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Tension High at Abortion Clinics

Diatribe against 'Tiller the Killer' circulated by Canadian anti-choice group.

Tom Sandborn 25 Jun 2009TheTyee.ca

Tom Sandborn is a Tyee contributing editor focusing on health and labour issues.

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Joyce Arthur of Canadian Abortion Rights Coalition: Extremists being encouraged.

Abortion doctor George Tiller was murdered in Wichita, Kansas, nearly a month ago, but aftershocks still reverberate in Canada.

A Canadian anti-choice group is spreading an essay slamming "Tiller the Killer" on the Internet, Ontario abortion clinics are said to face "renewed aggression", and outside a Vancouver clinic, two people were arrested last week for protesting too close.

On May 31, Tiller was shot and killed at the Lutheran church where he regularly worshipped. Scott Roeder, an anti-choice militant, was arrested three hours later and now faces murder charges.

Roeder, who had reportedly posted entries on the web site of Operation Rescue (a leading American anti-choice group, which has publicly denied that Roeder is a member or donor) calling for mass confrontations with Tiller at his church, has a long history of involvement with anti-abortion activism and far right politics in the U.S.

The Tiller shooting has prompted debate in the American media about whether rhetoric used by mainstream anti-abortion activists incites acts of violence against abortion providers.

Right wing commentator Anne Coulter stoked the flames this week, telling Fox Network's Bill O'Reilly: "I don't really like to think of it as a murder. It was terminating Tiller in the 203rd trimester," adding, "I am personally opposed to shooting abortionists, but I don't want to impose my moral values on others."

A PBS special aired after Tiller's murder featured interviews with surviving American abortion providers and chilling glimpses of anti-choice websites that detail names, addresses and pictures of providers and clinics.

At least one of the more extreme anti-choice websites includes a link to a list of Canadian doctors on what appears to be its hit list.

No increase in danger: police

Local RCMP and Vancouver police spokespeople told The Tyee they are unaware of any increased threat of anti-choice violence targeting providers or clinic staff.

According to the National Abortion Federation (NAF), in Canada and the U.S. combined, there have been eight murders of abortion providers since 1997, seventeen attempted murders, 41 clinic bombings and 175 clinics torched by arsonists.

For the same time period, the organization, which represents abortion providers in North America, reports 1400 acts of clinic vandalism, 179 assaults against clinic staff and clients and 763 clinic blockades.

NAF president Vicki Saporta told The Tyee her group was concerned about the safety of Canadian and American abortion providers in the wake of the Tiller shooting.

"There is a heightened alert at clinics," she said. "It is very important in a democratic society that we don't allow extremists to take the law into their own hands."

'For whom shall we mourn?'

Dr. Tiller's murder drew condemnations from both pro- and anti-choice organizations across North America, including Operation Rescue in the U.S. and Canada's Campaign Life Coalition, but pro-choice spokespeople have told The Tyee that anti-abortion rhetoric that equates the procedure, legal in Canada since 1988, with murder runs the risk of inciting violence against doctors and clinic staff.

One example of anti-abortion discourse that troubles some observers is the essay "George Tiller is Dead: For Whom Should We Mourn?", written by a Texas-based minister named Douglas Phillips and circulated to the email list of the Canadian organization Equipping Christians for the Public Square on June 1, the day after the Tiller shooting.

"'Tiller the Killer' is dead," the essay begins. "Who shall mourn for this man? Perhaps the bigger question is this: who will mourn for the more than 60,000 babies that Dr. George Tiller brutally murdered in the most horrific manner imaginable over his lengthy career as America's most notorious provider of late-term abortions?... Tiller's career was more horrifying than any horror movie ever produced, because there was nothing pretend about his bizarre and diabolical practices. On Sundays, George Tiller worshipped in his Lutheran church where he served as an usher. But on Mondays through Fridays he chopped up children."

The essay goes on to say that it is not a tragedy that "Tiller will never be a killer again," describing the murdered physician as "...this church going Sweeney Todd of the medical profession." Phillips does argue, deep in the essay, that the murder of Dr. Tiller broke the law of God and will help abortion supporters "justify America's idolatrous practices of child sacrifice to the gods of feminist self-determination." The wrongful killing of abortionists, the essay argues, only furthers their cause.

A moral equation condemned

Carolyn Egan, a spokesperson for the Ontario Coalition of Abortion Clinics, says the Phillips essay makes a false and dangerous equation.

"This essay equates the murder of Dr. Tiller to abortions. I would absolutely reject this equation," Egan told The Tyee. "The many anti-choice groups who use this equation create the situation in which an extremist or mentally ill person will commit murder."

Egan's assertion that rhetoric calling abortion mass murder is bound to inspire violence was echoed by conservative National Post columnist Colby Cosh in the days following the Tiller shooting.

"Here is what violence can accomplish, as Operation Rescue and other pro-life groups now wringing their hands theatrically over Dr. Tiller's death know perfectly well. It can make young medical students more reluctant to pursue abortion as a vocation; it can raise the costs of security at abortion clinics; it can make hospitals and stand-alone abortion providers more reluctant to advertise their services openly. If you believe that abortion is tantamount to murder, a single act of violence can save an awful lot of innocent lives indeed -- especially when contrasted with the progress made by the "peaceful, legal" advocacy of groups like Operation Rescue," wrote Cosh.

The NAF's Saporta said that essays like the Phillips piece circulated by the EPC Centre are "part of the problem."

"People try to justify homicide," she said. "That kind of rhetoric is indefensible."

Abortion rate is declining

"The annoying thing about this essay is the complete dismissal and disrespect shown to the women and their families who had abortions at George's clinic," Joyce Arthur, coordinator of the Canadian Abortion Rights Coalition said about the Doug Phillips article. "The more mainstream anti-choice groups provide encouragement for the extreme right wing, then they absolve themselves when something like this happens."

Jill Doctoroff, director of the Elizabeth Bagshaw clinic in Vancouver, which provides abortion services, told The Tyee that the essay circulated by the ECP Centre was biased and one sided.

"Essays like this build on a rhetoric that can justify and rationalize violence," Doctoroff said.

According to Stats Canada figures for 2005, the most recent available, 98,815 abortions were performed in Canada that year, down 3.2 per cent from 100,039 the previous year.

B.C. saw 14,927 abortions in 2005. Abortion figures for Canada and B.C. have declined steadily since 1996, when the national total was 111,757 abortions and the B.C. total 16,501.

A similar pattern of declining numbers for abortion has been reported in the U.S.

'Seeing renewed aggression'

Access to abortion continues to be an issue in both countries. No legal abortions are performed in Prince Edward Island and access to the procedure continues to be very uneven in Canada, with women living in rural areas often having to travel long distances to obtain service.

Jacqueline Foley of Vancouver's Everywoman's Health Centre, the site of Vancouver's most recent arrests of anti-abortion protesters on June 19, said that the Phillips essay sounded to her a lot like right wing radio from the U.S. "This sort of stuff can push people over the edge," she said.

Foley said that anti-abortion pickets appear regularly outside her Commercial Drive clinic at noon on Fridays, but usually respect the bubble zone legislation that limits how closely they can approach the doors of the clinic.

On June 19, two demonstrators, including Donald Spratt, whose challenge to B.C.'s bubble zone legislation had been rejected by the Supreme Court last week, entered the bubble zone and were arrested.

Egan told The Tyee that the Ontario Coalition of Abortion Clinics had noticed increased harassment of at least one Toronto area abortion clinic since Tillers murder.

"We are definitely seeing renewed aggression," she said.

Defending the Phillips essay

Ann Thomson, author of Winning Choice on Abortion: How British Columbian and Canadian Feminists Won the Battles of the 1970s and 1980s, voiced concerns about anti-choice rhetoric in an interview with The Tyee.

"I struggle to understand why there is so much fanaticism around this issue. The only explanation that rings true is that the right to abortion represents a current aspect of the millennia old war on women."

Tim Bloedow, the Interim President of the ECP Centre, the organization that circulated the controversial essay on the Tiller killing, sees the matter differently. Bloedow, whose group describes itself on its website as "apologists for social conservative Christians," says that he chose the Doug Phillips article for Canadian distribution because the Texas writer, unlike many pro-life voices responding to the doctor's murder, "had a strong theological position on why the shooting was wrong without being reactionary. He was considered, not emotional, and he both showed the shooting was wrong and showed that Tiller was a killer."

Bloedow rejected any suggestion that the Phillips essay or other strong criticism of abortion could be seen as promoting vigilante justice against abortion providers as "fraudulent."

"We know we are all sinners and God's law doesn't tolerate vigilantism," he told The Tyee.

'We treasure all life, even abortionists'

Bloedow said that secularism, which he says dominates Canada today, is a religion in its own right. He says he and his organization are working to create a Christian Canada with a more de-centralized structure of government without the welfare state, no fault divorce, abortion, or same sex marriage. He said that while the ECP has not taken a position on human rights tribunals, he personally believed they should be abolished and human rights issues decided by "real courts."

Following his interview with The Tyee, Bloedow posted a new dispatch to his group's members describing his conversations with "a Tyee reporter," headlined "Why Christians don't kill abortionists or homosexuals".

Other voices from the Canadian anti-abortion movement were also eager to disassociate themselves and their organizations from the murder of George Tiller. Campaign Life's Mary Ellen Douglas told The Tyee, "It isn't true. We don't want abortionists to be killed. We treasure all life, even the abortionists. We pray for them."

Roman Catholic Archbishop J. Michael Miller of Vancouver wrote in a June 8 issue of the BC Catholic that "The teaching of the Catholic Church is clear. There is no justification for using violence to bring about an end to abortion."

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