“His murder did not stop us”: Meet the women keeping George Tiller’s legacy alive in Wichita
Five years after Tiller's assassination, his former clinic honors his memory by providing fearless care for Kansans
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"I interviewed Oklahoma state Rep. Doug Cox a couple months ago, he was saying that — as a medical provider — he has patients who have said, “I personally don’t support abortion, but here I am anyway.” Or “I don’t believe in abortion, but here my daughter is, and this is the situation she finds herself in, and I want to make a compassionate decision.” Do you see possibility there?"
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http://www.salon.com/2014/05/30/his_murder_did_not_stop_us_meet_the_women_keeping_george_tillers_legacy_alive_in_wichita/
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That's what this boils down to: lack of access to birth control, lack of serious developments in the field of effective birth control, using legislative tricks to make abortion (at any stage of development) impossible and humiliating to obtain, right-wing state legislatures that can find money for "abstinence only 'eductation' ", but not for sex education, making certain forms of birth control unavailable because an unimplanted egg fertilized by a rapist or a male family member has more human rights than the 12 - 50 year old female it may or may not implant in.
This has nothing to do with concern for human life, because anyone who calls themselves "pro-life" while making life so miserable for working families, the elderly, children, veterans (yeah the GOP is up in arms about Shinseki and the problems at the VA - too bad they don't seem to give a shit that most of those problems have arisen from cutting funding for *everything* that helps veterans and those who are still in service. Currently, our military's only function is to act as human shielding for contractors, funneling still more billions "Koch-ward", which would be the only reason politicians and pundits have a "meltdown" over mention of removing troops from any place where their lives are being risked soley to protect American Oil Interests (Bloody Bill Kritol Loses His Mind Over Afghan Troop Withdrawal
Ooops! god side-tracked on fodder for many other blog entries.... Gee, that never happens (ha!)
But this is my blog and I can get side-tracked if I want to.
The original point, however, is that Jesus and Dr Tiller have a lot in common. They were both martyred because they threatened the mythologies and power structures that benefitted only the wealthy and powerful in the societies in which they lived. They saw unfairness and suffering and risked their lives to do something about it. They challenged the idea that there was no greater sin than having sex and that women are the greatest evil because they are the cause of sex (and he said nothing about being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgener - or abortion, for that matter).
Our would be tyrants, paving their way to monarchy with money stolen from the labor of the masses they hate so much, love rigid hiarachies. The symbol of the Elizabethan empire was the beehive - orderly, structured, everyone accepting their place, no one asspiring to rise higher than their "divinely appointed place, by birth", with, ironically enough, a supposedly "virgin Queen" overseeing the hive.
Our society still accepts the notion that women are "fallow fields" with no say over what is "planted" in them - the idea of a field rising up to a farmer and saying "NO!" is, of course, laughable. At the same time, any woman who is raped must have wanted it and is lying when she says she didn't.
Unless it is us. Or someone we care about.
We pass laws requiring parents to know when a teenager seeks an abortion - supposedly because parents have a right to know what their children are doing. Even if it was a relative who got her pregnant and who will probably force her to abort to cover up his incest.
We pass laws requiring that doctors who perform abortions have hospital privileges, require 24 - 48 hour waiting periods and require women be fed a load of bullshit about abortion before the procedure. We force women who are already grieving that the baby they wanted might kill them (leaving the children they already have motherless, sending them into a system for which funds are continually being cut or denied for those little "moochers") or the fetus is so malformed that life after birth can only be brief and excruciating.
Because none of these people are "pro-life" - especially not the women who support this kind of "self-hatred". They care for the lives of neither the children nor the women. They do care about the suffering these forced "choices" will cause because they see women's suffering as God's will. They believe that "Eve" was "evil" because she got Adam "in trouble" and their god is so hateful and cruel and, above all, male, that he sentenced all daughters of Eve to get pregnant and suffer in childbirth and submit to the will of any and all men.
I don't buy that mythology any more than I buy the idea of Zeus turning into a swan in order to rape a woman who said, "No" to him as a god.
It's time we reached a point where we accepted that women are human beings with the same power men have as to what will or will not be put in their bodies or allowed to grow there.
I also would like to see Bill "Have I Got A Loofah For You!" O'Reilly, who repeatedly referred to Dr. Tiller as a "murderer" and "baby killer", take the blame he deserves for Dr. Tiller's martyrdom, dragged off his show, publicly tarred and feathered and never heard from again. That won't ever happen but visualizing it makes me happy.
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