Repost: Words have consequences

Note: This is a repost of an earlier post, originally posted May 31st last year, shortly after Dr. Tiller had been murdered. The original post is the most widely linked post I've ever posted, and the most with most comments. I am reposting it now because of Rachel Maddow's documentary on The Assassination of Dr. Tiller, since that would again raise the issue of how the dangerous rhetorics of anti-choice organizations contributes to an environment where some people feel that it is acceptable to kill doctors who do their duty to women.

In my last post, I shared the news that Dr. George Tiller has been murdered. I have absolutely no doubt this happened because of his willingness to do his job as a doctor and provide late-term abortions to his patients.

Now I see that Operation Rescue, an anti-choice organization, which has tried to stop Dr. Tiller in the past through lawsuits, have put up a post denouncing the murder.

It has been learned today that George Tiller was shot and killed while entering his church on Sunday morning, May 31.

Operation Rescue releases the following statement:

We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller’s family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.

This is an understandable reaction, but it doesn't absolve Operation Rescue of guilt.

One of David Neiwert's points in the Eliminatorists is that dehumanizing of people allows other people to commit atrocities against them, and Operation Rescue has been very busy dehumanizing Dr. Tiller indeed.

I took a screenshot of their denouncing the murder, and posted it below (click on it to see a larger version).



If you look closely at the image, you might notice a image in the lower right corner saying "America's Doctor of Death" bearing an image of the face of a man wearing spectacles. That man is Dr. Tiller, and clicking on the image on their website brings you to a category under their website called "Tiller watch" (the URL is http://www.operationrescue.org/category/tiller-watch/).

Calling someone "America's Doctor of Death" is dehumanizing him to an extreme degree, allowing people to ignore the fact that he is a person, which again allows people to do things like murdering him. Operation Rescue might not have pulled the trigger on Dr. Tiller, but they created an environment, where someone could pull the trigger on him.

Update: Jill Filipovic has written a piece in the Guardian which explains my sentiment a lot better: Who killed George Tiller?

Words have consequences

In my last post, I shared the news that Dr. George Tiller has been murdered. I have absolutely no doubt this happened because of his willingness to do his job as a doctor and provide late-term abortions to his patients.

Now I see that Operation Rescue, an anti-choice organization, which has tried to stop Dr. Tiller in the past through lawsuits, have put up a post denouncing the murder.

It has been learned today that George Tiller was shot and killed while entering his church on Sunday morning, May 31.

Operation Rescue releases the following statement:

We are shocked at this morning’s disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller’s family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.

This is an understandable reaction, but it doesn't absolve Operation Rescue of guilt.

One of David Neiwert's points in the Eliminatorists is that dehumanizing of people allows other people to commit atrocities against them, and Operation Rescue has been very busy dehumanizing Dr. Tiller indeed.

I took a screenshot of their denouncing the murder, and posted it below (click on it to see a larger version).



If you look closely at the image, you might notice a image in the lower right corner saying "America's Doctor of Death" bearing an image of the face of a man wearing spectacles. That man is Dr. Tiller, and clicking on the image on their website brings you to a category under their website called "Tiller watch" (the URL is http://www.operationrescue.org/category/tiller-watch/).

Calling someone "America's Doctor of Death" is dehumanizing him to an extreme degree, allowing people to ignore the fact that he is a person, which again allows people to do things like murdering him. Operation Rescue might not have pulled the trigger on Dr. Tiller, but they created an environment, where someone could pull the trigger on him.

Update: Jill Filipovic has written a piece in the Guardian which explains my sentiment a lot better: Who killed George Tiller?

Abortion doctor murdered

Well know Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, who was known for being one of the few doctors in the US willing to make late term abortions, has been murdered.

NY Times has the story

Abortion Doctor Shot to Death in Church

George Tiller, a Wichita doctor who was one of the few doctors in the nation to perform late-term abortions, was shot to death on Sunday as he attended church, city officials in Wichita said.

It was not the first attempt on his life - he was shot in both arms in 1993, but unfortunately this time, it was fatal.

Dr. George Tiller was a brave man, and my thoughts go out to his family, colleagues, and friends.

Kansascity.com also has more

A good start

When Obama first appeared on the national scene, I thought he was a great speaker, but I didn't think much of the content of his speeches. As time went, I became more and more impressed by him, and I found the content of his speeches to be much more to my liking. As a result, I was quite happy to see him first win the nomination, and then later the election. Still, words are easy - it's actions that matter, and we didn't see those until he first appointed his administration, and later took office. In other words, it's now the real Obama will show himself.

Speaking for myself, I am very happy with what I've seen so far.

Let's start with the cabinet positions. Before the names became public, there were some pretty bad names floating around, but it turned out that Obama's picks were much better than I could have hoped for. Obama demonstrated his ability to win over former opponents when he picked Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. He also demonstrated his backing of science with his selection of Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy. His candidate for the position as AG, Eric Holder, says that waterboarding is torture and his candidate as head of the EPA, Lisa Jackson, vows to put science first.

That's some major changes from the last administration.

And then comes his policies. He has barely begun, but he has already done two very important things:

He has signed the order to close the Guantanomo Bay prison. That facility is a continuing monument of the Bush administration's disregard towards international law, human rights, and justice, so the faster it can be closed the better, and Obame showed that he has his priorities right by making the closing of it one of his first three executive orders. The others were a formal ban of torture and the establishment of an "interagency task force to lead a systematic review of detention policies and procedures and a review of all individual cases", as the article explains it.

The fact that Obama choose to make such executive orders his first ones tells a lot about his priorities. Much like George W. Bush's first two "Agency Responsibilities with Respect to Faith-Based and Community Initiatives" and "Executive Order: Establishment of White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives" (both issues January 29th, 2001) tells us a lot about his priorities.

Another great thing Obama has done, since he started, was to overturn the gag rule. For a good explanation of why this is important, see this description by Planned Parenthood.

What can I say? So far, I am very, very happy with the Obama presidency.

Amnesty International's stance on abortion

Sp!ked has a good point about Amnesty International's stance on abortion.

The real Amnesty-abortion scandal

Forget the Catholic Church’s predictable stance on abortion. Why is a human rights group so cavalier about a woman’s right to choose?

Amnesty International was founded as an organization working against political prisoners and torture, but has become a all-round human rights' organization. Probably the most well-known such, as a matter of fact.

This means that their opinion and stance on issues carry a certain weight.

What is more shocking? The fact that the Catholic Church, well known for its obsessive opposition to abortion and contraception, should threaten to cut its links with organisations that support a woman’s right to choose? Or the fact that Amnesty International, a Western, liberal, progressive outfit whose slogan is ‘Protect the Human’, remained, until recently, neutral on the question of abortion, and now only supports a woman’s right to choose if she has been raped or made pregnant as a result of incest?

I wasn't actually aware that Amnesty International don't support women's right to choose fully, but I was aware that they only recently started to support it at all (I just thought they supported it fully).

Some of this is probably due to them not wanting to offend their allies, such as the Catholic Church. However, this is not an acceptable reason in my book, especially not given the support given by the Catholic Church to regimes like "Baby Doc" Duvalier in the past. They are not exactly a morale barometer that you want to use.

Amnesty was traditionally neutral on abortion. This was partly because it has close links with the Catholic Church and carries out much of its work in Catholic countries, and it did not want to upset the bishops by mentioning the A-word. And it was partly because Amnesty describes itself as a ‘human rights organisation’, and ‘there is no generally accepted right to abortion in international human rights law’ (3). This meant that Amnesty could largely ignore the question of abortion, despite the fact that women in the developing world need legal abortion services every bit as much as women in the West do. In countries where abortion is legal, the maternal mortality rate is 0.2 per 100,000 – in countries where abortion is illegal, the rate is 330 per 100,000. There are an estimated 20million abortions around the world every year, and according to the World Health Organisation many of them are ‘carried out by unskilled staff in unsafe conditions’ (4). Yet in order to keep sweet with the Catholics, and in the name of sticking to the letter of international human rights legislation, Amnesty trotted the globe for years criticising prison conditions and rights violations without uttering a word of public support for a woman’s right to choose.

I would also guess that not having a stance on abortion would make AI more digestible by certain religious groups in the US. Given the fact that these religious groups are politically well-connected, this might make sense from a purely real-political stance, however, from a humanitarian stance, it certainly doesn't.

In many ways, a woman’s right to choose – a real, meaningful right which, if enjoyed, can have an immensely positive impact on a woman’s life and status – is the very opposite of a human right. Where human rights are written from on high and passed down like a list of instructions to national governments, the right to choose is about a woman having control over her own body and personhood. It gives her power over her destiny and increases the choices she can make about work, family life and social life. Where human rights emphasise governments’ responsibilities to protect people from harm, the right to choose frees a woman from official prying into the decisions she makes about her body and her life; it increases her humanity, it makes her a fuller, more independent human being. The human rights agenda gives rise to Western advocacy on behalf of at-risk individuals, as groups like Amnesty and officials at the UN adopt victimised individuals in the developing world and campaign for their human rights to be reinstated; by contrast, real rights emphasise a person’s ability to be a self-advocate, if you like, to make decisions and take actions according to his or her own interests and desires.

In short, where human rights infantilise us, treating us as beings with very basic needs who need our governments, the UN and groups like Amnesty to guard us from others, real rights such as the right to choose, as well as the right to vote and the rights to free speech and free assembly, allow us to live as autonomous adults. Amnesty’s neutrality on abortion was about more than keeping on side with Catholics. It also reflected the human rights lobby’s lack of interest in, possibly even innate hostility towards, traditional rights. After all, a developing world in which people were demanding the right to choose and organise and speak as they saw fit would not need powerful human rights organisations to come and fight its corner. Everything you need to know about today’s problematic human rights agenda is contained in the idea that, according to the Amnesty worldview, it is acceptable for countries to adopt human rights without granting women the right to choose. That is, there can be a ‘human rights culture’ even if there is no free and safe access to abortion; a woman can be said to enjoy human rights even if she does not have basic control over her own reproductive system. Such is the narrow focus of the human rights agenda that you can ‘have human rights’ and yet still be enslaved.

Though Sp!ked is quite left politically to me, I find myself much in agreement with them on this issue. Traditional human rights, such as those Amnesty International focuses on, are important, but they are certainly not sufficient.

The right to make decisions over your own body is generally considered a basic human right, but for some reason, this does not cover women's right to choose. The only reason this is the case, are religious considerations, which has absolutely no place in a human rights' organization.

Democrats fight for choice

Abortion Ban Spurs 'Free Choice' Move in Congress

The day after the Supreme Court upheld a controversial abortion ban, pro-choice politicians mounted a counteroffensive from the legislative branch of government across the street.

Democrats Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York--two leading supporters of abortion rights in the U.S. Congress--reintroduced the Freedom of Choice Act, which would codify in federal law the rights established in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that found abortion was part of a woman's constitutional right to privacy.

"We can no longer rely on the Supreme Court to protect a woman's constitutional right to choose," said Nadler, who chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. "This Supreme Court may have gone out of the business of protecting women's rights; it is time that Congress stand up to the challenge."

I think Democrats should make this a core issue. There is no doubt that the average American supports free choice, especially when the woman's health and life might be in danger.

If passed, the Freedom of Choice Act would likely lead to court challenges that could overturn the ban upheld Wednesday. The federal ban okayed by the high court Wednesday does not include an exception to protect the health of the woman, a precedent laid out in Roe v. Wade.

The Democrat's bill would also bar government at any level from passing laws that outlaw abortion before the fetus is viable or after viability if the woman's health or life is endangered. It is unclear how the law would apply to future or past restrictions on access to abortion.

Supporters say the legislation will help inoculate women from a wave of new restrictions to abortion that is expected to follow Wednesday's court decision. Advocates on both sides of the issue agree that the court's ruling gives a green light to further chip away at reproductive rights and could even embolden efforts to ban abortion altogether.

I think that every Democratic member of the senate should be held accoutable for their vote on this issue. Harry Reid is going to vote against, and in a perfect world, he would get kicked out at the next election. On top of that, people should try to influence moderate Republicans. Use words like "murder" when talking about what happens to the women who can't get a medically needed abortion. Get personal stories into the press. Put a constant firm pressure on the politicans to make up for their past faults.

This is literately an issue of life and death for women.

Edit: more on the issue of the abortion ban can be found at Truthdig

Two books on pre-Roe vs. Wade USA that I must get hold off

The Atlantic Monthly has a book review by Caitlin Flanagan of the book The Choices We Made. Normally Flanagan's writing is the worst kind of psuedo-liberal pseudo-feminism around, but this time I actually am somewhat impressed by her writing (even if the last couple of paragraphs makes me want to scream).

In the middle of a hot New York summer 60 years ago, my mother and her two roommates were invited to spend a weekend at Fire Island. The three girls, recent nursing-school graduates, worked together at Bellevue and were sharing the rent on their first apartment. When a fourth young nurse of their acquaintance overheard them talking about the trip, she asked if she and her young man, a resident at the hospital, could borrow the apartment while they were away. In those days, lovers had to seize on those kinds of opportunities to be alone together. The apartment key was given to the friend, no big deal, and my mother and her roommates left for the beach.

They returned late Sunday evening, in a commotion of kicked-off shoes and set-down carryalls and switched-on lights. One of them pulled the string on the kitchen bulb, and her cry brought the other two. At first they thought a crime had taken place. Strictly speaking, one had: The boyfriend, a kid with a year or two of medical training under his belt, had performed an abortion on his girlfriend. Literally, a kitchen-table abortion. There was blood on the table and the floor, and there were wadded-up bloody towels in the sink.

What happened next, I don’t know. Probably two of the girls cleaned up (they were nurses, remember; they would not have been horrified by such a task once they had the nature of the thing sorted out), and probably the third went to the friend’s apartment to check on her. All three were accomplices to a crime, and they would have been keenly aware of that. At Belle­vue, my mother had twice attended dying young women who were victims of botched abortions, young women—“girls,” she called them—who spent their last hours on earth being interviewed by policemen. Terrified, alone, dying, neither would reveal the name of the abortionist; “they were too frightened,” my mother said. If I had to put money on which of the roommates bravely went to the girl’s apartment, I’d put it on my mother.

If Flanagan wrote with this kind of compassion, passion and power all the time, I would not have any problem with her writing, unfortunately she doesn't (which shows up in passages in the review).

Now, to her description of the book.

The history of abortion is a history of stories, and the ones that took place before Roe v. Wade are oftentimes so pitiable and heartbreaking that one of the most powerful tools of pro-choice advocates is simply telling them. The Choices We Made is a compendium of such stories, and while you could read it in an afternoon, you should not make the decision to do so lightly: It will trouble you for a long time afterward. In it, women whom we know for the large space they occupy in the world—writers Grace Paley, Linda Ellerbee, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and actresses Polly Bergen and Rita Moreno among them—tell us about a time in their lives when they were reduced to begging for a simple medical procedure that, because of the circumstances in which it was performed, almost killed several of them and left at least one infertile. Abortionists in those days included a handful of merciful and scrupulous doctors willing to risk prison, and more than a few monsters who considered groping or sexually assaulting their patients a droit du seigneur. Who would complain? And who didn’t have it coming? In those days, it was not uncommon for a woman to receive a D & C without anesthetic shortly after being lectured about the wages of being a slut.

The history of abortion is a history of stories, and the ones that took place before Roe v. Wade are oftentimes so pitiable and heartbreaking that one of the most powerful tools of pro-choice advocates is simply telling them. The Choices We Made is a compendium of such stories, and while you could read it in an afternoon, you should not make the decision to do so lightly: It will trouble you for a long time afterward. In it, women whom we know for the large space they occupy in the world—writers Grace Paley, Linda Ellerbee, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and actresses Polly Bergen and Rita Moreno among them—tell us about a time in their lives when they were reduced to begging for a simple medical procedure that, because of the circumstances in which it was performed, almost killed several of them and left at least one infertile. Abortionists in those days included a handful of merciful and scrupulous doctors willing to risk prison, and more than a few monsters who considered groping or sexually assaulting their patients a droit du seigneur. Who would complain? And who didn’t have it coming? In those days, it was not uncommon for a woman to receive a D & C without anesthetic shortly after being lectured about the wages of being a slut.

Most of the abortions recounted in the book occurred sometime between the late ’30s and the early ’60s, a time when so many American young women were ignorant of some of the most basic facts of reproduction, and when an unmarried woman’s sexual life was, by definition, a shameful and secret thing. It was also a time in which pregnancy could destroy a young woman’s prospects: She could be thrown out of college, fired from her job, removed permanently from the marriage market. Criminal abortions, of course, were dangerous business, and among the women who survived the procedure, many were rendered infertile.

I think books like The Choice We Made are incredible important to show that there is a very real cost of the lack of freely available abortions, when needed. Flanagan goes on a bit about how society was different back then, and how women now can have children out of wedlock without the same stigma, but that's nonsense. There are very large parts of the US population where having a child out of wedlock brings with it some very large stigmas - this is of course especially the case in religious families.

And while adoptions, which Flanagan also gets into, since she also reviews The Girls Who Went Away, might be acceptable for some people, it still doesn't removes the stigma. My grandmother on my father's side had a child out of wedlock some time during the thirties - the child was adopted away straight away. It was something she kept as a secret for her whole life, and it only became known to the rest of the family when that child (now an elderly man) contacted her ten years ago. That's about seven decades that she had been hinding that secret, afraid that someone might find out (especially afraid that her deeply religious parents would get to know it, back when they lived).
To be fair, Flanagan doesn't claim that adoption is a good alternative to abortion, though she makes clear that adoption is an easier choice now than it was back then.

Go read the review, and buy the books - it seems like they are worth reading. I certainly intend to get hold of them.

Edit: Just after having posted this, I went to Feministe and saw them linking to a story about how these sorts of things are still going on outside the US. Abortion Rights in Mexico.

Abortion is morally neutral

Amanda Marcotte has written an interesting post at Pandagon:
Time to open up the Overton window some more: Abortion is a moral good

The “I’m pro-choice but I think abortion is wrong” thing crops up a lot in these discussions, and while I understand the urge to feel like a complex person that lays behind it, I seriously don’t get why people think that it helps anything to hand wring about how terrible abortion is if you’re supporting the right to have one. Suggesting that abortion is immoral just reinforces the anti-choice claims that abortion should be banned and it strongly reinforces the anti-choice notion that women who get abortions are moral children who are too stupid to know what they’re doing. The belief that women are too stupid to really understand what they’re doing is evident in anti-choice measures like requiring sonograms and requiring that women spend a day to think it over before they get an abortion.

Having the notion that women are moral midgets and that abortion is an evil, even if you think it’s one that should be tolerated, being reinforced by pro-choicers does the pro-choice argument no good. So I’d like to argue against it. I think that abortion is not only a good thing, but I’d like to posit that it seems to me that in the vast majority of abortions, the choice made was the most moral choice for that woman.

I see what Amanda is getting at, but I have a different take on it.

Abortion is a medical procedure, and as a such, is morally neutral. I think medical procedures should be avoided if possible (in this case, by using comdoms etc.), but they should be available if wanted.

When you start mixing morality into it, you buy into the anti-choice idea that this is anything else than a medical procedure, and that morality somehow comes into it at all. It doesn't.

When a woman decides to have an abortion for whatever reasons she does, then it's quite often for quite reasonable grounds. This is not morally right, as it's not morally right not to buy an expensive car, when you can't afford it, or to avoid buying a house, because you don't want to have to look after the garden. However it's certainly not morally wrong either.

In reality, few choices in life have much to do with morality, and I wish we could avoid tainting the abortion debate with such words.

What about the man's choice?

I am unapologetic pro-choice.

In other words, I believe in the woman's right to choose to have a child or not in case of pregnancy. This position is often misunderstood as being pro-abortion (as in thinking abortion is a good prevention method) - something I am not as such, since I feel that all medical interventions should be avoided if possible. However, if the intervention is wanted, I want it to be available.

When debating this, some people will make the argument that you are taking away the man's choice. This can be put in two ways:

• The man is the father to the potential child that the fetus represents, and since he is against abortions, he gets to decide that the woman can't get one (usually made by anti-choice people).

• The man is the potential father, but doesn't want to be one, and therefore the woman should get an abortion (usually made by men, often from the Men's Right movement).

I am not very sympathetic to these arguments, since I have a very simple stance

Your right to choice ends when your contribution to the process ends

This is why the woman get to have a choice for longer than the man – the man have the choice up to the actual point where the woman get pregnant, but then has to accept that the woman get to make the decisions, as she is the one who are still involved in the process, and has to suffer the consequences of the choice.

Obviously, I think that it’s healthy for a good relationship to involve both partners in the decision process, but ultimately the man made his choice when he choose to have sex with the woman (protected or otherwise – he should be aware of the risks, even when using prevention), and that’s where his right to choice ends.