Noli Irritare Leones

Actually, they do, of course. There are day-nightmares as well as daydreams, and people who imagine in advance all manner of catastrophes. Still …

I’ve been watching, this week, as Susie Bright filled my Facebook feed with one story after another related to Tiller’s death: candlelight vigils, the family that adopted a child from a mother who had sought a late term abortion at his clinic, the stories of dire medical issues, as Feministe ran multiple threads about abortion, and as various friends on various lists commented on the killing, and as other blogs started threads about abortion. John of Mind on Fire, who’s also part of my Quaker meeting, has a thread in which he asks

… So, putting legality aside, where do you draw the moral lines about abortion? When would you feel that it is morally wrong to abort a fetus/child? What factors should be considered in the decision making? I’m not asking you to prescribe your morality–just to share your reasoning with us.

Also, this post is a sharing space, and not a place to attack or object to one another. xJane or I will delete any comments that attack another opinion, or that argue in favor of a particular position….

I’ve written my own thoughts, about Tiller’s death and about the revived abortion debates that the killing has inspired, and I’ve tossed them; the thing is that shooting a man at his church, where he was acting as usher, and reportedly threatening other members of the church, casts a shadow over any of the other arguments I might usually make – the ones where I might try to do a William Saletan-like balancing act. There’s not much nuance to murder.

Under Kansas abortion law, according to Findlaw, abortion of a viable fetus is permitted if a 2nd M.D. certifies that abortion is necessary to preserve life of the mother or that the fetus has severe, life-threatening deformity or abnormality, so Tiller was liable for prosecution if he performed elective abortions of third trimester pregnancies. Such prosecution was actually brought against him, and he was found not guilty in March of this year.

Tiller has been a favored target of anti-abortion protesters, and he testified that he and his family have suffered years of harassment and threats. His clinic was the site of the 1991 “Summer of Mercy” protests marked by mass demonstrations and arrests. His clinic was bombed in 1985, and an abortion opponent shot him in both arms in 1993.

Kansas law allows abortions after a fetus can survive outside the womb only if two independent doctors agree that it is necessary to save a women’s life or prevent “substantial and irreversible” harm to “a major bodily function,” a phrase that has been interpreted to include mental health.

Physician Ann Kristin Neuhaus provided second opinions on late-term abortions before Tiller performed them.

The complaint with the board cites 11 late-term abortions Tiller performed in 2003 on patients ranging in age from 10 to 18….

Of course, many remained unconvinced by the verdict, and maintain to this day that many of Tiller’s post-viability abortions were not tragic stories of already dying babies, but purely elective abortions for social reasons. Well, I and millions of others believe, and have believed ever since his trial, that OJ Simpson really did murder Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. That still didn’t inspire me to take a gun and hunt him down.

But I meant to talk, not about the actual murder, but about the imaginary babies. Steve Barnes had a post up about an ex-girl friend’s two abortions.

… Trust me, Cheryl was devastated by her decision to have the abortions. Yes, I could probably have talked her out of them. No, I’m not sorry I didn’t.

I saw that, later, when Cheryl became a mother she fell right into her mother’s pattern, sacrificing and giving everything for her children….

I have to admit that men who would NOT be willing to allow women to vote amongst themselves on this issue make me nervous. I trust my daughter, my mother, my wife…and Cheryl. I tasted her tears.

Others that I know online have told their stories of decisions about abortion, in blogs or in comments. I know that Amy Welborn chose to keep a child as a single parent, that Hugo’s high school girl friend had an abortion, that Lauren had two birth control failures as a teenager, the first leading to abortion and the second leading to a baby, that Sheelzebub had an abortion and intends never ever to have a child.

Myself, the closest I’ve been to pregnancy are the two imaginary ones. The most recent was when I was 29, and married to Joel. Since it’s an imaginary pregnancy, and the child is just what I say she would be like, I can tell you that she was a girl, and that she’d be in college now. What actually happened was that one month, something shifted in my appearance that led the women I was then working with to insist that I must be pregnant. I also had a very light, almost non-existent period that month, followed by a particularly heavy one the next month, so the imaginary pregnancy came with an imaginary miscarriage. But I’ll still insist that neither of them was real – not, that is, a real pregnancy or a real miscarriage. The facts of the case were that there was no reasonable likelihood of my having gotten pregnant that month, so I didn’t bother, at the time, mentioning my coworkers’ suspicion to Joel.

The other was longer ago. Since it’s also an imaginary pregnancy, and the child is just what I say he would be like, I can tell you that he was a boy, and that he would now be well out of college, either working or on to graduate school of some kind, about the same age as my brother James. And he has a particular father, who wasn’t Joel, and whom I won’t name. It was, really, no more than a period that was late a week or two, at a particular time when it jogged my mind thinking in a particular way. Again, it was purely imaginary, and circumstances were such that there didn’t seem a realistic likelihood that I would really have been pregnant that month, so, in the interests of not appearing to make a fuss about nothing, I didn’t bother telling whoever would have been the imaginary baby’s imaginary father.

I think I’ve blogged about this one once before, in another context, but at any rate, what I remember most about it is the combination of the sense that, if I had been pregnant, it would have been a disaster, and the sense that, if I had been pregnant, there was no way, as I saw it, that I’d not keep the child.

Occasionally I’ve wondered how life would have turned out if I had had a child, under those circumstance, and at that time. Would I have agreed to marry the father, if he’d asked? Maybe; I thought he was wonderful, and would have loved him for asking. But maybe not; we were so young, and had known each other so briefly, and the prospect of a shotgun divorce was unappealing. For all those reasons, it’s hard to imagine him actually asking, under those circumstances. In some ways, I wouldn’t have been badly positioned; I was close enough to a Stanford degree that there’s no question that I’d still have gotten it, and, likewise, there’s no question that the child’s father would also have gotten a degree. But there are other dreams than that, important ones, that might have been lost. His as well as mine, actually, maybe even, after all, his more than mine. The actual pregnancy, of course, and almost certainly most of the care of the baby, would have been mine to bear.

It is odd to be affected by something purely imaginary (and invisible and unknown to the other person involved), but I have been ever since, really; that moment of realization – if I were pregnant right now, I would keep the child – did influence me ever after, in my choices about birth control, in my choices about sex, and, ultimately, in how I talked to Joel about pregnancy and choices about abortion, before we had ever slept together. I knew that if I got pregnant by him, I wasn’t getting an abortion, and I wanted to be sure he knew that. And it mattered to me that he welcomed that choice on my part.

I never imagined, though, for either of my imaginary babies, this story.

If you’re like me, you had no idea that this happened to people. I thought that I would go through this under the care of my regular doctor, in my local hospital, with the support of family and friends nearby. I remember a few weeks before getting our baby’s final, lethal prognosis, I heard on the news about a doctor being shot. “Isn’t that terrible,” I thought, having no inkling just how relevant this would be to me just a few weeks later.

Up until the moment I sat across the desk from my OB, I held out hope that he would give my son some chance to beat the odds. I couldn’t believe it when he said that there was no chance that he would live very long after he was born. Since I had not even entertained that idea, I was even less prepared for the next thing he had to say, but those words are burned into my memory forever.

“There is no one in Texas who can do this procedure. The only doctor you can go to is in Wichita, Kansas. I talked to him. He seems very nice. Here is his number.” That was it. There was nothing more he could do for us. I could barely stand up when we rode down the elevator.

Or the “It’s So Personal” stories that Andrew Sullivan has been blogging from readers, which (with some exceptions) seem to be leaning towards stories of late term abortions of much wanted pregnancies after medical problems were found that were incompatible with life (i.e. if you carry to term and give birth, you’ll wind up with a dead baby anyway).

I think back to my niece, clinging to life in the NICU, born at just barely past 23 weeks, and I can understand the horror of anyone who believes that Tiller was actually killing healthy babies of that age whose mothers just didn’t want a baby and had dawdled about figuring out that they were pregnant and getting an abortion. I think of the people with stories of dangerously wrong pregnancies with dying and wanted babies, and can understand the gratitude toward the doctor who was offering medical deliverance.

And I think of the people in that church, expecting, Susie Bright tells me, to witness a baptism on that Sunday of Pentecost, and I feel sick at the thought of even speaking to the controversy. Whatever you think of the man, whether he was your enemy or your hero or something in between, he was killed in a way that no man should be killed.

Other stuff:

Joel has thoughts both on the murder of Tiller and on this week’s shootings at an Army recruitment office.

Newsweek has an article by the niece of another abortion provider who was murdered.

Comments open on this post, but I’ll probably only leave them open for a few days, rather than the full two weeks, since I’m not sure I have the heart for a long discussion about abortion right now. I have other blog posts coming up on totally different subjects, but I think this will be my last word, for now, on this one.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Abortion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.