Get Right

Abortion is one of those topics I try to avoid discussing with folks.

It's not because I don't think it's important. I do. However, I also understand that abortion is one of the those topics where the conversation very quickly devolves into shouting and namecalling. It's such an emotionally charged topic that it's very hard for people to find common ground.

I was thinking about the emotions that the abortion issue creates as a I digested this story about the abortion doctor in Kansas who was murdered at church. It has dominated the national news for a while now, and it has sparked crazy discussions on blogs across the internet. The two camps seem to have taken sides pretty clearly. Either the doctor got what he deserved, or he was murdered by lunatic. There haven't been many folks arguing anything in between.

Well, here goes nothing.

I'm not trying to make some pitiful plea for all of us to get along. That ship sailed a long time ago. No, what I'd like to see is folks actually admit that complicated issues rarely have simple answers.

From most accounts, this doctor was one of the few people in this country who performed legal late-term abortions. These operations typically involve well-developed fetuses, who look a lot like the babies that get delivered in a full-term pregnancy. Apparently the law dictates that late-term abortions can only be performed due to a medical risk to mother, or some sort of severe disability with the baby.

I've read that this doctor may have performed 60,000 late-term abortions over the past five years, and consequently, he was one of the most hated people on Earth in anti-abortion circles. Yet, I've also seen folks describe him as a loving and kind man who took on a difficult and heinous job that needed to be done, but that nobody else really wanted to do.

To me, the duality of this doctor's life mirrors the abortion issue itself.

There are no simple answers with abortion. Yet, people insist on pretending there are. It's not enough to say "Life starts at conception" and ignore all the reasons why abortions make sense for some women. It's also not enough to say "A woman's body is her body" and pretend like you don't understand that we're talking about erasing a potential life.

More importantly, it's simply unacceptable to believe that because people disagree with your position, and act on their beliefs, they deserve whatever comes to them.

That's what really troubles me about this incident. Have we as a society become so morally bankrupt that we can rationalize ANYTHING?

I respect the fact that many folks believe that performing an abortion is the same as murdering a child. But, those folks have to know that those are their feelings, they are not fact. Just because a person believes that this doctor was committing murder does not justify gunning him down outside of church.

I could compare it to my feelings on racists. I find people who mistreat and discriminate against people based on the color of their skin reprehensible. Thinking about slaveowners and segregationists always raises my blood pressure and works me into a frenzy. Yet, I understand that no matter how heinous I think those folks were, no matter how many people they hurt or even killed, it would not have been right to murder them in cold blood.

If I behave like my enemy, how can I be better than my enemy? How can I claim the mantle of Christianity, yet behave in a manner that would be an anathema to Jesus? How can I rationalize and even rejoice at actions that I know violate God's will? Where is the God in murdering a father and husband because I didn't agree with his actions?

Most of the folks who shrug off this doctor's death seem to be saying that since he killed babies, he had this coming to him. They seem to be saying that taking the law into your own hands and killing someone who you feel is evil, is understandable and even justifiable.

I see this as part of the slow return to the darker days in American history where murder and mayhem were common place, and punishment was handed out based on who had to power to enforce their beliefs. We create laws in an attempt to instill order. We understand that left up to their own devices, humans will trample the rights of others in order to make themselves happy. Laws are supposed to counteract these desires, and while they often fail, they do succeed sometimes.

When we shrug off laws, not because they are unjust or immoral, but because we disagree with them, then what precedent are we setting? I understand the urge to protect unborn children, but how does the desire to protect children from murder justify another murder? It's one thing to work to overturn current abortion laws, it's quite another thing to become a vigilante and murder doctors who perform abortions.





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