The Last Abortion Doctor

As I have stated here several times, I am as uncomfortably pro-choice as I can be. That means, as far as I can tell, that I am like one hell of a lot of pro-choice people. Just found this essay on The Last Abortion Doctor at Esquire and could not stop reading. It isn't easy. But this is the last guy in the US who performs these late abortions, and this interview came right after George Tiller was gunned down in Wichita.

I had a conversation with an old friend on facebook. She started her attack on Obama with "not sure how a Christian can want to kill babies," and continued from there. She didn't mind torture as she knew people who had lost military members and they were "tortured" by their loss. She didn't mind wiretapping without warrants because she "wasn't doing anything wrong and just wanted to be kept safe."

I was struck by all of those uninformed statements. But her flip take on those who are pro-choice is in my head this morning. Reading this essay, with all of those women who struggle and are changed for the rest of their life by this decision, but in many cases are there because they have no other choice (read about the couple from Canada who arrived in Wichita only to find their doctor murdered in his church).

My old friend scares me. Unfortunately, she is not alone in her take on any of this. But I think she has not thought through many, if any, of these positions. Her Christianity is now more GOP than follower of Christ, or that is certainly how it feels. Her litany of problems with Obama certainly sounds like those coming from the RNC and Fox News. They are sound-bites rather than reflections of a principled position. She has very little concern for those uninsured, no concern for those innocents caught up in our anti-terror net, and not one clear thought on the constitutional protections she enjoys. Yet, I bet money she would tell me that America is a Christian nation.

We can do better than this. We can do better than to simplify complex issues into "killing babies." I doubt we will. But we can do better.