In the wake of George Tiller’s murder, I’ve been pondering the incongruity of his providing the most controversial abortion services in Kansas, of all places – a solidly conservative state. He’s not the only one. Dr. LeRoy Carhart – of Gonzales v. Carhart fame – practices in Nebraska. He too offers late-term abortions, including past the point of fetal viability when warranted. (Carhart has offered to take over Tiller’s clinic, but Tiller’s family says the clinic’s fate remains uncertain. Plus one wonders what Carhart’s patients would do.) Then there’s Dr. Warren Hern in Boulder, Colorado. It’s Hern who said, “The main difference between the American anti-abortion movements and the Taliban is about 8,000 miles.” All three of these men knew each other and were friends.
Are there more American doctors willing to perform third-trimester abortions? These names are familiar because Carhart and Hern have been talking to the press these past few days. There may be others, but I googled like crazy trying to find them, and I failed. (“Like crazy,” because I actually tried to find the Army of God’s hitlist online. No dice. Thankfully!) I wouldn’t blame any doctor who wanted to stay under the radar. After all, as Dr. Hern said (via DailyKos): “I am next on the list.”
Plenty of others have already observed that the killing of Dr. Tiller greatly reduces the number of doctors who are able and willing to perform these very late abortions. (A larger number will perform the procedure up to 24 months weeks.) Others have also remarked that these third-trimester abortions are virtually always tragic: a much-loved and anticipated child suffers from severe hydrocephalus or has other anomalies that will doom her to painful short life and an early death.
What I’m wondering is this: Why does the heartland seem to spawn these pragmatic yet idealistic doctors? Tiller and Carhart come from Kansas and Nebraska. They are constantly embattled – not just by vandals but by the court system, aka the Will of the People. Hern shares his home state with the main campus of Focus on the Family. Why do they persist despite hostile geography? Where are their blue-state equivalents? If you go back to the early days of underground abortion resistance in the 1960s, big cities like New York and Chicago led the way. Why must a woman with a disastrously impaired fetus now travel from a coastal city to Wichita?
I don’t have any answers. I think a Midwestern work ethic may play into it. Surely you’ve got to be mule-stubborn to carry on in the face of harsh local and national opposition. You’ve also got to believe in the cause more than your own life, but Midwesterners haven’t cornered that market. It’s not even that Kansas has especially lax laws; a late-term abortion requires the assent of a second physician. Partly, I think Tiller and his colleagues were moved by plain old practicality – there’s a job and someone’s gotta do it – mixed with compassion for women’s sufferings.
I’d love to know if any of you has a more coherent theory on the geography of third-trimester abortion providers.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
I have no idea… but the day before Dr Tiller’s murder, I had just written my piece on Mel Gibson, mentioning one of the Sedevacantists’ “real popes” is in Kansas. He was even interviewed in the book “Whats the Matter with Kansas”… This makes me think there is a sturdy brand of robust individualism in the prairie; the kind of people who left everything to become homesteaders could NOT be the kind of people who cared what other people thought of them. You know?
“What will the neighbors say?”–well, out on the prairie, no neighbors. It’s you and God, or you and your conscience. It makes for strong opinions and people not easily intimidated.
You’re right about the individualism. But along with self-reliance, survival on the prairie also demanded cooperation with one’s neighbors. There always were neighbors, even if they were a mile or two away. So you get a mix of both independence and intense neighborliness.
In a way, what’s more surprising is that the big coastal cities lack very late-term abortion services.
“(A larger number will perform the procedure up to 24 months.)”
This is probably much too serious a subject on which to be picky, but I thought I’d point that out before your opponents do.
Question:
I’ve been told that late term abortions are plain illegal in Kansas. Is this not the case?
This version has it that Dr Tiller had been practising late term abortions illegally and unprosecuted for years. This doesn’t excuse his murder of course but, as a foreigner, I’m trying to better understand the whole quagmire created by living under a federal legal system, which I do not. Thanks for any clarification.
Reg
Sorry, by “federal legal system”, I meant highly autonomous state legal systems under the federal law; that’s what takes a bit of getting your head around if you live in a small country like England with a unitary legal system. (Well there is Scotland, but that doesn’t seem to cause so much conflict generated by jealously guarded diversity).
Reg, thanks for pointing out my typo; I fixed it (without erasing the original).
From what I’ve read, Kansas requires a second physician to agree with the first physician’s decision. This was evidently treated as a formality, since Tiller had another doctor who regularly did this for him. Tiller was repeatedly hauled into court but he was never convicted of anything. Abortion opponents also tried to tighten the law, but Governor Kathleen Sibelius refused to ratify older versions, which contained provisions such as allowing a woman’s relatives to go to court to stop a planned abortion. This spring, probably hoping to blunt anti-abortion opposition to her nomination as secretary of Health and Human Services, Sibelius did sign a milder law that requires ultrasound imaging prior to abortion.
Roe v. Wade did require abortion to be legal after fetal viability if the woman’s life or health would be endangered. These late abortions in cases where the fetus is doomed are performed under a mental health justification, as far as I understand. In theory, this ought to be legal in every state. In practice, most states have defined the health loophole very narrowly.
So
Thanks Sungold.
It’s very hard to get any kind of clarity from here, since what I’ve read is so polarised, with both sides demonising each other, effectively burrying any genuine human or moral concerns under a mass of invective.
But even those who sincerely believe that child murder is involved here have no right to take vengeance into their own hands. That’s what the law is for. And lunatic terrorists, whether they’re shooting doctors or soldiers, are just lunatics in my view.
People like David Leech, who are prepared to give some spurious scriptural legitimacy to Tiller’s assassination, should be prosecuted under anti-terrorist legislation I would think. It’s effectively ensightment to commit murder.
I don’t want to say there’s no moral import to late abortions. My position is that the moral weight of the fetus gradually increases as it develops. I see abortion prior to quickening as fairly unproblematic (though still a form of killing). Between quickening and viability, I’d like to see women subject their decision to the highest level of ethical scrutiny – but it’s still their decision. After viability, the state needs to impose limits, and I think the physician is the most appropriate person to interpret those limits in individual cases.
So – that was your short timeout for moral concerns. Now back to the invective!
Seriously, I agree with you 100% that even those who sincerely regard abortion as murder must remain within the law. I felt that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were murderers, too, but I didn’t ever advocate killing them in return – though I did have one very intense fantasy about it.
[...] 3, 2009 by Sungold In comments on my last post, Reg asked if aborting a viable fetus wasn’t actually illegal in Kansas, where Dr. George [...]
As a Boulderite, I’m not sure that I can agree with your assesment of Colorado as ‘hostile’ geography. Colorado went blue in the last election, and Boulder is one of the most liberal cities on the globe. Dr. Hern is not surrounded by a city of right-wwing nutjobs, as your post seems to suggest, and Dr. Dobson is not clamoring outside of his door.
Give us blue states some credit, please.
Andrea, I’m sorry that I didn’t make the distinctions clearer. I realize it would be an overgeneralization to say all of Colorado is conservative. As far as I can tell – from friends who’ve lived in various cities there, and from brief visits – Colorado is a funny political mix, teetering between red and blue, and varying quite a lot from one locale to another. The same could be said for Ohio, my adopted state. Ohio also went blue this past election, but that doesn’t mean the state as a whole is liberal. We have some very conservative areas, and we also have some liberal ones, such as Cleveland or Athens (the little college town where I live). Correct me if I’m wrong, but Colorado has enough wingnuts to put Prop. 84 on the ballot last fall – and more than enough sensible people to vote it down quite decisively. That doesn’t make all of Colorado home to wingnuttia, it just means that the state as a whole has to contend with a vocal and persistent right-wing element. Or so it appears from the outside; I’ll obviously defer to you if that’s an unfair characterization.
The point I intended to make in this post is that none of these three states – especially Nebraska and Kansas – are obvious locations for the abortion services that attract the greatest controversy. In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was California and New York that led the way toward liberalizing abortion laws. It just seems very odd to me that neither coast has an abortion clinic that openly offers late-term abortions, even though California’s laws are among the most liberal regarding post-viability abortions.
Thanks for your comment, Andrea!