Like most people who engage in the debate over abortion, pro-lifers miss the whole point behind the need for doctors like Dr. George Tiller, who performed late-term abortions in Kansas and was murdered yesterday.
I have only known one woman who had a late-term abortion, but I will briefly relate her story. She was a co-worker of mine many years ago. She married in her late 30's, and she and her husband, knowing her child-bearing years were few, set about to start a family. She got pregnant and went happily through 5 1/2 months of pregnancy, until she had a sonogram (this was in the early days of HMOs, when they were seriously stingy about doling out services). The sonogram unfortunately showed that the fetus had abnormalities so severe that there was no way it would be viable outside the womb. In reality, Mother Nature would normally have caused an early miscarriage to happen with abnormalities of this kind, but for whatever reason the pregnancy had continued. In addition, carrying the fetus to term would only mean that a C-section would be in order, and the fetus would die a slow, painful death.
My co-worker lived in Missouri; she had to go through the Christmas season pregnant, and after the holidays flew to Texas to have a late second-term abortion procedure. This is a married woman who desperately wanted children; this was NOT someone who simply waited too long to decide they didn't want to be a mother. This was a fetus that unfortunately was not a perfect, cherubic little child who could be easily adopted; this fetus had zero chance of living outside the womb and, if a doctor such as Dr. Tiller had not intervened, would have died a horrible death instead of the much less painful procedure the doctor performed (sorry, but I'm not going into details here, you'll just have to trust me that it was a preferable way to die, given that death was inevitable).
Pro-lifers never understand that THIS is why we need to keep abortion legal. I frankly don't care if somebody who is an adult got pregnant by accident -- as far as I'm concerned abortion is not to be used as birth control by irresponsible adults. It's people like my former co-worker, or the 10-year old who was raped by her father, that I care about. That's why abortion must remain legal. From what I understand, Dr. Tiller's practice was not centered around women who just took too long to decide they didn't want a baby, but around those unfortunate and sad cases when a late-term abortion is medically necessary or is simply the more humane choice of the two options, as in the case of my former co-worker. This is the point that pro-lifers don't understand, but they need to. If they did perhaps we wouldn't have had the tragedy of Dr. Tiller's murder in the first place.
