Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion extremist who murdered Dr. George Tiller, was sentenced yesterday to a “Hard 50” — essentially life in prison without the possibility of parole (via Tennessee Guerrilla Women):
Sedgwick County District Judge Warren Wilbert could have allowed Roeder to come up for parole after 25 years but gave him the harsher sentence because he shot Tiller in church and stalked him for years before.
Roeder was also sentenced to 24 consecutive months on two counts of aggravated assault for threatening to kill two church ushers who tried to stop him as he fled Reformation Lutheran Church after the shooting.
Roeder was, to say the least, unrepentant.
Obviously, Judge Wilbert’s sentencing decision was the correct one, and it does send, as Lynn Harris puts it at Salon, “the clearest possible message that nothing — not even his stated belief that his actions prevented the ‘murder’ of millions more — mitigates his crime.”
Yet, the domestic terrorists who target women’s health clinics and abortion providers for intimidation, violence, and murder have won an important victory. Dr. Tiller’s clinic shut its doors permanently after he was killed, and now, according to the Midwest Voices column at the Kansas City Star, the nearest abortion-providing clinic is in Denver.
The truth is that the purpose of anti-abortion violence goes way beyond simply shutting down specific clinics or taking out individual doctors who provide abortions:
… Julie Burkhart, who worked with Tiller as his spokesperson, said Kansas lawmakers are now considering changes to statutes that would make it even harder for women to get late-term abortions, the kind Tiller was one of the few in the country to provide. “This legislative session in Kansas, antichoice legislators feel emboldened,” she says.
And it [Roeder’s sentence] also does nothing to challenge the rhetoric that egged Roeder on in the first place. “When you look at the antichoice activists who use this kind of language — this language works to incite to violence, and so I don’t think they can just blame scott roeder for being the trigger man,” she said. She said she knew this anyway, but said it became even clearer as she sat through the trial.
Not only is Wichita left without an abortion provider at all, but many of the women around the world who would have seen Tiller in the most desperate of circumstances now likely have nowhere to turn. …
Tiller’s murder, the closing of his clinic, and the win-win quality of his sentencing (the lesser sentence would have been an exoneration; the maximum sentence that he actually got makes him a martyr for the movement) just feeds into the larger network of far right anti-abortion groups and individuals — both avowedly violent and nominally non-violent (Operation Rescue being an example of the latter) — and makes future violence against abortion providers more likely, just as it made Tiller’s murder more likely:
According to trial testimony, Roeder has collaborated for over a decade with Army of God adherents, a web of violent extremists who actively promote the murder of doctors and other healthcare professionals who provide abortion services. Army of God follower Shelley Shannon was convicted of a 1994 attempt on the life of Dr. Tiller. In addition, the Army of God claimed responsibility for numerous bombings of abortion clinics, including the bombing of a clinic in Alabama that killed a guard and badly maimed a nurse. Dr. Tiller was the ninth murder victim, with more than two dozen wounded, in domestic terrorism by anti-abortion extremists. In each of these cases, only a lone perpetrator was charged and prosecuted, despite evidence of nationwide actions that amounted to aiding and abetting criminal activity.
“Doctors are being threatened at their clinics, stalked at their homes, and plastered on Wanted posters. There will be more victims unless the federal government acts swiftly,” said FMF Executive Vice President Katherine Spillar, an expert in clinic terrorism who leads the FMF’s National Clinic Access Project.
And terrorism is what it needs to be called because that’s what it is, using the FBI’s own definition:
The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
There is so much more that can and should and needs to be said about this, but I will leave you with excerpts from a very long article at The Guardian, written by John Richardson (h/t Christian Humanist at Alternet.org). The article, titled “The Last Abortionist,” is about, literally, the last doctor in the United States who provides late-term abortions:
The young couple flew into Wichita bearing, in the lovely swell of the wife’s belly, a burden of grief. They came from a religious tradition where large families are celebrated and they wanted this baby, and it was very late in her pregnancy. But the doctors recommended abortion. They said that with her complications, there were only two men skilled enough to pull it off. One was George Tiller, a Wichita doctor who specialised in late abortions.
They arrived on Sunday, 31 May last year. As they drove to their hotel, a Holiday Inn just two blocks from the Reformation Lutheran Church, they saw television cameras. They wondered what was going on, a passing curiosity quickly forgotten. But when they got to their room, the phone was ringing. Her father was on the line. “There was some doctor who was shot who does abortions,” he said. They turned on CNN. Dr Tiller had just been killed, shot in the head as he passed out church leaflets.
Now there is only one doctor left.
[…]
Twenty minutes later, the abortionist enters. Dr Hern is a tall man in green surgical scrubs, remarkably vigorous at 70, emphatic in speech and impatient in manner. He has a long face and no lips, which gives him a severe look. He apologises for having very little time. This is the day he sees patients for the first of three visits, giving them the seaweed Laminaria, which slowly dilates the cervix, and his normal caseload has been doubled by Dr Tiller’s patients – including two with catastrophic foetal abnormalities and a 15-year-old who was raped, all in the second trimester, all traumatised by the assassin who calls himself pro-life, a phrase he cannot utter without air quotes and contempt. “They hate freedom,” he says. He says it again. He warns me not to use anyone’s name or it will put them at risk.
[…]
In the kitchen at the clinic, Dr Hern bolts down two microwave tamales. He talks fast and doesn’t smile. “It is my view that we are dealing with a fascist movement. It’s a terrorist, violent terrorist movement, and they have a fascist ideology…” Dr Hern goes on like that for some time. Long before the first doctor got shot back in 1993, he was warning that it would happen. He was getting hate mail and death threats way back in 1970, just for working in family planning. They started up again in 1973, two weeks after he helped start the first non-profit abortion clinic in Boulder. “I started sleeping with a rifle by my bed. I expected to get shot.” In 1985, someone threw a brick through his window during a protest by the quote unquote Pro-Life Action League. He put up a sign that said THIS WINDOW WAS BROKEN BY THOSE WHO HATE FREEDOM. In 1988, somebody fired five bullets through his window. In 1995, the American Coalition of quote unquote Life Activists put out a hit list with his (and Tiller’s) name on it. The feds gave them protection for about six months, then left them on their own.”People don’t get it,” he says. “After eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 406 death threats, 179 assaults, and four kidnappings, people are still in denial. They say, ‘Well, this was just some wingnut guy who just decided to go blow up somebody.’ Wrong. This was a cold-blooded, brutal, political assassination that is the logical consequence of 35 years of hate speech and incitement to violence by people from the highest levels of American society, including but in no way limited to George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Bill O’Reilly, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Reagan may not have been a fascist, but he was a tool of the fascists. Bush was most certainly a tool of the fascists. They use this issue to get power. They seem civilised, but underneath you have this seething mass of rabid anger and hatred of freedom that is really frightening, and they support people like the guy who shot George – they’re all pretending to be upset, issuing statements about how much they deplore violence, but it’s just bullshit. This is exactly what they wanted to happen.”
[…]
The patients can be upsetting, too. They’re under terrible stress, of course, but sometimes they come in very angry. One had conjoined twins and would have died giving birth, but she exploded when told she couldn’t smoke in the office. Some treat him with contempt: usually those who have been directly involved in anti-abortion activities. They hate all abortion except for their special case. One even said they should all be killed. Only 14, she came with her mother. “What brings you here?” Dr Hern asked. “I have to have an abortion.” “Why?” “I’m not old enough to have a baby.” “But you told the counsellor we should all be killed?” “Yes, you should all be killed.” “Why?” “Because you do abortions.” “Me too?” “Yes, you should be killed, too.” “Do you want me killed before or after I do your abortion?” “Before.”
He told her to leave. Her mother was very upset. But he isn’t an abortion-dispensing machine. He’s a physician. He’s a person.
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