{"id":1052,"date":"2009-05-31T20:29:22","date_gmt":"2009-05-31T20:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/theirbadmother\/2009\/05\/doesnt-pro-life-mean-pro-life.html"},"modified":"2009-05-31T20:29:22","modified_gmt":"2009-05-31T20:29:22","slug":"doesnt-pro-life-mean-pro-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/theirbadmother\/2009\/05\/doesnt-pro-life-mean-pro-life.html","title":{"rendered":"Doesn’t Pro-Life Mean Pro LIFE?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Follow-up to reflections on Jon & Kate<\/a> postponed for a day or two)<\/i><\/p>\n

George Tiller, a doctor who performed late-term abortions, was shot to death<\/a> at 10 a.m. today, at his church outside Wichita, Kansas. For some, like Operation Rescue Founder Randall Terry, Tiller was a “mass-murderer<\/a>” and deserved what he got. For others – their voices represented by women like NOW President Kim Gandy – Tiller is an innocent victim of “domestic terrorism<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Count me among the latter. This is terrifying and terrible and terrorism is as good a word as any to apply to what happened.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty vocal about being pro-choice. I’m also pretty vocal about my ambivalence about what such choice entails<\/a>, which is to say, I’m emphatically not<\/i> pro-abortion<\/a>. But then again, I don’t know anyone who is pro<\/i>-abortion, or anti<\/i>-life, or anything other than simply pro-choice<\/i>. Pro-choice is not pro-death. Funny, though, how pro-life, in this case, turned pro-death. A more perfect example of irony in action I cannot, at this moment, imagine.<\/p>\n

Abortion is – to say the least – a complicated issue. How do we say when life begins, how do we determine whether the earliest stirrings of life should be protected, whether the rights and interests of a self-determining human being should or should not outweigh the possible rights and interests of a being whose life has not yet begun? Hard questions that sometimes seem to defy answers. Murder, however, is not a complicated issue. Killing a living human being in cold blood is wrong. We can parse arguments about murder to account for necessary defense (self-defense, war), but otherwise it’s pretty straightforward: murder – understood as killing an autonomous, living human being – is wrong. So how anybody, anywhere, can defend this is beyond my understanding entirely. Even if you belief that abortion itself is murder, how does spreading more death  – spreading death, and terror? – bring forward a message of life and hope?<\/p>\n

I am confused, and sad. So, so sad. <\/p>\n

   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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