Are abortion doctors like soldiers?
Rally in support of the slain Dr. George Tiller
About that Saletan article I wrote about yesterday, Ramesh makes a characteristically good point:
While it took bravery for George Tiller to persist in killing seven-month-old fetuses in the face of death threats, that bravery is not remotely comparable to that of soldiers who enter into combat against enemy soldiers who are fighting back.
He can say that again. The fact that unborn infants can’t fight back is the most pathetic and despicable aspect of abortion; against the might of the abortion doctor, with his forceps or vacuum aspirator, they are completely and utterly helpless. The fight is not a fair one. Even unswervingly pro-choice physicians struggle with the procedure, as this young medic told the Washington Post Magazine:
But she seemed to be harboring reservations about the procedure. She thought using the tenaculum was barbaric: “I don’t know, insensitive. You’d think there’d be something else besides digging into the cervix with a toothlike instrument.”
She tried to rationalize her reaction. Second-year students were only beginning to learn procedures. She had put in a catheter the previous week and had watched a doctor intubate a patient or, in her words, “stick a blade down someone’s throat.” The lack of gentleness by some doctors disturbed her. She knew some chose not to use the very sharp instruments in abortion procedures, but those tools gave the doctor better control and, ultimately, the patient better care. Seeing it for the first time was “jarring.”
Her first surgery was jarring, too. Maybe after seeing it a thousand times, she said, “I’ll get used to it.”
A few days later, thinking over the papaya workshop, Lesley concluded that something was missing: any discussion of how it might be difficult for doctors to perform an abortion. That was the way of medical school, the basic facts, not how to deal with a patient or a doctor’s own feelings. Why would this be different? she asked. The doctor was probably treating abortion like any other medical procedure, to take away the stigma, the emotional charge associated with it.
“But you can’t deny it,” she said. “I feel they are ignoring it. I wanted more guidance on the softer side of it, the emotional quagmire of what you have to deal with every day as an abortion provider. There was no acknowledgement.
To be sure, pro-choice supporters might point out that a fetus or embryo can and do harm women physically; the image that sticks in my mind is the opening scene in Oliver Twist, in which Twist’s mother dies as a result of giving birth to him. But their point is not so much invalid as it is inapplicable. As a 2005 Alan Guttmacher Institute study revealed, nine in ten women who abort do so for reasons unrelated to threats to their health or life; figures on late-term abortions are harder to come by, but in 1997, Ron Fitzsimmons, the head of a chain of abortion providers, said that “the vast majority” of those procedures are elective.
Not only is is true that abortion doctors aren’t like soldiers; in the vast majority of cases, they don’t strike me as doctors even; butchers maybe. Which is why talk about Tiller being mourned as a “saint” and “martyr” is all the more twisted.
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
[...] Over at True/Slant, I posed the question and gave what I think is a good answer. Read the whole thing. [...]
Since you brought up the comparison, couldn’t your paragraph also read:
“The fact that unarmed civilians can’t fight back is the most pathetic and despicable aspect of disproportional warfare; against the might of the modern solider, with his predator drones, cruise missiles, and cluster bombs, they are completely and utterly helpless. The fight is not a fair one.”
I really think pro-lifers and pro-choicers could stand a better chance at achieving their shared goal of reducing unwanted pregnancies if the language was dialed back a bit and more realistic. Your rendering of abortion doctors as these bloodthirsty murderers who love killing babies for money is cartoonish and at odds with the facts and feelings of these people’s lives and motivations.
Whether or not abortion is murder, clearly neither the mothers nor the doctors do it for fun, or unthinkingly. The controversial nature of the issue requires them to think about it. They’ve just reached a different conclusion than you. When you talk about abortion providers, it never seems like you’re talking about real people. It seems like you’re talking about what you wish they were like because you find what they do so heinous. And certainly, the pro-choice side often does the same thing, portraying all pro-life people as backward religious nuts who hate women’s freedom.
I’m not saying the sides will ever agree. But until they start seeing the other side as merely misguided instead of evil maniacs, then no one will get what they want, except the extremists who profit from the status quo.
Joseph,
Thanks for your comments.
Your points sound reasonable and accurate. And I agree both pro-lifers and pro-choicers should dial back their rhetoric. But on closer inspection, I find some of your other points wanting:
1) The scenario you laid out is not controversial. It’s a war crime or, by nearly all accounts, gravely immoral: soldiers killing civilians.
2) I’m biased, but I don’t think my portrayal of abortion doctors was unfair. It did not show them as cartoonish or bloodthirsty; just more powerful than fetuses and embryos. For example, my post quoted a young medic’s perception of abortion doctors.
3) The subjective motivations and conclusions of abortion doctors can’t be discounted. But surely they matter less than the objective nature of their work. Many Southern slaveowners sincerely believed that blacks were inferior and that they were giving them a good living. But their slaveholding was objectively wrong, no?
In response to another comment. See in context »1) But any supporter of war has to realize that civilian casualties happen on a massive scale, even in modern ’sanitized’ warfare. Iraq has had 100K at last count – people that would still be alive had we not intervened in a war of choice. Not to mention the lopsided advantage held by modern US troops against actual soldiers of smaller nations like Iraq. That’s not to say they’re not brave, but there are quite a few who are dropping bombs on people from airplanes or firing rounds from tanks and have less contact with the results of their actions than an abortionist, since we’re making the analogy. I guess I have more respect for the consistency of the “seamless garment of life” pro-lifers than hairsplitting between abortion and war. (I don’t know your war position, just going by your quoting of Ramesh, who is pro-war and pro-life)
2) But you have referred to it as a lucrative “industry” and as “murder”, so that obviously implies that they are people who kill because of the profit motive. But as I’ve said before, the idea that anyone would go into the one health area where costs have gone down and where they are at risk for their life to make a buck is ridiculous on its face. Clearly, they’re doing it because they believe in it as a medical procedure that women need. I can understand how you would think they were misguided in that belief and that it was indeed murder, but yes, “butchers” is cartoonish, Operation Rescue level rhetoric. It’s the mirror image of “stay out of my womb”: bumper sticker lingo for those inside the bubble, and an off-switch for those outside of it.
3) Comparing doctors to slaveholders is maybe not the best way to dial back the rhetoric? Why does the pro-life movement always focus on the doctors and not the mothers? Is it b/c a bunch of people screaming at mothers as baby killers is awful PR? I feel like it’s arguing in bad faith to put it all on these male doctors and not give some blame to the women. It’s too easy. If it is indeed murder or a “contract hit” as the movement often says, the mothers are even more complicit b/c it’s their own child they’re paying someone to kill. Generally, we look worse upon the person that pays the killer to off their loved one than the hit man, no? Or maybe most pro-lifers don’t follow the logic to its natural conclusion, even in their own head.