Word: tiller
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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...
...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...
...logic of the extremists: If abortion providers are mass child killers and the law refuses to act, the vigilante may see himself as the lone defender of justice - as vigilantes usually do. Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who in 1991 was arrested while protesting in front of Tiller's office, released a statement that began, "Dr. Tiller was a mass murderer ... he left this life with his hands drenched with the innocent blood of tens of thousands of babies that he murdered. Surely there will be a dreadful accounting for what he has done...
...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...
...Read "George Tiller Murdered...