor, front and center in the national debate about abortion.
Tiller, you'll remember, aborted babies days before they would otherwise have been born. I'll save you the gory details, unless you have an academic interest, and just let you know that it has been estimated that Tiller performed over 60,000 of such abortions. Shields points out why Tiller so irked pro-lifers by mentioning that Tiller, who was paid well over a million a year, "offered cremated ashes to parents and baptized aborted remains."
Indeed, he was one of only three abortionists in the country willing to perform the operation. And for left-wingers who are quick to say that anything Europe does, we should do, such procedures are illegal in most of the world. He's not your garden variety abortionist, no matter how many times people may say he is or stress the fact that he was gunned down in a church. For the record, I'm an atheist/agnostic and these kind of arguments are basically meant to suggest that someone is a good person because they frequent a house of worship. How quaint and unfortunately untrue.
Pro-lifers continue to be stigmatized as violent nutjobs. Shields writes that these radical groups have almost no support in the pro-life movement. He writes,
Although radical factions have often existed in social movements, they have almost always been marginal. This fact is constantly obscured by the media's attentive vigil over the most sensational and militant activists. Currently, for example, one of the most prominent radical organizations in the pro-life movement is Operation Rescue West, a group that has devoted itself to harassing the late Dr. Tiller. Nonetheless, Troy Newman, the director of Operation Rescue West (ORW), confessed to me, "We have no base."
Despite the fact that it is hardly an organizational secret that Operation Rescue West has no members, an internet search of ORW yields more than twice as many hits as Birthright International, a pro-life organization that manages more than 400 crisis pregnancy centers with thousands of volunteers.
I'm of the opinion that Roe led to fighting in the streets over abortion because a workable compromise couldn't be achieved politically. Shields
writes about that history of non-violence and how marginalization of pro-lifers has led to more and more violence, especially as evangelicals join the debate.
Roe guaranteed that electoral politics would bring only marginal victories for the pro-life movement, such as parental consent laws and a ban on partial-birth abortion. As Risen and Thomas conclude, "Roe led almost inevitably to revolution and sent opponents out into the street." The court decision birthed one of the largest campaigns of civil disobedience since the anti-war movement, even as other '60s movements were dying. According to the National Abortion Federation, there were more than 33,000 arrests and 600 blockades between 1977 and 1993.
Though a tradition of Christian pacifism held sway over the first generation of activists in the rescue movement, some grew exasperated by the late 1970s by the small, ineffectual clinic blockades in cities such as Washington D.C. and St. Louis. Activists such as Joan Andrews began attracting headlines for vandalizing abortion clinics. Once caught, her dogged refusal to cooperate with the criminal justice system earned her solitary confinement and fame as a pro-life martyr. Midnight bombings began. Radicals orchestrated 28 bombings between 1977 and 1993. Some of the perpetrators were Catholic leftists who had cut their political teeth on the anti-war movement. In their destruction of abortion clinics and equipment, for example, such radicals were trying to consciously imitate the "Plowshares" anti-nuclear movement.
By not allowing anti-abortion activists to protest or blockade abortion mills by using federal law, anti-abortion activists were pushed still further from the mainstream and unfortunately, some of them decided to turn to violence. Or at least, says Shields.
I'm a reluctant pro-lifer. Here's the article that best sums up my philosophy
regarding abortion in all its nuance. I came to the party way late and I don't see it as the most important issue for the GOP or the country. While I'm personally pro-life and would vote for a law criminalizing abortion on the state level, I would rather spend my energies elsewhere.
That said, if I could push a button, and end abortion everywhere, I would. But such a button will never exist because we as a society, just as society's before us -- the Greeks, etc. -- have always had policies that approach infanticide. Whether it be leaving the nation's babies out to die in well, as do the Chinese, or the ancient Greeks, who left them out in the cold, I don't think we're ever going to stop aborting them.
