Terrance Heath's List: Abortion and tiller

• My first caveat is a big one, and an obvious one: most conservatives do not in any way support this kind of political terrorism, and are in fact saddened by it. There is no question about that, and I think when discussing the issue of political violence and American fascism, we should be very clear about that important point.
• In addition, I think it is extremely important that progressives be very slow and very careful in calling conservatives fascist or supporters of political violence unless they actually show themselves to be that. A person may passionately believe, for example, that abortion is murder, and still strongly oppose any kind of domestic terrorism.
• Conservatives in the South who vehemently and violently defended and fought for slavery and Jim Crow are the most obvious example: From the vicious caning of political opponents on the floor of the Senate, to the fighting of the bloody Civil War, to the gunning down of hundreds of freed slaves in the reconstruction era, to the lynching of thousand of African-Americans in the 90 years after the Civil War, to all of the horrible violence of the civil rights struggles in the 1950s and 60s, the story of race relations in the South has been long and incredibly bloody. The North wasn't exactly pure on race issues either, from the mass murder of blacks in Tulsa in 1921 to the rock throwing mobs of Chicago greeting Martin Luther King.
• Racial violence hasn't been the only from of political violence by those opposed to progressive change in this country either. Labor leaders have been assassinated; women suffragists and other progressive reformers have been tarred and feathered, and violently harassed. Tim McVeigh, the perpetrator of the country's biggest single act of domestic terrorism was a far right-wing, militia activist. Sadly, the Tiller killing is only the latest in a long string of anti-abortion activists bombing clinics and murdering people.

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• A man with ties to anti-government groups was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder in the shooting death of abortion provider George Tiller at a church.
  
  Scott Roeder, 51, made a two-minute court appearance via a video link from the Sedgwick County Jail. Roeder, wearing a red jail jumpsuit and fiddling with the charging documents on a podium in front of him, said, "OK" three times as Judge Ben Burgess read him the charges and explained the court process.

  Roeder is accused of shooting Tiller to death Sunday as the doctor served as an usher at his Lutheran church in Wichita. Roeder also is charged with aggravated assault for allegedly threatening two people at the church who tried to stop him.

  • What's interesting is that it's the second time that a person who might be described as "liberal" has been targeted and killed while in their place of worship. Suggesting that the battle between the two sides is one of values -- and, surprise, progreessives are as motivated by values as conservatives claim to be.

• If convicted on the murder charge, Roeder would face a mandatory life sentence and would not be eligible for parole for at least 25 years.

  Police have said it appears the gunman acted alone.

  • He acted alone. And he didn't.

• The 9-year-old girl had been raped by her father. She was 18 weeks pregnant. Carrying the baby to term, going through labor and delivery, would have ripped her small body apart.

   

  There was no doctor in her rural Southern town to provide her with an abortion. No area hospital would even consider taking her case.

   

  Susan Hill, the president of the National Women’s Health Foundation, which operates reproductive health clinics in areas where abortion services are scarce or nonexisistent, called Dr. George Tiller, the Wichita, Kan., ob-gyn who last Sunday was shot to death by an abortion foe in the entry foyer of his church.

   

  She begged.

   

  “I only asked him for a favor when it was a really desperate story, not a semi-desperate story,” she told me this week. Tiller was known to abortion providers — and opponents — as the “doctor of last resort” — the one who took the patients no one else would touch.

   

  “He took her for free,” she said. “He kept her three days. He checked her himself every few hours. She and her sister came back to me and said he couldn’t have been more wonderful. That’s just the way he was.”

  • Were it not for Dr. Tiller, this young girl would have been dead. She would have died during childbirth, while barely a child herself. And that's what the other sidee sentence her too.
    
    Now they will say of course the rape should never have happened. But it did, and she's pregnant. Here and now.
• One New York mother wrote of having been referred by an obstetrician to Tiller after learning, in her 27th week of pregnancy, that her soon-to-be son was “so very sick” that, once born, he’d have nothing more than “a brief life of respirators, dialysis, surgeries and pain.” In-state doctors refused to perform an abortion.

• “The day I drove up to the clinic in Wichita, Kansas, to undergo the procedure that would end the life of my precious son, I also walked into the nightmare of abortion politics. In this world, reality rarely gets through the rhetoric,” wrote another mother, from Texas, of the shouts, graphic posters and protesters’ video camera that greeted her when she came to see Tiller.

   
• “Late abortion is not a failure of contraception. It’s for medical reasons,” Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who has worked to defend abortion providers like Tiller against harassment and violence since the mid-1980s, told me this week. “We’ve made pregnancy a fairy tale where there are no fetal complications, there’s no cancer, no terrible abuse of girls, no cases where to make a girl go all the way through a pregnancy is to destroy her. These are the realities of the story. That’s what Dr. Tiller worked with — the realities.”

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• After a two-decade hiatus from activism taken to grow her career and family, she plans to march tomorrow with her husband, Paris, and her boys, Aaron, 8, and Asher, 6. This time, equal access to health insurance is her issue: Due in part to poorer health care options, African American and Latina women suffer from higher rates of childbirth mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and infant mortality than do Caucasian women.
• "All over our country, there are women's voices for the right to . . . have control over their own bodies, especially contraception and abortion," Rosado said. "To talk about this question is to talk about social justice."

  • The same peopel who would make abortion illegal would make contraception inaccessible, and fact-based sex education. They close window after window after window.

• Gerri Santoro was one of her younger sisters, bubbly and trusting, the mother of two girls by a man who abused her and them. They separated, Santoro had a relationship with another man and became pregnant. When she was more than six months along, her husband contacted her: He was returning to her Coventry, Conn., home in hopes of reconciling.

   

  Santoro panicked, her sister said. When he saw she was pregnant, she feared, he might kill her. Leona scraped together $700 and told her to hide. Instead, the man by whom she was pregnant borrowed a set of medical instruments and a textbook from a work colleague. When the procedure went wrong he fled, leaving Santoro to bleed to death at a Norwich, Conn., motel.
• For years, the family told Santoro's daughters that she'd died in a car accident. After the Roe decision, Ms. magazine published a police photo of Santoro's death scene. Gordon recognized her sister, lying nude, facedown on the motel room floor, gripping a towel she'd used to try and stop the bleeding. The photo became a symbol for the abortion rights movement, a "never again," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority, which publishes Ms.
• Ms. editors at the time said they were unsure how they had gotten the photo and did not identify Santoro. Gordon was appalled, traumatized, then glad, she said. "People needed to be shocked into believing that something like this really happens." She said she has marched holding aloft a poster-size version of the photo.

  • They need to be shocked into caring, too. Of course opponents will tell you that they don't want any women to die in abortions -- legal or illegal -- because they don't wany any woman to have an abortion. (That, of course, means that some will die in or as a result of childbirth.)
    
    Perhaps in a way both sides want the same thing. Both want a world where nine year old girls aren't raped and impregnated by their fathers. Both want a world where women don't have husbands so abusive that they end up in the kind of circumstances that ended Gerri Santoro's life.
    
    Who wouldn't want a world where those kinds of things don't happen? Who doesn't want to work for such a world?
    
    The reality is, though, that we don't live in such a world, and pretending that we do does more harm than good. Until the day no girl or woman is ever beaten, abandoned, or raped again; until the day every everyone behaves as they "should" women need to have the option of safe, legal abortion.

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• What could I do? Abortion was illegal. I drank paregoric, hurled myself against walls, and did all the other terrible things rumored to end a pregnancy. Including the coat hanger. Those coat-hanger ads can't have the true impact of their intent unless you have tried to end a pregnancy with one. Finally thoroughly terrified, I decided that I could not do it myself.

• I told the baby's father. A fairly wealthy man of considerable stature in the community, he seemed hardly bothered. He told me to talk to a woman who worked in his office building (in hindsight, I wondered how many times he had played out this scene), that she could tell me what to do.

    I had casually known this woman. She was sophisticated and worldly-wise in a way I suspected I would never be (I was right in that, at least). I told her I had a friend who needed an abortion. She wrote down a number on a slip of paper, told me to call and ask for Barney, said not to worry. It'll cost $100, she said. My salary was $190 a month and my savings account totaled about $37. I went back to the baby's father, who said he'd have the $100 for me the next day--that afternoon, if I needed. I went to a pay phone and dialed the number.

  • How often does the woman get left to deal with the pregnancy because it's so easy for men to walk away? Like the movies the Magdalene sisters and the oscar winning movie about the old abortionist.

• The carport door led into a somewhat dingy kitchen, where the woman stood. Steamy and overheated, it smelled like last night's fried food and boiled greens. She took the money. Barney disappeared. The woman pointed me into a small room that led off a short, dark hallway just beyond the kitchen, said to put my coat on the chair and remove my panties, Barney would be here right away. In the room was a wooden table similar to the one in my parents' kitchen. There were two chairs and another, smaller table on which there was a pitcher of water alongside a basin, some paper cups and a small stack of towels. The room had faded wallpaper with rows of brownish designs that looked like stalks of wheat.

    Barney entered, minus his overcoat. He could have been anyone's bad caricature of a greasy-haired used car salesman. He had on a white shirt and red striped tie, both pretty much the worse for wear. Had I not been hypnotically bound into it myself, the entire scene would have seemed so like a bad B movie as to be funny. It was not funny at the time. Barney said to lie on my back on the table. This won't hurt, he said. I felt something being inserted into my vagina, something smaller than a tampon. It was over in a matter of minutes. Barney said to put my panties back on and he'd be in the car. I wondered later if he had washed his hands, before or after.

• As he drove me back to the Loew's Grand, Barney said I should expect to start bleeding within a few hours. That was the extent of our conversation, but the trip back took only a fraction of the time spent driving out.

    Barney was right about the bleeding. I told my roommates I was having some really bad cramps, and thought I'd stay in bed on Sunday. Monday morning I was still bleeding heavily. Frightened. I called my physician and said I needed to see him right away.

    The doctor said, Who did this to you? Nobody, I said, I just went ice skating and had a bad fall. After a few moments of uncomfortable probing, mentally and physically, he said, You are one of the lucky ones. He gave me a prescription to fill and told me to come back in a month, sooner if I had problems.

  • There will be more unlucky ones. But the opposition doesn't have an answer for them. Just more closed windows. And only one choice, which amounts to no choice.

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• In the late evening hours of June 8, 1964, my mother died in a Connecticut motel room from the complications of a self induced abortion. Her lover assisted her in the abortion attempt and then left her there to die alone when he realized things were not going well. My mom bled to death on the motel floor. They found her body there the next morning. She was 28 years old and the mother of 2.
  
  In 1973 a crime scene photo of my mother’s bloody naked body was made public. Without volunteering my mom became the poster child for the pro-choice movement. The image has circulated throughout the country over the years and is still in use today.
  
• The date no longer escapes me even if the courage to speak out about it still usually does. So today, this June 8th, 2006, I want to remember.

  • Ironically Tiller's murder happened nearly 45 years to the day after Gerri Santorro's death.

• On June 9, 1964, 28-year-old wife and mother Geraldine Santoro of Coventry was found dead on the floor of the Norwich Motel (now Rosemont Suites).

   

  Three days later, Santoro's lover, Clyde Dixon, 43, of Mansfield, and another man, were arrested and charged with manslaughter and "conspiracy to commit abortion."

   

  Though the case made local headlines at the time, it would take on national significance nine years later, when the police photo of Santoro's body turned up in Ms. Magazine accompanying an article applauding the recent Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. 

   

  In the years since, the image of the dead woman on the motel floor has become a symbol for abortion rights advocates, a reminder of the horrific results of the unsafe "back-alley abortions" the magazine said many women were forced to seek before Roe vs. Wade in 1973. 

   

  Waved about on placards at pro-choice rallies as a counterpoint to the gruesome images of aborted fetuses carried by abortion opponents, the haunting picture remains a powerful weapon in a heated battle that rages on to this day.

  • Yet her story represents what happens to women in situations where they have few real choices. She was on the run from an abusive husband, from whom the law apparenlty couldn't protect her. Her lover, who'd gottern her pregnant, fled when he realized how bad it was.
    
    There was nowhere for Gerri to go.
    
    If they other side had their way, there would be nowhere for women like Gerri to go.

• Her life took a tragic turn at age 18 when she impulsively married a man she met at a bus stop and -- according to the documentary -- spent the next 10 years a victim of his verbal and physical abuse.

   

  In 1963, she left her husband and moved back to the family farm with her two young daughters.

   

  She got a job at the Mansfield State Training School and fell into an affair with a sweet-talking married man named Clyde Dixon, and she became pregnant.

   

  Terrified her husband would kill her, and possibly her daughters, if he found out, she and Dixon secretly looked for ways to terminate the pregnancy.

   

  When all else failed, Dixon attempted to perform the procedure himself on a hot spring night in the Norwich Motel, using tools and instructions obtained from a co-worker at the Mansfield school. 

  • The other side seems think that women will stop having abortions if they are illegal. That somehow people in desperate situations will just accept their fates, no matter how gruesome.
    
    They may believe that doctors will still perform the practice for those women who can find them and afford them. But if so, why make it illegal? Are they willing to accept the practice so long as it is illegal and thus carries risk?
• When the operation went awry, Dixon fled, leaving Santoro behind to bleed to death.

• "The fact is that the more anti-abortion laws were enforced, the more women were forced to use unsafe back-alley providers ... and many, many women died from illegal back-alley abortions," Porter Benson said. "(And) that would have been just about the worst time because there was a real crackdown after World War II. They had hospital committees to determine whether you could have an abortion in a hospital and they would say things like you could have one if you agreed to surgical sterilization. 

   

  "All these terrorizing kinds of things. It wasn't the illegality of abortion, but the terrorizing enforcement of abortion laws that made women unsafe."

   

  While abortion foes concede the tragedy of cases like Gerri Santoro's, they say the number of deaths that actually occurred prior to 1973 has been exaggerated by the pro-choice faction.
• hough impartial figures on abortion related-deaths before or after Roe vs. Wade are hard to come by, the Center for Disease Control estimates that, between 1972 and 1990, a total of 365 women died from abortion complications, or 1.3 percent of all women who underwent the procedure.

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• Rebecca "Becky" Suzanne Bell (August 24, 1971 – September 16, 1988^[1]) was an American woman who died as a result of a back-alley abortion in 1988. She lived in Indianapolis, Indiana. ^[2]

   

  Bell became pregnant at age 17, but under a state law in Indiana, minors required parental consent to obtain an abortion. Said to be unwilling to tell her parents about her pregnancy for fear of disappointing them, or go to court to receive a judicial bypass, Bell sought an illegal abortion. Within a week of the procedure, she became seriously ill and died from a massive infection. ^[1]

• Her parents, Bill and Karen Bell, have since become outspoken opponents of parental consent laws, having lobbied in 23 states by 1991 and appearing on news programs such as 60 Minutes. ^[2] Additionally, Bell's mother submitted an essay to NARAL for use in the 1998 book Choices: Women Speak Out About Abortion. The following is an excerpt from her piece:

   

   

  Bill and I decided to speak out; we thought we could prevent other girls from dying. We appeared on 60 Minutes. The anti-choice crowd came after us. They followed us. There would be crowds of people with their fetuses in a bottle, and some would say that Becky didn't die the way we said she did. They loosened the lug nuts on our car. In Arkansas, they shot a hole in the building where we were speaking. They cared more about a fetus than about my daughter. I thought, "I'm not afraid of anybody, because my daughter is dead and you can't hurt me anymore."

   

  People ask me what I would have done if Becky had told me the truth. I would have been mad, and I would have said, "Becky, you just ruined your life. What are the neighbors going to think?" That would have been my first reaction because that's who I am. But then I would have asked her, "Beck, do you want to get married? Have a baby? Have an abortion? What do you want? What can you live with, hon?" We would have worked it out. But I never got the chance.^[3]

• 
   Susannah Lattin (January 7, 1848 – August 27, 1868) was a young woman who died post-partum at an illegal adoption clinic at 6 Amity Place in New York City, operated by Henry Dyer Grindle. Her death lead to an investigation which resulted in regulation of abortion clinics and adoptions in New York in 1868.^[1][2]
• Susannah became pregnant by George C. Houghton (1845-?); he was a clerk at Whitehouse's boot and shoe store on Fulton Street, Brooklyn. He paid $50 to Dr. J.C. Harrison to perform an abortion, but Susannah did not go through with it. She was still hoping that Houghton would marry her. Houghton then quit his job and moved to Philadelphia to escape the situation. Susannah next went to George H. Powell (1830-?), an older cousin, who worked as a butcher at the Washington Market to help her. He pretended to be her husband and arranged for her, as "Mrs. Smith", to see Dr. Henry D. Grindle, who ran an unauthorized "lying-in" hospital that allowed pregnant woman to have their children and have them illegally adopted. The doctor wanted her to pay $150, but Susannah could only pay $100 and he accepted it.

• Susannah checked into the lying-in hospital on August 5, 1868, then a few weeks later she delivered a healthy baby boy who was adopted anonymously without any record kept of the adoptive parents. Around August 18, 1868, Susannah developed a postpartum infection. The medical student who attended to her realized Susannah was in serious condition and was not likely to survive, and he persuaded her to tell him her real name so he could notify her family. The message got to her parents after she had died. She was later buried in the family plot in Powell Cemetery in Farmingdale.

   

   

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