Being George Tiller

Kirby Olson asked, in a comment to What Makes a Christian? the following question:

By the way, do you think it's possible to be an abortionist like Dr. George Tiller and still be a Christian. Is he doing unto others? to the mother, yes, but what about to the babies?

It soon became clear to me that there was no way my reply was going to fit within the 4095 character limit for comments, and also no particularly sensible way to divide the reply into pieces. And so, a post.

I think the record is quite clear that Dr. Tiller was a Christian. I'd like to consider two more subtle questions, though, that I believe are at the heart of Kirby's question.

How did he reconcile his livelihood as an abortionist with his Christian beliefs?

It is not difficult to conjecture, although I think there are a lot of Christians who would disagree with some of his premises. I suspect he believed something like the following:

1. The value of a human life is a function of our investment in it and its potential, and the investment in an undesired fetus is minimal.

   We as society have invested a lot in the mothers, who might on average be a woman in her low-20's, with 12 years of compulsory education and 1-2 years of college. On the other hand, society as a whole has a fairly minimal investment in a fetus, and the great majority of that investment has come from the mother. To be blunt about it, she can probably make another if she wishes.

   Of course, this sort of thinking can easily lead to infanticide (which I distinguish from abortion by applying the obvious criteria), euthanasia, and even eugenics, so generally speaking people who believe in this way apply limiting threshold tests (you don't kill infants, you only euthanize those who request it, and where that request meets certain criteria, etc.). But the logical extreme of this kind of thinking is the society of “Logan's Run.”

   This kind of economic thinking pervades a lot of decisions about who lives and who dies, and you'd have to be extraordinarily naïve to believe otherwise. Consider, for example, that back when the military draft was active, we drafted men as they exited high school. We drafted men, because the biological ability of a society to replenish itself is proportional to of the number of females of child-bearing age, the number of men hardly matters so long as the female:male ratio doesn't fall too much below 10:1 (Remember Dr. Strangelove?! Come on guys, you know you were all suddenly very alert when you heard that line.). Or, as one of my hunting friends says, "if you want to thin the herd, you have to shoot the does." We don't draft younger men (in whom we have less of an investment) because they're not yet physically ready, and we don't draft them much older because we have a larger investment in them, and they've acquired responsibilities (care for a spouse and possibly children) that it would be expensive for society to provide for otherwise. I would argue that the education deferment of the Vietnam War was a particularly clear example of how this kind of thinking plays out in terms of governmental policy.

   I think it probable that Dr. Tiller believed that the “value” of a woman (to herself, if not society at large increased as a result of the procedures he performed. Maybe she'd be able to go back to college (and live an upper-middle class life) instead of having to go to work as a waitress to support herself and her child (likely consigning her to a lower-class life). He might have even thrown in the expected value of her offspring (not just the present fetus, but future children too). Being able to delay when you give birth might mean that the children she ultimately bore would be better fed, better educated, etc.

2. Fetuses are not yet human.

   The observations of various pro-life groups that they can feel pain, etc., would not have been material to this kind of thinking. After all, biologists often cause pain to laboratory animals, and no one thinks that their capacity for pain makes them human. In some ways, this mode of thinking parallels (1)—it believes that humanity is something that is acquired over time by biological animals of the species homo sapiens sapiens, along with societal value. In this kind of thinking, it is perfectly reasonable to say that a 12 year old is “more human” than a 3 year old. We'll set aside for now the special case of 15 year olds, who often seem less human (at least to their parents) than 12 year olds ;-).

   Again, this kind of thinking can, and historically did, lead certain cultures to infanticide, euthanasia, etc. But these steps are not necessary, and there are philosophically defensible positions that permit abortion, but preclude infanticide. To put it differently, yes, there's a slippery slope, but the grade is not steep, and there are plenty of good handholds for those who want to use them.

3. Abortion is not murder.

   While there's a lot of scriptural guidance on murder specifically, and violence generally, there's not a lot of scriptural guidance on abortion specifically. Indeed, you might want to read Numbers 5:11-28, which describes how a Priest should use an abortificiant as test of faithfulness for pregnant wives whose faithfulness is in doubt. Yes, the LORD told Moses to attempt to induce abortion in women whose faithfulness was in doubt.

4. Doctors decide when people die.

   Again, Doctors decide when people die. You probably don't think about this, and you probably imagine that that Doctors fight for life their patient's life until the very end. Death is part of life, and when possible, death is a medically managed process. Doctors, who understand all too well the alternatives, want “good deaths” for their patients. It would not surprise me if Dr. Tiller thought in these terms—that the prognosis for the fetus was a difficult life (after all, their mother's didn't want them, and this is a bad start for anyone), and this was a “managed” death, much quicker and less painful than their life of unrealized humanity would be expected to be.

5. He did not set out to be an abortionist, instead he was forced into this role by the anti-abortion movement.

   Please, hear me out on this one, which may seem counterintuitive.

   The testimonials I've read to Dr. Tiller on the more liberal blogs reflect a diversified obstetrics/gynecology practice. Abortion would have started out as a tiny part of that, and likely one that was limited to fetuses that were not viable or where abortion was necessary to save the life of the mother (e.g., ectopic pregnancies).

   But the record of attempted intimidation of Dr. Tiller (including a previous murder attempt in which he was shot in both arms, and legal harassment by the Kansas Attorney General, who abused the full power of his office to entangle Dr. Tiller in litigation) proves, if nothing else, that Dr. Tiller was a courageous, and indeed, possibly stubborn man. As his colleagues stopped doing abortions because they were intimidated, he became increasingly the only person in central plains who would perform the procedure.

   I think it is likely that the tactics of intimidation were less affective on the demand side of the abortion equation. The women seeking abortion would have been more desperate, and the anti-abortion terrorists (note that I am not using this phrase to imply that everyone who opposes abortion is a terrorist—but rather to separate the pro-life population into a very large proportion of ethical people who oppose abortion by nonviolent means, and a miniscule proportion of unethical people who use violence to achieve their ends) would have fewer opportunities and a lot less time to intimidate them. Thus, the effect of the activities of the anti-abortion terrorists is asymmetrical, reducing the number of people willing to perform abortions much more quickly than the number of women seeking abortion, and therefore necessarily increasing number of abortions performed by those who are sufficiently courageous to continue to perform them.

   It is clear the existence of a few doctors like Dr. Tiller who became de facto professional abortionists, is a consequence of violent anti-abortion terrorists. Indeed, this could have been their strategy all along—intimidate those whom you can, using the law, using violence, and by enlisting the nonviolent ethical pro-life people to demonstrate and maintain pressure, and finally, to murder the few that remain.

I want to be clear here—I buy into some of this, but not all of this. And the question isn't whether or not you or I agree with this kind of thinking, it is whether or not there exists a self-consistent set of beliefs that includes a reasonable interpretation of the Christian faith, and still allows one to practice a livelihood that involves abortion. I believe there is. A related question is whether or not there exists a self-consistent set of beliefs that includes a reasonable interpretation of the Christian faith that permits an armed man to shoot and kill an unarmed man while he worships in church, because he is following a particular, lawful, profession that you object to. Or the same, for people who support and arm that man, and have foreknowledge of his intent. After all, the question of whether abortion is murder is something over which people of faith disagree. But the question of whether or not murder is murder should not admit the same kind of variation.

Can Dr. Tiller can be saved?

This is for God to decide, not us. Dr. Tiller was Lutheran, and presumably he believed that he passed the “faith by grace” test. I am reluctant to try to delve into the mind of God as a judge. I believe him to be merciful (and I sincerely hope that this applies to me as well as to Dr. Tiller), but we must remember Isaiah 55:8, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD,” and remember to be humble. So, in the worlds of Iris DeMent, I'll just “let the mystery be.”

A question for ethical pro-life readers...

Why do you shelter and nourish murders in your churches? How do you reconcile that with your Christianity? Why do you try to focus the issue on the man that was murdered, as if by doing so you could create a justification for righteous murder?

Peace