Thank you, Dr. Tiller.

I grieve and rage at the assassination of this hero for women’s health, autonomy and lives. George Tiller cared about women and girls, and did what he could to help them in desperate circumstances. Despite years, decades, of intimidation and violence, he wouldn’t abandon the patients who needed him. He was incredibly brave.

I read a short story a few years ago that chilled and sickened me (I wish I could remember its title and author – I’ll go look on my bookshelves). A woman living in a totalitarian regime where abortion was illegal had attempted to obtain one anyway, was caught, and was punished with something like thirty years of forced, back-to-back pregnancies. A bleak, dystopic vision, yes. But there are parts of the world – Latin America, parts of the Middle East – where this story, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, are terrifyingly close to reality. Where pregnant women are jailed for trying to get an abortion, forced to carry fetuses to term, even when it threatens their own lives.

Pregnancy and childbirth are risky propositions, not the walk in the park that some adoption advocates would have you think. Every baby should be a wanted baby. And even sometimes the wanted babies have fatal abnormalities that are not diagnosed until the second or third trimester. Or a woman is diagnosed with cancer and must have an abortion in order to undergo chemotherapy. These are the cases that Dr. Tiller, almost singlehandedly, tackled. Only one or two other doctors in the country are willing, for reasons of fear and intimidation, to perform late-term abortions. Of course Dr. Tiller also was a regular Ob/Gyn who delivered hundreds, if not thousands of babies in his career.

“Pro-life” is a sickeningly propagandist term that the anti-choicers have successfully co-opted. Insinuating, of course, that the opposing contingent is “anti-life.” When it’s the pro-choice people who are actually “pro-life”: pro-women, pro-family, pro-wanted children. Recently it was trumpeted in the media that something like 51% of people now consider themselves “pro-life.” (Who knows if all of them even know what the term means?) But if you asked many of those people what legal penalty a woman should face if abortion were recriminalized and she broke the law to get one, they would look at you blankly. They don’t really want to see their friends and sisters go to jail. But it is sheer blind laziness not to think about what the legal consequences would be.

This anti-choice intellectual laziness, and the rabid frothing-at-the-mouth that too frequently accompanies it, obscures for anti-choicers the fact that they are free to hold whatever beliefs they want, but they don’t have the right to decide what happens inside someone else’s body. That’s fascism, and worse (see The Handmaid’s Tale, above). They conveniently don’t think about the slippery slope – about which of their own rights other people might decide to legislate away (as catchy slogans go, I like “Protect traditional marriage: Ban divorce.”). We live in a democracy, and a woman’s body cannot be subject to anyone else’s opinion, majority or otherwise. Women will not be content to remain second-class citizens; we can and must be trusted to make the best decisions for our own lives about when and whether to bear children.

The second reality that the rabid anti-choicers can’t or won’t comprehend is that women and girls will have abortions whether they’re safe and legal or not. Better, for the sake of women and the people who love them, that they be safe and legal.

No woman should ever be forced to carry a pregnancy she does not want or cannot sustain. The consequences to women of compulsory gestation and childbirth can be devastating. Bringing a human being into the world is a tremendous responsibility. When you are not equipped or willing, it can be a nightmare. We see the consequences of unwanted children in the foster care system, where abuse and neglect are endemic, on our streets and in our prisons. Do the anti-choicers care about those lost kids, take them into their homes, provide for them financially and spiritually? Yeah, right.

Ultimately the anti-abortion crusade is not about saving babies, but about controlling women – our sexuality and autonomy. The solid citizens who harass women at clinics and from Republican wingnut bully pulpits are usually the same ones who rail against contraception and sex education. Women shouldn’t be sexual, the twisted logic goes, but if they are, they’re sluts and they should be punished with pregnancy. It is no accident that the cultures in which women and their reproductive lives are controlled most repressively are also the cultures in which girls are not allowed to go to school, and women are not allowed to work outside the home. The anti-abortion forces know that overturning Roe v. Wade would be difficult, if not impossible. But if they can’t make abortion illegal, they can make it almost impossible to obtain. 87% of American counties do not have an abortion provider.

Somewhere around 35-40% of American women have had abortions. They, and their husbands and boyfriends and family members, need to stand up and say no to the campaign of domestic anti-choice terrorism that has made George Tiller its latest victim. (And Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, for years an on-air fomenter of hysterical violence toward Dr. Tiller "the Baby Killer," has blood on his hands.)

To honor Dr. Tiller’s memory, you can donate to Medical Students for Choice, Planned Parenthood, NARAL. You can volunteer at your local women’s health center. You can stand up and be counted as a voice for sanity, for the equal citizenship of women, for the kind of care that Dr. George Tiller stood for. We will really miss him.