Toronto March for LifeIn his column “Who’s to blame for George Tiller’s murder” (June 2), Colby Cosh is completely wrong when he says: “If you believe that abortion is tantamount to murder… then you should be willing to stand up and celebrate the murder of Dr. George Tiller…”
Perhaps those who support violence (through abortion) in the face of difficult life circumstances just don’t understand when other people don’t resort to violence in the face of difficult life circumstances (a society where abortion is legal). But nonetheless, that’s our point. Take a message from the pro-life textbook, Mr. Cosh: Killing people isn’t the way to deal with problems. It’s the reason why we are more than just “anti-abortion.”
Furthermore, abortionists could be offering their “services” on every street corner but whether they kill unborn human beings is dependent on one person: the woman. It’s true that some women are pressured to abort, or are not fully informed. But ultimately the abortionist could do nothing without a woman laying her body down, to be vilely entered in order to dismember, decapitate and disembowel her child’s body. As a result of this fact, analogies about intervening in other acts of violence break down.
A toddler may be taken away from a mother who may drown that child in the bathtub, but the unborn cannot be separated from their mothers. And so one must intervene by appealing to the heart and mind of the woman and those in society who influence her: educating her about who the baby is, showing her what abortion will do to the baby, informing her what abortion will do to her and offering her loving support throughout the pregnancy and after birth.
With Mr. Cosh’s rhetoric, I am reminded of the clergymen who were critical of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s controversial approach. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King responded by saying, “In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? … We must come to see that … it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.”
But since Mr. Cosh doesn’t seem to support that philosophy, I wonder if he’s willing to take responsibility for the consequence of his comments. Given that he’s named Jim Hughes and my organization’s parent affiliate, the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), and implied that we were at least in part responsible for violence against Tiller, will he take responsibility for his rhetoric if advocates of legal abortion take it upon themselves and direct violence toward us?
