'they keep pounding their fists on reality hoping it will break...'

George Tiller was assassinated at 10am this morning in Wichita, Kansas, while ushering at the Sunday morning church service at the Reformation Lutheran Church.

Dr. Tiller's clinic, Women's Health Care Services, also of Wichita, Kansas, is, or was, one of the last remaining havens for women, sometimes very desperate women, seeking late-term abortions.

The clinic survived a bombing in 1986.

Dr. Tiller survived an assassination attempt in 1993.

Earlier this spring he was tried (and acquitted on all counts) for allegedly performing illegal late-term abortions in 2003.

Earlier this month the clinic was vandalized (again), resulting in damages worth thousands of dollars.

His clinic, his home, and his church have been the sites of ongoing protests, intimidation, and violence for over three decades now, including the 1991 so-called Summer of Mercy protests, and culminating in his (inevitable?) murder this morning.

I received in my inbox this afternoon the requisite outraged mass mailings from Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

I was a lucky woman, back in the spring of 2002, when I found myself knocked up and distraught and scared. I was lucky to be living in New York City and not most of Kansas or Mississippi or Ohio or any of the other vast stretches of this country where it can be so very difficult for women to obtain an abortion. I was lucky to have a partner who joined me on a Saturday morning at 7am for that dreadful cross-town walk to the Margaret Sanger Center, a partner who chattered inanely to keep me from noticing the protesters clustered on the corner outside, who sat in the waiting room for almost eight hours, who stood guard as I threw up into a trash can on a subway station platform at Times Square (made ill from the remnants of anesthesia), who called Arielle (on whose shoulder I'd been crying the day before, and whom he barely knew) to let her know we were home safe and sound.

I was just six or seven weeks pregnant and living in New York City and lucky, as far as these things go, and even then I knew it. But I was 25 years old, college educated, financially independent and not entirely stupid, yet still found myself in this predicament. I cannot imagine the trauma of needing a late-term abortion, whether due to medical reasons or due to being too poor to scrounge up the $400 needed to get an abortion right away or due to being a teenaged girl in denial about being pregnant in the first place or due to living in one of the 87% of counties in this country that have no abortion providers whatsoever.

NARAL and Planned Parenthood are sending out letters of outrage, and apparently Obama himself is 'shocked and saddened,' and yet there are probably people rejoicing tonight -- the Terrys and the Dobsons and the Limbaughs and the O'Reillys and the men and the women with the rocks and the guns and the little homemade bombs and the bloody plastic fetuses and the rhetoric of violence that is so inherent to the most radical speech of the pro-life movement.

I find myself not infrequently thinking about abortion, both personally and politically (it's always those damned letters), and today it's difficult, even from half way across the country, to not feel a little bit broken in the face Dr. Tiller's death, this horrific, violent ending to a constantly embattled life.

My gratitude goes out to him, and to those brave enough to continue the work to which he dedicated, and for which he sacrificed, his life. And my heart goes out to his family, his friends, his community, to the women he helped, and to the women who need him now, and to the generations who will always need him and others like him.

I will continue to donate to Planned Parenthood the $10/month that I have been giving them since the fall of 2002, and I will continue giving to NARAL what I can, when I can, though I would give them both thousands, millions, if I could.


"the time i dropped your almost body down
down to meet the waters under the city
and run one with the sewage to the sea
what did i know about waters rushing back
what did i know about drowning
or being drowned

you would have been born in winter
in the year of the disconnected gas
and no car
we would have made the thin walk
over the genesee hill into the canada winds
to let you slip into a stranger's hands
if you were here i could tell you
these and some other things

and if i am ever less than a mountain
for your definite brothers and sisters
let the rivers wash over my head
let the sea take me for a spiller of seas
let black men call me stranger always
for your never named sake"
(Lucille Clifton, the lost baby poem)


"i passed their handheld signs
i went through their picket lines
they gathered when they saw me coming
they shouted when they saw me cross
i said why don't you go home
just leave me alone
i'm just another woman lost...

under the fierce flourescent
she offered her hand for me to hold
she offered stability and calm
and i was crushing her palm
through the pinch pull wincing
my smile unconvincing
on that sterile battlefield that sees
only casualties
never heroes
my heart hit absolute zero
lucille, your voice still sounds in me
mine was a relatively easy tragedy
the profile of our country
looks a little less hard-nosed

but that picket line persisted
and that clinic's since been closed
they keep pounding their fists on reality
hoping it will break
but i don't think there's a one of us
leads a life free of mistakes..."
(Ani Difranco, Lost Woman Song)