MY OPINION: THE DEATH OF DR. TILLER AND THE LEAGUE POSITION ON REPRODUCTIVE CHOICES

By Ann Zimmerman – Attorney and president of the League of Women Voters of Salina, Inc.

When a radical “pro-life” activist murdered Dr. George Tiller at his church in Wichita this spring, I began again to examine the issue of abortion.

Since 1983, the League of Women Voters position on the issue of Reproductive Choices has stated: The League of Women Voters of the United States believes that public policy in a pluralistic society must affirm the constitutional right of privacy of the individual to make reproductive choices.

This position has often branded the League as irrevocably pro-abortion and has sometimes called into question its non-partisanship. Abortion is considered by many to be a form of murder – how can murder be allowed to exist cloaked by a privacy right? In the face of people and institutions with absolute moral convictions, arguing a different position becomes awkward – “I understand you believe absolutely that you are on God’s side, but I still disagree.”

Given this state of affairs, we consider the case of Dr. Tiller. Decades ago, upon the death of his father, he took over his father’s family practice temporarily with the goal of transferring patients to a different doctor and getting on with his own dermatology practice. He soon learned, to his uncomfortable surprise, that his father had been providing abortion services – which were illegal at the time. He declined to do an abortion for a woman. He later learned she had died from a botched “back-alley” abortion.

This led to a change in his thinking.

Accounts of those who worked with him and his patients described women who did not sound like murderers – women who wanted their babies and were overjoyed to be pregnant: One woman learned six or seven months into her pregnancy that her fetus – her unborn baby – was developing without a brain, which meant its death was certain upon birth. Would this abortion be murder? Another learned that she had a malignant tumor likely to kill either her or her unborn child or both if the pregnancy were to continue. Would this abortion be murder?

I guess that for those who live in a world of absolutes, murder is murder. These mothers should just carry on through the end of their doomed pregnancies, facing the deaths that await them, hoping for miracles. Dr. Tiller was willing to offer them an alternative – in a clean, skilled, and by all inside accounts compassionate, place.

Some women traveled half-way across the country for Dr. Tiller’s services, because those services were so rare, because almost no other doctor was willing to undergo the daily threats, danger and harassment showered on Dr. Tiller. Many such women, experiencing these saddest, most difficult decisions, faced taunts and hysteria among protesters as they walked from their cars to Dr. Tiller’s clinic.

Are these women murderers? Is Dr. Tiller a murderer because he assisted them in terminating their dangerous or hopeless pregnancies? I say not.

Another essential question is: Who decides which abortions to allow? People who consider all abortions murder want themselves to decide – and to decide no abortions can ever happen. Others might agree that some abortions make sense while others are immoral. Who decides?

Some stories coming out of abortion clinics involve atrocities – consider the nine-year-old girl pregnant with her own father’s child. Consider the woman pregnant for the fifth time after her other four children have been removed from her home for abuse or neglect. This is not Leave It To Beaver. Consider the good mother whose resources – financial, emotional, etc. – are stretched so thin she genuinely believes that another child in the family will hurt them all. Is that an abortion “of convenience” as some would call it? I doubt that grieving woman finds the whole process “convenient.”

Is it always better for a baby to be born? Who decides?

Pregnancies are, by nature, time limited. In most cases, by the time the pregnancy is detected it is several weeks — or months — along. A pregnancy lasts nine months – 40 weeks. By the later weeks of pregnancy, Kansas law requires that two doctors must be involved with the woman to terminate her pregnancy. Proponents of outlawed abortions are unsatisfied with that. They want stricter laws. But who interprets laws? Judges do. Who enforce laws? Police – and others in the executive branch of the government – do.

One problem with the courts is that they are not designed to work quickly. If a woman and her doctor decide that terminating the pregnancy is the best option, should she have to go before a judge, explain her decision, and beg the judge to give her permission? First she needs a lawyer who knows the court rules on such procedures – which usually means major legal fees. Then most lawsuits take many months – more time than the weeks left in a woman’s pregnancy. Appeals to higher courts typically take years.

Even if a judge can decide the case in time, is a judge always wiser than a doctor? Is a judge always wiser than the patient? Though we hope for the best, not all judges are renowned for their great wisdom.

Should we require every woman who seeks an abortion to stop by the courthouse and run their decision by a judge first? Courts are not set up this way. And which cases would pass muster and which would not? What if a woman does not want her child? Is that reason enough? What if a woman has abused drugs throughout her pregnancy? Is that reason enough? What if a pregnancy was the result of a brutal rape? Is that reason enough? Can you put yourself in the place of the women standing up in court to testify to these things?

What if court permission were required, but a woman had an abortion without it? Should she be arrested and tried for murder? This would seem to be the inevitable outcome of a law declaring that, as the billboards say, “Abortion is Murder!” Some say that the mother is an innocent victim, while the doctor carrying out her decision, is the murderer. That’s how Dr. Tiller’s murderer justified his killing. But women without skilled abortion doctors still get abortions – sometimes with “back-alley” unsanitary providers, sometimes with clothes hangers. Before abortion was legalized, many women died from the process. Should a woman who terminates her pregnancy herself be convicted of murder?

Maybe we should make a rule that people must get permission from a judge to have sex in the first place.

Those who want to outlaw abortion tend to also be the same folks who decry too much government involvement in our lives. So they want to keep government out of their land use matters and out of their wallets but want government peering into women’s wombs to control their pregnancy decisions – possibly a woman’s most agonizing and personal decisions. Should she have to write those decisions into legal pleadings and stand up against a prosecutorial cross-examination?

Some estimates say that fifty percent of pregnancies result in natural miscarriages. What if the pregnancy terminates itself? Of course, no one would say this is murder. What if the pregnancy terminated by abortion would have miscarried anyway? Is it still murder because the woman did not let nature – or God – decide? Is God the only one who gets to decide? But modern medicine allows the continuation of countless pregnancies that in the past would have ended in spontaneous abortion, miscarriage or stillbirth. Modern medicine gives us God-like powers at every turn. Do we know that God only makes decisions in favor of life and never of death? Do we know that God always wants a birth and never a death when it comes to a fetus?

These are all issues which were surely considered in the 1980s national League study on the issue of Reproductive Choices.

As for me, I do not believe that it is always better for a baby to be born. I do believe that once a baby is born, the whole family, community, society, should work together to make sure that child – and every child – is healthy, loved, and given every opportunity to thrive.

A woman, in consultation with her doctor, should be making the decisions about her pregnancy. Judges, law enforcement officers, courts, are particularly unsuited to deal with the short, dramatic, miraculous but sometimes difficult process of pregnancy.

The League of Women Voters reached this same conclusion. Pregnancy is a private event full of private decisions and choices. Those choices must be left to the individual, not to the courts, lobby groups, the legislature or the judges.

I believe the League’s position is sound. Dr. Tiller’s actions showed that he believed it, too.

Dr. Tiller was not a murderer. He believed women should make their own decisions about their bodies and about the children they bear, and he acted on that belief. Dr. Tiller died for his belief in the ability of women to make their own decisions, no matter how difficult.

We should work to give all women — and all men — the information they need to make wise reproductive choices. But they must be allowed to make those choices for themselves.

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