Dr. Tiller's Murder Was Inevitable

Very few of us are like we were in high school. Growing up in Peachtree City, GA--a bastion of conservatism in a state that is a bastion of conservatism--I always considered myself a Democrat, albeit one that was anti-gay rights and anti-choice.

My journey towards flipping my view on the former happened much more quickly than the latter...and is a great topic for another post.

I recall noting with great pride in those days how I believed a fetus was a child and that abortion was morally wrong and should be illegal (though even then I made exceptions for rape, incest, and a mother's health). It wasn't until well into college that the drip-drip-drip of arguments finally got through to me: I may have that belief, but I must be intellectually honest enough to realize that there is legitimate, honest disagreement. And while that disagreement exists, I have no right to tell a woman what she can do with her body.

But to this day I have remembered my previous position and the honesty and genuine belief that went into that position. And I have advocated for reasonable debate and dialogue on each side, knowing that demonizing the opposition only brings us further away from the real potential middle ground: reducing the need for abortion. In other words, I agree with this guy.

And I couldn't disagree more with this kind of disgusting rhetoric and disingenuous peddling of half-arguments.

Elizabeth Lev strains to draw a continuous line between at least 12 million fully developed, fully sentient slaves, the civil rights movement for tens of millions of African-Americans, and today's anti-choice movement. The logical failures of merely substituting "abortion" for "slavery" aside (and in fact deriding our President as literally morally comparable to enablers to slavery), she claims that African-American women are disproportionately more likely to have abortions (true) and that this is somehow evidence of some sort of conspiracy (not).

From 1700 to 1865 -- the year the 13th Amendment was ratified -- approximately 7 million black slaves were kept on American soil. Abortion kills 400,000 black children a year in America. Do the math: that's more than 15 million African-American children killed since 1973, when Roe v Wade overturned state legislation and imposed abortion as a "constitutional right." Jeremy Corsi in his Rebuilding America offers some chilling statistics. While blacks only comprise some 13 percent of the population, about 1,450 African American children are aborted a day. Which means three out of every five black women will have an abortion.
Hasn't Margaret Sanger's 1939 creation, Planned Parenthood, intentionally opened its family planning clinics in and around predominantly black neighborhoods? Yes, and the de facto result of this policy has been to encourage black women to abort their children. Sanger herself used the term "race hygiene" for what I see as her clearly eugenic ideology of culling the black population and others deemed "unfit," and that legacy is evident in today's staggering statistics.
Thanks to President Obama, taxpayer money will fund more of these clinics than ever, and the further reduction of African American numbers.
What would Uncle Tom, who ministered to the lowliest, hopeless slaves on Legree's plantation, make of Obama's participation in the extinction of so many babies in the name of "choice"?
Abortion practitioners target -- "serve,'' they would say -- poor, single mothers, many of them black women. Often told by those who pretend to know what is best for them that they can't handle a child, that they can't manage the expense or complications or aren't mature enough, these women are left with little "choice" but to abort. Stowe's slave mothers were willing to go to any lengths to keep their children, but abortion robs their modern descendants of the chance to show how much they have to offer.

Indeed, it is Lev that must truly look in the mirror. To her, millions of black women that choose abortions are not adult women making one of the most painful and difficult choices of their lives, often because of an economic system that has failed them and other blacks for decades. No, for her these women are mindless lemmings forced into abortions by the evil white people that work at Planned Parenthood. Mindless lemmings that, mind you, she wants to be raising children.

Of course, it is arguments such as these and those made by extreme groups such as Operation Rescue (well documented by DailyKos and Feministing in too many links to post here) that make Dr. Tiller's murder so inevitable. After all, if a doctor (or the U.S. Government) is actually complicit in the genocide of millions of children, then perhaps the only morally defensible position is to take up arms.

Sounds like something Dr. King would probably not get behind. Oh, by the way Elizabeth? Dr. King was an ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood. He even won their Sanger award. The same Sanger you accuse of eugenics. Likely.