Word: murdered
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...murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, 67, has already been reconstructed in chilling detail: the threats to Good Samaritans who tried to intervene, the single shot in a Wichita, Kans., church, the wailing wife, the gunman's powder-blue getaway car decorated with a red rose - an antiabortion emblem - and a Jesus fish. But specifics about the suspected shooter, Scott Roeder, 51, are only just starting to emerge. Roeder had been following, and decrying, Tiller's work - which included performing abortions after 21 weeks - for years. Early reports on Roeder, who was taken into custody shortly after the shooting...
...Read "Tiller's Murder: The Logic of Extremism on Abortion...
...Tiller, like others before him, represented a challenge to both sides. Late-term abortions have always been the hardest to defend, but he and his supporters would point to cases when the procedure, however morally troubling, was medically necessary. Murder is even harder to defend, and yet there are some kinds of killing we distinguish from murder. A battlefield slaying is one; killing in self-defense is another. To its supporters, capital punishment is a third way, and now we approach the logical challenge. If someone truly believes that abortion is the same as murder, then is not bombing abortion...
...Mercifully, the abortion debate typically occurs within the boundaries a democracy sets, one of peaceful, if not always respectful, debate and advocacy on both sides. But what Tiller's murder reminds us is that in matters of life and death, the argument itself can become a matter of life and death...
...many pro-choice observers, Tiller's murder smacked of a sort of frontier justice that could intimidate abortion providers in the country's heartland. It was a sober reminder that, even as pundits have claimed abortion would not be a key issue in Sotomayor's Supreme Court confirmation hearings, it remains an incredibly divisive moral issue - and one that is still a province of extremists...