george tiller and the waning credibility of the new york times

I am repulsed. It would take some work to parse David Barstow’s column in the New York Times, “An Abortion Battle, Fought to the Death,” and pull out all the fawning adjectives used to describe slain abortion doctor, George Tiller. “Savvy,” “warrior,” “defiant;” he even had a “sense of mission.”

Attached to the article is a picture of men (all men, including a priest and a man holding a crucifix) praying with clasped hands, with another of women (all women) with hands clasped in protest. Such is the image of the abortion debate we are asked to believe: white Christian men versus women. The issue thus framed is one of women’s rights.

Barstow even writes, “Employees said Dr. Tiller did not have moral qualms about his work, in part because he defined it as saving women’s lives and giving them freedom to determine their futures.” Tiller himself once bragged that, “We have helped correct some of the results of rape and incest. We have helped battered women escape to a safer life. . . We have helped women and families struggle to save their unwell, unborn child a lifetime of pain.”

It is a perverse mind that thinks the result of rape can be “corrected” let alone that such is corrected by an abortion. It is a deranged individual who thinks an “unwell” unborn child is “saved” from life by summary termination. Indeed, let us not be lulled by such high sounding rhetoric. “Unwell” simply means a child with disabilities. Approximately 92% of unborn children in the U.S. and England diagnosed with down-syndrome have been aborted over the last twenty years.

Why, if only “Christian conservatives” would stop “demoralizing” and “outmuscling” abortion defenders, even more unborn down-syndrome babies could get some justice. For so long we have looked for a cure to down-syndrome, yet no further should we have looked than to Tiller’s Abortuary.

Barstow relished in bitter-delight that Tiller gave his employees plaques that read “freedom fighters.” A “warrior” who fought to the end, he was.

Now let me say that it is unnecessary for reasonable people to have any debate over whether a cold blood murder is morally wrong. Tiller’s assassin is obviously unclear on the meaning of “pro-life.” But so is Barstow.

In fact, “pro-life” is seen nowhere in his front page article. “Anti-abortion” is used often. Yet “pro-abortion,” we are often told, is a mischaracterization of men like Tiller. They aren’t “pro” abortion; no one is “pro” abortion.

I beg to differ. Tiller performed tens of thousands of abortions in his long career. He didn’t advocate a reduction in the number of women seeking abortion as President Obama, who is “personally opposed” to abortion, purports to: at $6,000 a pop, abortion was his bread and butter. Abortion was not a last resort procedure in Tiller’s mind as more moderate pro-choicers feel it should be: abortion saves women’s lives, according to his former employees.

From what? Financial troubles? Social stigma? The prison of motherhood?

Perhaps they are “correcting” a rape? Perhaps from a statutory rape in the case of the legion pregnant teenage girls being, at best, ditched by their older boyfriends; and, at worst, abused by discrete older men: men who, but for opponents of parental notification laws, ought to be exposed, prosecuted and kept from repeat offensives.

Perhaps he was protecting us all from more un-fathered Black babies who are being terminated at a rate of three-to-one over White babies. Well, to be fair, at $6,000 per abortion, Tiller was probably catering to a slightly different class in Wichita. It’s Planned Parenthood who has set up 80% of their facilities in heavily Black neighborhoods. And it’s Planned Parenthood who makes no qualms about accepting donations for the express purpose of “lower[ing] the number of Black people,” as the pro-life student group from UCLA exposed.

If you haven’t heard, that UCLA group conducted phone calls to multiple planned parenthoods in which they asked if they could make donations for the express purpose of aborting Black babies. Their donations were readily accepted. One girl even posed as a fourteen year old and went into a Planned Parenthood to ask for counseling. She told the nurses her boyfriend was in his late twenties. The nurses at best pretended they didn’t hear her; and more often recommended that she not tell anyone.

Of course, after about an hour of attempting numerous search combinations, combing the New York Times website for this incident (which certainly made the news), I came up short. So far, it appears that the Times never paid this sting much attention. Instead what I found was an article by Robert Mackey about how Bill O’Reilly of Fox News has been mean to George Tiller these last couple years, and musing over whether all the mean rhetoric leveled against Tiller led to his death.

“As Dr. Tiller’s killing inevitably becomes part of the war of words over abortion rights in the United States, it is worth asking if heated rhetoric, like that invoking mass murder and jihad, does help to create a climate in which violent attacks, like the one in Kansas, become more likely.”

Bartow cites the words of one representative from the National Organization of Women who demands that the attacks on abortion doctors be treated like “domestic terrorism.” After all, four have been slain since Roe v Wade was decided in 1971.

I wonder, do the words and rhetoric of pro-choice politicians help to “create a climate” in which abortions, likes the thousands happening every day, become more likely? Did President Obama’s address to Planned Parenthood plant the seed of abortion in the minds of young girls “punished” with pregnancy? Did the great abortion rights “warrior” George Tiller’s “defiant” words play any role in the thousands of abortions he gleefully performed?

These cartoon characters from the extreme left have effectively raped the Times of all credibility on issues like abortion.

Firstly, fifty-one percent of Americans, according to Gallup, now identify as pro-life. That’s one hell of a terrorist cell.

Less than twenty percent (a high estimate) support the kind of abortion Tiller was famous for: late term abortions. Twenty to twenty-five percent support no form of abortions. The rest, in between, believe abortion should be restricted, not used as birth control, and limited to cases of rape or to save the life of the mother. This means that even though fifty-one percent self-identify as pro-life, more than seventy-five percent oppose abortion as birth control and late term abortions.

Of course, the number of abortions performed to save a mother’s life or to “correct” a rape account for less than one percent of all the abortions performed. So, seventy-five percent of Americans (crossing all political ideologies), at minimum, oppose more than 99% of all the abortions being performed.

Most women cite youth, financial problems, that the father left, that they want to finish college, that they aren’t ready (the number one reason), or that they fear a social stigma. If one feels an unborn child is a human life possessed of intrinsic moral worth, these reasons, at the very least, do not amount to just causes for the destruction of life. Most people are seriously examining this moral dilemma. That is, all but the fringe left, George Tiller, his assassin and the New York Times.