Dr. Tiller did not "murder babies." He was a healer who helped women abort late-term pregnancies under conditions where the fetus would die shortly after birth from conditions, such as an exposed brain or Down Syndrome with severe congenital heart defects, or where one twin had died in the womb and toxins were killing the other twin and the mother.
Many of his patients desperately wanted children, and Dr. Tiller saved their lives and preserved their health so they had the chance to bear healthy babies and build strong families.
While many extremists are the first to say they act on behalf of children, they are often the last to lift a finger to help poor mothers raise, educate or provide health care for disabled children.
"Pro-life" extremists are quite willing to condemn these children, and their families, to a lifetime of suffering to promote their own intolerant religious beliefs. As was Scott Roeder, the murderer of Dr. Tiller, who subscribed to hate literature advocating that the killing of an abortionist should be legally justifiable homicide.
Undoubtedly, Roeder was also exposed to the ranting of conservative propagandists, such as Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, who compared the doctor to a Nazi "operating a death mill" and who called him "Tiller the Baby Killer."
The effect of these twisted hate messages on Roeder is revealed in a post he made in 2007 on the Operation Rescue website, ChargeTiller.com: "It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the ‘lawlessness’ which is spoken of in the Bible. Tiller is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgement upon our nation."
According to the Kansas City Star, Roeder was also involved in the "Freemen" movement, which had been among the organizations cultivated by Willis Carto, my former opponent in the Holocaust Case.
The Freemen declared they were not subject to any government and were exempt from all laws, including the payment of income taxes.
In 1996, Roeder was found to be in possession of bomb-making materials and was sentenced to probation on condition he avoided anti-government groups that advocated violence.
Dr. Tiller was serving as an usher in the Reformation Lutheran Church handing out church bulletins when Roeder invaded the sanctuary and shot him down. The church is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the largest of all Lutheran denominations in the U.S.
Evangelical Lutherans are "supportive of life" and encourage women to explore alternatives to abortion when possible; however, the church believes it can be "morally responsible" to end a pregnancy in cases where the pregnancy "presents a clear threat to the physical life of the woman," and in "circumstances of extreme fetal abnormality, which will result in severe suffering and very early death of an infant."
The church also opposes "laws that deny access to safe and affordable services for morally justifiable abortions."
The Catholic and Orthodox Churches and many fundamentalist evangelical congregations oppose virtually all abortions, including pregnancies that threaten the lives of mothers and those resulting from rape or incest. However, most mainstream Christian denominations, including the United Church of Christ, American Baptist Churches, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church, support a woman’s right of choice.
In addition to the thousands of women helped by Dr. Tiller over the years, four children and ten grandchildren will mourn his death.
The son of Holocaust Museum guard Stephen Johns is undoubtedly devastated by the loss of his father to violent hatred, and even the son of Johns’ murderer has suffered from his father’s extremism.
The Washington Post quotes James von Brunn’s son, Eric as saying that his father "should not be remembered as a brave man or a hero, but a coward unable to come to grips with the fact that he threw his and his family’s lives away for an ideology that fostered sadness and anguish."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
