Abortion Doctor Assassinated for Serving Women

[Saorsa]

Outrage in Kansas: Assassinated for Serving Women (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/outrage-in-kansas-assassinated-for-serving-women/)

Posted by onehundredflowers (http:///) on May 31, 2009

http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/george_tiller.jpg?w=226&h=320George Tiller

This was originally posted in nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01tiller.html?pagewanted=print).
Doctor Who Performed Abortions Is Shot to Death

By MONICA DAVEY and JOE STUMPE
WICHITA, Kan. — Authorities said they had a suspect in custody Sunday afternoon in the shooting death of George Tiller (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/george_r_tiller/index.html?inline=nyt-per), a Wichita doctor who was one of the few doctors in the nation to perform late-term abortions.
Dr. Tiller, who had long been a lightning rod for controversy over the issue of abortion and had survived a shooting more than a decade ago, was shot inside his church here on Sunday morning, the authorities said. Dr. Tiller, 67, was shot with a handgun inside the lobby of his longtime church, Reformation Lutheran Church on the city’s East Side, just after 10 a.m. (Central Time). The service had started minutes earlier.
Dr. Tiller, who had performed abortions since the 1970s, had long been a lightning rod for controversy over the issue of abortion, particularly in Kansas, where abortion opponents regularly protested outside his clinic and sometimes his home and church. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by an abortion opponent but recovered.

Dr. Tiller had also been the subject of many efforts at prosecution, including a citizen-initiated grand jury investigation. In the latest such effort, in March, Dr. Tiller was acquitted of charges that he had performed late-term abortions that violated state law.
Shortly after Sunday’s shooting, police said they were searching for a man who had fled in a powder blue Taurus. By mid-afternoon, they said someone had been taken into custody, but offered no additional details.
“This is going to be a larger search than maybe just Wichita,” said Brent Allred, a police captain, who said that the FBI and state police had been called to the scene. Few parishioners remained at the church, a modern, red brick facility that seats about 500 people. Police cars surrounded the building.
Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group that has led opposition to Dr. Tiller’s methods, denounced the killing on Sunday, as did other national groups opposed to abortion. “Our prayers go out to his family and the thousands of people this will impact,” Mr. Newman said in a telephone interview from his home in Wichita.
“Operation Rescue has worked tirelessly on peaceful, non-violent measures to bring him to justice through the legal system, the legislative system,” Mr. Newman said. “I’m a tireless advocate and spokesman for the pre-born children who are dying in clinics everyday. Mr. Tiller was an abortionist. But this wasn’t personal. We are pro life, and this act was antithetical to what we believe.”
Leaders of national abortion rights organizations, meanwhile, expressed outrage. Some described Dr. Tiller as one of the only doctors in the nation who performed third-trimester abortions when the life or health of a mother was at stake, and said that his death would make it even harder for women in such circumstances to end their pregnancies.
“Dr. Tiller was a fearless, passionate defender of women’s reproductive health and rights,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, based in New York, which had worked on a legal case related to Dr. Tiller. “It’s time that this nation stop demonizing these doctors, and start honoring them.”
At St. George Orthodox Christian Church, next door to Dr. Tiller’s church, members said they had often been concerned about being so close to a church that often was the scene of protests because of Dr. Tiller’s presence. Dr. Tiller had attended the church for a long time, they said, and had contributed significantly to construction of the current facility, which was built in about 1996.
“This is a God-fearing community,” said Mickey Cohlmia, who was at services at the neighboring church on Sunday morning and said she was horrified that such a thing had happened in Wichita, a city of about 358,000 in southern Kansas. “How does this scar everybody in his church?”

[jake williams]

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/christ_kills_two_injures_seven_in

[JimmyJazz]

America. http://i215.photobucket.com/albums/cc101/vtm20002000/patriot.gif

[Rjevan]

Well, another good reason never to enter a church... impressive way to show that "killing" is wrong: killing the "sinner". :rolleyes:

[Guerrilla22]

A cowardly terrorist act. It's funny because the Dept. of Homeland Security released a report on potential right wing extremism a few months ago and had conservatives all bent out of shape. A section about possible terrorist acts from anti-abortion individuals/groups was one the reasons they were so upset.

[Led Zeppelin]

Fox was slandering him and his practice for years, as they always do, baselessly.

For example Bill'o was saying that Tiller would perform abortions an hour before birth, or a day before birth...when in an interview Tiller clearly said that he would not perform abortions on fetuses that had "viability", i.e., could survive on their own and had no defects or were not a threat to the physical health of the mother.

Anti-abortionist pseudo-scientists claim that viability exists after a couple weeks already, so they move the goal-posts to such an extent that Tiller becomes a baby-killer. In reality "viability" sometimes exists only a week or so before birth, at the very least not before the third-trimester (29-40 weeks).

Guess what, Tiller never performed an abortion on a fetus in the third-trimester stage of development (no one did, officially):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/US_abortion_by_gestational_age_2004_histogram.svg

So by any standards, not just our own, he wasn't a controversial or "radical" doctor. Except by the standards of the fundamentalists.

That term should be used more often for Christians, by the way. Muslims seem to have a monopoly on it in the media nowadays. Or how about Christian-fascists? I'm sure Hitchens won't be pleased with that.

[Communist Theory]

Wait isn't there already a thread on this?

[Kassad]

This recent event is a testament to the ever-present anti-woman bigotry in the United States. This must be battled in the streets, not just in the legislature. Dr. Tiller's legacy must be preserved by struggling against patriarchal chauvanism in the United States, which is something we in the revolutionary socialist movement must combat. Here's a statement from the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition and the Party for Socialism and Liberation.


http://www.pslweb.org/images/content/pagebuilder/52371.jpg

Dr. Tiller's Murder: Fascist Terrorism and Its Pampered Apologists

By Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
Attorney and co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice
Statement on behalf of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition

The rampant terrorism and violence against women and health care professionals who dare to provide women's health services took its latest victim when Dr. George Tiller was brutally gunned down in his church on Sunday in Wichita, Kansas.

The government and the corporate media coddle these anti-women terrorists.

In the last 30 years, right-wing bigots have carried out 5,800 reported acts of violence against women's health care providers, including targeted assassination, bombings, arsons, death threats, kidnappings and assaults, according to NARAL.

Hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of women have been assaulted and harassed by the right wing as they tried to see a doctor.

The Fascist Strategy

By targeting and intimidating health care providers, the fascist movement hopes to effectively ban abortion services in the United States. If they were to succeed, not only would it deprive women of their fundamental right to control their own bodies, it would be a health care catastrophe. One out of three women in the U.S. have an abortion by the time they are 45, according to Planned Parenthood.

The only question is whether women will be maimed or left to die because they cannot access quality health providers. Dr. Tiller took over his medical practice from his father, a doctor who began performing abortions himself in the 1940s after a patient whom he refused to help died in a back-alley abortion.

Dr. Tiller, like many other health care heroes, kept providing abortion services to women despite the threats. He had been shot previously in both arms; had his office bombed, shot at and frequently vandalized; and he and his patients were routinely threatened, intimidated and attacked.

Dr. Tiller kept providing health care services because, as his family said in a statement, he was “a dedicated servant on behalf of the rights of women everywhere.” He was past retirement age, with four children and 10 grandchildren, and he lived under a virtual military siege because of the terrorist threats. But he didn't stop.

It Wasn't Just the Gunman

This assassination is the culmination of a coordinated assault by the right wing. This included the Kansas Attorney General's efforts to prosecute Tiller, the demonization of Dr. Tiller by Bill O'Reilly, who ran dozens of hit pieces targeting him as a "murderer," and by "Operation Rescue," which prominently called him "America's Doctor of Death."

In the aftermath of the murder, amid reports that the killer had worked with them, Operation Rescue scrambled to take down their prominent "Tiller Watch" webpage, apparently sanitizing it, while their founder continued to call Dr. Tiller a "mass murderer” and held a press conference to do so.

The New York Times coverage of the murder was pathetic. On its front page it stated, "Officials offered little insight into the motive, saying that they believed it was 'the act of an isolated individual' but that they were also looking into 'his history, his family, his associates.'"

The decision to question or suggest uncertainty as to the killer’s "motive" reflects an effort to depoliticize and isolate this most violent of political acts and to disconnect the killing from right-wing groups who seek as their goal to deprive women of their rights using assassination as they see fit. Some right-wing groups and leaders have been quick to announce that the killing was not a homicide, but a justifiable act of "salvation."

The mass media has leapt to the defense of many anti-woman, right-wing groups who directly targeted Dr. Tiller by giving their spokespeople more time in the wake of Dr. Tiller's death to express their primary grievance with his murder -- that it might make them look bad.

Fake Terrorism and Real Terrorism

In recent months, Dr. Tiller reported to the FBI that the threats were increasing.

Obviously, stopping real terrorism is not a "priority" for the FBI, which has allocated limitless resources to infiltrate and sabotage lawful political organizing all over the country. The FBI and police have disrupted and spied on progressive organizations that built a powerful anti-war movement in the last years. They have paid agents provocateur to infiltrate and frame up organizations and individuals engaged in dissent.

Nor is any mosque or Muslim community center safe from FBI infiltration and disruption activities. From Southern California to upstate New York, undercover FBI agents are trying to entrap Muslim youth into "terrorist" plots that emanate from the FBI itself.

The U.S. government's use of the terrorist label is used to frame up and imprison Muslims in the United States. Just last week in Dallas, representatives of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) were sentenced to as much as 65 years in prison for the “terrorist” crime of raising money for desperately needed humanitarian relief. HLF had been the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. The charity's "crime" was that the humanitarian relief was going to those starving and dying in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine. The U.S. government has determined that it is an act of terrorism to get medicine to hospitals and food to children when U.S. foreign policy supports the strangulation of a civilian population for geostrategic reasons.

When Anthrax Threats Were No Big Deal

Yet, when it comes to the right-wing organizations that engage in violence and threats, the FBI and the corporate media are conspicuously mute.

For instance, shortly after the September 11 attacks, letters containing anthrax were sent to media and Senate offices. Hundreds of anthrax threats were also sent to reproductive health clinics, according to the website of NARAL, which states: "Between October 15 and 23, 2001, more than 250 abortion and family planning clinics in 17 states and the District of Columbia received letters purporting to contain anthrax. In each instance, a powdery substance was accompanied by a letter stating, 'You have been exposed to anthrax. We are going to kill all of you.' An additional 270 letters were sent to clinics during the first week of November."

Very few people know about this kind of extreme terrorist intimidation. Can you imagine the reaction of the FBI and the media if anti-war organizers or Arab Americans were linked to anthrax threat letters? There would be screaming headlines and nationwide police sweeps.

Coddling Right Wing Terrorists

But in 2007, in Washington, D.C., when a man showed up at an immigrant rights rally, covertly carrying a map of the demonstration area with sight lines drawn on it, with a cache of weapons including a converted fully automatic M1-Carbine and apparent plans to massacre participants, you probably never heard about it. Why? Because the man, Tyler Froatz, was a right-wing vigilante bent on attacking immigrants and their supporters.

Froatz, who organized with the Free Republic and acted as a spokesman for the Minuteman, stalked a May Day demonstration in 2007. He was arrested after he was confronted by a courageous young woman working as an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition. She was then assaulted by him when she objected to the racist signs he was posting depicting the graphic slaughter of immigrants, including pregnant women and children.

In addition to the weapons Froatz brought with him, in his apartment was found a large arsenal of rifles, handguns, ammunition, a Molotov cocktail, a hand grenade and a 100,000-volt taser gun.

So is Froatz in the special terrorist prisons in Terre Haute or Marion? No. He was released to the custody of his parents in Connecticut and thereafter allowed to plead to a minor weapons charge. The U.S. Attorney’s Office never charged him with any terrorism-related offense or hate-crimes offense. And today, members of Froatz’s group, the Free Republic, celebrated this latest cold-blooded terrorist murder of Dr. Tiller in their postings.

More than Bullet-Proof Vests and Federal Marshals: A New Strategy is Needed

The murder of Dr. Tiller is a misogynist attack against all women. It is also the foreseeable outcome of a climate of bigotry and vilification fostered by the right wing, normalized by the media and the U.S. government.

A political calculus has been made by the government as to what will be deemed terrorism: what political acts will be crushed and what political violence will be supported or tolerated. As it stands, there is no mobilized effective counter to this fascist violence and the threat that it poses. It’s time for a new strategy and a new challenge. There must be a multi-faceted mobilization of women themselves and of all those men who stand with us against anti-woman bigotry.

www.answercoalition.org (http://www.answercoalition.org/)

[mykittyhasaboner]

Only in this country.....can a medical professional get killed for performing abortions. I really don't know what to say, I just feel pretty bad.

[marxistcritic]

Yet another one of the many reasons why religioun should be destroyed...:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

[Invariance]

Only in this country.....can a medical professional get killed for performing abortions. I really don't know what to say, I just feel pretty bad. In 2001, a security guard of an abortion clinic was killed by a pro-life murderer. He's serving a minimum of 23 years. Where I live, a medical centre was firebombed and graffiti of 'baby killers' tagged on the builiding by some morons - it was a GP practice, not a family planning centre, and their molotovs didn't even explode. I suppose we should be thankful for their total incompetence.

[mykittyhasaboner]

In 2001, a security guard of an abortion clinic was killed by a pro-life murderer. He's serving a minimum of 23 years. Where I live, a medical centre was firebombed and graffiti of 'baby killers' tagged on the builiding by some morons - it was a GP practice, not a family planning centre, and their molotovs didn't even explode. I suppose we should be thankful for their total incompetence.
What the fuck is the matter with these people?

I've never cared too much about their label, but "pro-life" needs to be scrapped; its really contradictory and misleading.

[JimmyJazz]

Where I live, a medical centre was firebombed and graffiti of 'baby killers' tagged on the builiding by some morons - it was a GP practice, not a family planning centre, and their molotovs didn't even explode. I suppose we should be thankful for their total incompetence.

I've been thinking that maybe we could teach abortion doctors to hold these religious attackers at bay by holding up their empty hand and saying, "Watch out! I've got a blastocyst here in my hand! It's too small to see, but it already has a soul! Make one false move and I'LL DROP IT ON THE GROUND!!"

If the wackos persist, he can turn his hand upside down, then make his escape as they drop to their knees to frantically look for the li'l human he so callously discarded (as only an abortion doctor could).

[The Deepest Red]

Disgusting.

[Verix]

the irony is these people consider them selfs "Pro-life" yet kill people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence#Murders

[Black Sheep]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryiUBIiN4xE

[Wakizashi the Bolshevik]

Well, I suppose "everything is possible in America". Fascist scum!

[kharacter]

this pissed me to pieces, I thought we were done with this bullshit. I absolutely despise the hypocrisy of the American mindset.

Pro Life is Anti-Woman

[Il Medico]

Let me get this straight, a pro-life extremist, walks into a church and kills a 67 year old man for what he does for a living? God-damn. That is just fucked up. :crying: It is a complete contradiction. This is truly an outrage, I hope they catch that scumbag.