There’s a must-read piece in Esquire about Dr. Warren Hern, the last doctor in the United States to specialize in late-term abortions. It’s an interesting, nuanced piece, and I would recommend reading the whole thing — it neither lionizes nor demonizes Dr. Hern, and instead casts him as a complex and good-hearted human being. The article is written in the shadow of Dr. Tiller’s murder, and the fear that Warren Hern lives with is a major theme in the piece. (To make the formatting work, I’ve bolded where the original article italicizes).
In the kitchen of the Boulder Abortion Clinic, the abortionist 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…
He 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 nonprofit 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 name (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, seventeen 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 thirty-five 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 W. 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. George W. Bush was most certainly a tool of the fascists. They use this issue to get power. They seem civilized but underneath you have this seething mass of angry, 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.
He goes on about Bill O’Reilly for a while. Over the course of twenty-nine separate shows, O’Reilly accused “Tiller the Baby Killer” of performing a late abortion for any reason at all, even so a girl could attend a rock concert — a charge that is blatantly untrue. O’Reilly is a disgrace to American society, he says.
He’s right.
On Rachel Maddow’s show last night, she talked about “wave of angry mobs” that are attacking healthcare-related town hall meetings. It’s worth a watch. Congressmen have been threatened. They’ve been lynched in effigy. Republican leaders have joked about lynching Democrats. Paul Krugman has a column today that details some of the same behaviors. But one thing that Maddow points out is that the rhetoric used even by supposedly “mainstream” groups is intented to incite violence, even as they claim to abhor it. Nazi comparisons are the easy example — I think it’s one thing to say that someone’s views or beliefs are so extreme that they are reminiscent of popular views in Nazi Germany, or even to point out the similiarities between certain regressive, frighteningly controlling policies and the polices of fascist states. But accusations of Nazism, or being just like Hitler, evokes a particular response. It crosses a line to start arguing that a Democratic leader is basically a Nazi, or to say that healthcare is a “Hitler-like policy being heralded like a Hitler-like logo” and “Obama is asking citizens to rat each other out, just like Hitler did” (those are Rush Limbaugh quotes, for the record; apparently Hitler was extremely concerned with universal health care). As Maddow says, “He’s just like Hitler. And you know what that means he deserves, right?”
It’s pretty clear that rhetoric and words do have consequences. Of course I’m not arguing that people like Limbaugh, O’Reilly, et al shouldn’t have the right to say incredibly ugly and sometimes incendiary things; I don’t want them locked up or barred from their hate speech. But I do want a conversation about what those kinds of words lead to, and what responsibility — not necessarily legal responsibility, but ethical and moral responsibility — people like Limbuagh and O’Reilly have when they incite their listeners and viewers to take these kinds of accusations to the logical conclusion.
The tie-in with the anti-choice movement is pretty obvious — that’s the home of ugly, violence-abetting rhetoric. While the anti-healthcare movement has rested its vitriol on accusations of Socialism and even Nazism, the anti-choice movement has literally said that abortion providers, pro-choicers and pro-choice politicians are killing babies. Committing genocide. Murdering people. Slaughtering innocents. And no one is stopping them. Then they hand their followers the names and contact information of these supposed mass murders.
If you really truly believed that someone down the street from you was slaughtering thousands of children ever year, what would you do? Just look the other way?
The “abortion is murder” rhetoric is used specifically because it incites disgust and anger. The accusations of genocide and mass slaughter are used specifically because they upset people to such a degree that it seems someone reasonable to try and stop the killings, by any means necessary.
And, make no mistake, they are backed by the most supposedly “maintream” pro-life groups and their affiliates, including the Republican Party. Bill O’Reilly, for example, was just given the “Media Courage Award” by the right-wing Family Research Council, specifically for his coverage of George Tiller — in dozens of segments where he made up lies about “Tiller the Baby Killer.” O’Reilly will be honored at an event that features some of the biggest names in the Republican party:
On the evening of September 18, FRC Action will recognize Bill at the Values Voter Summit with the first-ever Media Courage Award. Bill is scheduled to speak after the tribute. He joins a jam-packed line-up, which now includes Govs. Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.), Rick Perry (R-Texas), Joel Rosenberg, Stephen Baldwin, and many of Capitol Hill’s brightest. The list of invited speakers includes: former Gov. Sarah Palin, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Sean Hannity, Ben Stein, and others.
But yeah, sure, the GOP and “pro-life” groups totally oppose violence visited upon abortion providers.
In reality, abortion providers perform often thankless medical work every day. The profile of Dr. Hern emphasizes that much.
Similar Posts:
- Violence-Abetting Anti-Choice Fanatics: Now in Congress by Jill June 19, 2009
- Why Dr. LeRoy Carhart Won’t Stop Doing Abortions by Cara August 19, 2009
- Dr. Tiller’s Clinic Will Remain Closed by Cara June 9, 2009
- Anti-Choice Dems Receive Death Threats From Pro-Lifers by Jill March 24, 2010
- Come to think of it, she was pretty strict about the glue by Linnaeus December 19, 2007
A profoundly honest article. We need to keep saying these things, even if they hit a nerve on the highly reactive reich wing.
Thank you for posting this story. Dr. Tiller and Dr. Hern are heroes and deserve our respect and gratitude.
Comparing the anti-choice movement to aspects Nazism is totally accurate–probably the most accurate use of that comparison in modern American society. Central to Nazi rhetoric you found this semantic breakdown: you would hear things like “Jews are vermin.” Not “Jews are like vermin,” but “Jews are vermin.” And when the believers repeated it ad nauseum it made killing a Jew, or a Roma, Communist, etc. no different from killing a rat.
Anti-choice rhetoric shows the same breakdown, as pointed out in this post. We see people running around saying “abortion is murder” when it’s clearly not. Why isn’t it murder? Why isn’t a duck a tool shed? Why isn’t Barack Obama an oboe? We’re talking about two things that bear no empirical similarity to one another. “Abortion is like murder,” you can almost see if you shoot up an overdose of naive sentimentality and squint at it hard enough from just the right angle, but the removal of that one middle word puts it so far past that. It’s a story that you can readily see happening in the 1930′s (and not just in Germany) and we all know how it ends.
If there are laws about truth in advertising, why are there no laws about truth in politics? It would seem to me to be an even more important arena for requiring some attachment to truth. I mean, in advertising, at worst you might waste a few dollars, but in politics, you can seriously detrimentally affect the conditions of your life and your liberty.
I am a PhD student from Canada, and my area of study is health care systems. This means that I spend about 8-15 hours a day (for the last 10 years) looking at health care systems and what makes them work or not.
One thing that is seriously bugging me is the amount of misinformation that is being spread about the Canadian health care system in these debates about health care reform in the USA. Yes, we ration (so do you). But in Canada it is illegal, it is against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms bit.ly/10RqHn, to ration based on age. There is absolutely no age-based rationing occurring here. The whole thing about Obama’s plan killing old people began with some stupid second-hand story about someone being denied care in Canada because they were too old. That is just total BS.
bakka-
Yes, we ration (so do you). But in Canada it is illegal, it is against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms bit.ly/10RqHn, to ration based on age.
I agree. You “ration” everyone.
How can you support a system where an entire Province couldn’t find even a single neo-natal IC bed when needed? What happens if the US hospital says “No.”?
A great and honest article…but seriously, I hate the term “abortionist”. For crying out loud, this person is a doctor who happens to perform abortions. Is it so hard to address him as such? I don’t think you can write a neutral piece on abortion if you are going to call the doctor an abortionist. It’s inflammatory and I think that it paints a picture of some bloodthirsty money crazed butcher, as opposed to a doctor who specializes in a particular branch of medicine to help women and families. *shrugs*
An honest and exceptionally well-put article, Jill. It is so infuriating that we allow so much misinformation to pour from mainstream media, Fox News in particular. It means nothing to me when far-right lunatics like Bill O’Reilly “condemn” Dr. Tiller assassination (yes it was an assassination). You call someone a “Baby Killer” and accuse him of genocide on national television hundreds of times and then you act appalled when someone who believed it “avenges” the “babies”? WTF.
I agree with Bakka: If there are laws about truth in advertising, why are there no laws about truth in politics? Seriously. Why is there no fact-checking and no accountability?
Early this afternoon on CNN they were showing coverage of the anti-health care reform mobs at various town halls, and they had a man from a conservative coalition on, who literally lied several times about what “the American people are afraid of,” i.e. things that appear nowhere in any of the health care reform bills. I was honestly disgusted. I have no problem with people who disagree with me speaking their mind in a public forum. I do have a problem with people shitting in my hand and calling it a sundae.
I’m halfway through the article and already quite annoyed with the author. He keeps calling the patients “moms” despite being repeatedly corrected by the doctor. He throws out anti-choice talking points as interview questions.
Nationalized health care, it is kind of weird that you rely in your response on an issue that happened in Alberta, because this is one of the few Canadian provinces that has allowed for-profit medicine. So, actually I don’t support “Province couldn’t find even a single neo-natal IC bed” because the system in Alberta is one that has refused federal transfers for health funding in order to allow for-profit care. When Alberta fond oil, it became a rich province and decided it could afford to violate Federal Laws, since the punishment for this violation was merely the withholding of funds. So, actually, Alberta is not a very good example of the principles of the Canada Health Act, but is instead an example of a different system that violates the principles of the Canada Health Act. Check you facts.
Yeah, but the thing that got me about the article Dr. Confused was that in a lot of the really hard cases- the fetuses with severe abnormalities- these women may very well think of themselves as mothers. I know I did- my labor was induced 2 and 1/2 months early because my son had multiple fatal abnormalities. Even though I ended my pregnancy early, I still considered him my son and myself a mother. I know a lot of women who felt the same way, they ended pregnancies with fetuses who couldn’t survive, but they still consider them their children. I even know quite a few of us who were able to hold our babies. I understand why Dr. Hern was fighting against that mindset, but I found myself frustrated by that whole back and forth between the two of them, because I thought the author was just trying to be an ass and Dr. Hern wasn’t acknowledging the full range of feelings women could go through. That being said, I think Dr. Hern is a hero, so I’m not willing to get that hung up on it.
The “abortionist” thing initially rubbed me the wrong way too, until it became clear that the author was using it for effect — the point was to use such a loaded term, and to juxtapose it with totally normal and kind doctorly (and human) things that The Abortionist was doing. I actually thought it was a good device in the context of the piece.
I think part of what the author was doing was to approach the story from the perspective of a layperson in the United States — i.e., a person who has internalized a lot of the right-wing talking points. Without that, the article isn’t as effective. If he approached the doctor using pro-choice-approved words and didn’t raise anti-choice talking points, what would the article do other than please already pro-choice people?
I agree with Jill — we’ve reached a point in the discourse about abortion in the United States where it is treated as this freakish thing that cannot even be named, when it is the *most* common outpatient surgical procedure performed. 40% of American women will have one in their lifetimes. But somehow, everyone discusses it as a moral abstraction, and feels faint about calling it by name. In the 1970s and into the 1980s, an abortion could be a mentionable plot twist in a sitcom or movie. Now? Heaven forfend — the drama revolves instead around a miscarriage or “false alarm” (even an otherwise smart progressive show like 30 Rock dodged that bullet). And it *is* a bullet, as friends & family of George Tiller can tell us. Warren Hern performs abortions and gets lots of tributes of secret gratitude from women and men alike, and public excoriation as some kind of strange monster. How thankless a life, and what an unusually brave person.
Also, other kinds of doctor are referred to by their specialties: oncologist, neurologist, surgeon, pediatrician; I don’t see abortionist any differently. I know none of those other specialities have people calling for their deaths, but I don’t want to cede the word to those people.
Sorry… should we really cede the word to those people?
As one who hangs out with deliveryists, hysterectomyists, bladder suspensionists, total abdominal hysterectomy-bilateral oophorectomyists, and a few appendectomyists and root canalists I think it needs to be pointed out that “abortionist” does not refer to any medical specialty.
Just like with “partial-birth” abortion, the problem with “abortionist” isn’t that it’s not a pro-choice-approved word or that it is a loaded term; it’s that it is an inaccurate, propaganda word that has no place in a reality-based discussion. [Despite successful efforts from those who oppose proper medical care for pregnant patients, reality, in particular medical reality, does not depend on the perspective of the audience.]
And Jill, you did notice that the git who wrote the piece refuses to address Dr. Hern, and *only* Dr. Hern, as “doctor”, yes?