The New York Times Bids Farewell to George Tiller
The Grey Lady published the definitive article on the death of George Tiller and the controversy surrounding his work on Friday. I have yet to obtain an actual hard copy of the Times, but given the sheer length of the piece, one imagines it spilling into the sports section. The research done by journalist David Barstow is exhaustive and he deserves enormous credit for his legwork. Despite having been published in what credentialed reporters continue to insist is the Newspaper of Record, the article has a visceral pro-Tiller bias (it boggles the imagination, I know). But if you can get beyond Barstow’s mild disdain for pro-lifers and nagging urge to canonize the departed, the piece is an open window into the mysterious life of Dr. George Tiller, one of the most despised, controversial men in America until his life was ended by an assassin’s bullet.
Contrary to the accounts of many liberals, who have been portraying Tiller as a soft-spoken friendly neighborhood Doctor Proctor under siege by mad Christian zealots, Tiller was an ideological abortion warrior. According to the Times, he once declared, “If a stake has to be driven through the heart of the anti-abortion movement, I want to have my hand on the hammer.” (Tiller probably should have been the last person talking about driving something through a heart.)
Two incidents described in Barstow’s article deserve mention:
The next day, Mr. [Mark] Gietzen [a pro-life activist] was standing in the gutter [adjacent to Tiller's clinic] with his volunteer discussing the new tactic when Dr. Tiller pulled up in his armored S.U.V. In another “incident report,” Mr. Gietzen wrote: “Tiller floored his accelerator, and aimed his Jeep directly at us!” Mr. Gietzen claimed that Dr. Tiller’s vehicle hit him, causing bruising. He promptly filed a police report, generating more news coverage.
In a fit of anger, [Tiller] once told an anti-abortion leader, “Too bad your mother’s abortion failed.”
Tiller was not a simple doctor, an innocent bystander in the culture wars who happened to perform late-term abortions. He was a fierce ideologue who fought to win. While pro-life protesters succeeded in driving out Kansas’ other four abortion providers, Tiller defiantly refused to flee. Women flocked from as far as Canada to undergo an abortion at his notorious clinic.
He was also a man whose continual flaunting of the law would make Al Capone blush. Despite a law in Kansas banning partial birth abortion, Tiller remained in business, buying off lawmakers with substantial campaign contributions. Throughout endless protests, lawsuits, and hostile state attorney generals, Tiller always survived by the skin of his teeth. But as his name gained widespread attention and the hideous procedures performed at his clinic came under scrutiny, many began to wonder if Tiller could survive. To have several dozen Wichita protesters after you was one thing. To be in Bill O’Reilly’s crosshairs was quite another. How many PR battles could an abortionist win? Now we’ll never know.
Tiller is a totemic symbol of the fiercest cultural battle America has seen since segregation. Ironically, his death has set both sides back for miles. The pro-life movement has been discredited by his death, more vulnerable to attacks from media elites seeking to portray anti-abortion as the province of violent lunatics. The pro-choice movement has lost one of its savviest four-star generals and one of the last clinics in the country that performs late-term abortions. But though the effects are devastating, his death is also simultaneously meaningless, an act of violence carried out by one extremist against another extremist on an issue where most Americans are somewhere in the grey.
George Tiller was shot and killed on May 31, 2009.
To say that the effects of Tiller’s death are meaningless based upon your reasons is to fail to consider the importance of your argument that most Americans, if not most people in general, hold positions on abortion that lie somewhere in the grey area. The murder of one of the last doctors performing late-term abortions in the US by the radically, and violently, pro-life, and the fact that such a story is newsworthy indicates from both sides that there has been, in the last few decades, a monumental shift in where most people fall on the policy spectrum. To look at this terrible event from a strictly logical and linear standpoint is to realize that the grey area is the best, most logical and reasonable place to be–neither pro-abortion nor anti-abortion, but pro-choice–not in the colloquial sense, which has been given a meaning almost identical to “pro-abortion”, but in the literal sense. Why anti-abortion legislation has failed is not because it cannot be enforced, but because it caters to a small minority, just as pro-abortion legislation would. Tiller’s murder is the physical manifestation of these two minorities battling for the upper hand in a field where neither is the representative force. Tiller, in this case playing the role of the pro-abortionist for lack of a true example. The effects of his death are, therefore, far from meaningless, as they illustrate just where American sentiment, and human sentiment for that matter, lies. Bearing this as a beacon light, policy can be made, or perhaps more appropriately not made, that is representative of the grey area.