Context

In a comment following a post by hilzoy, aimai casts the murder of Dr. Tiller in a stark light:

Lets get real here. There is one and only one doctor left in this country to whom a desperate woman and her family can resort if they require a late term abortion. One. That isn't an accident and its not a bug. Its a feature of a right wing campaign of violent harassment.

I've been pregnant, twice, and was lucky enough not to need an abortion. But I asked my ob-gyn, the woman I was trusting with my life and health and with that of my unborn child, whether if I ended up needing an abortion or, say, currettage if the fetus died in the womb, I could continue to rely on her care. She said, bluntly, "no." And that I would have to find myself some kind of "clinic" to care for me.

This is not some abstract problem for naughty women. Its a problem for *families*, for men and women, for fathers and mothers, and siblings and children. Because the "choice" that women are faced with in late term abortions is between death for themselves or death for themselves and the fetus.

In killing this compassionate man the right wing--yes, all of the hysterics and the anti choicers and the nice people who get squicked out by abortion but who don't get squicked out by the gunning down of an elderly doctor--have put adult women's lives at risk. And for what? The fetuses that are terminated in late abortions are almost uniformly fetuses that will not survive outside the womb.

The anti abortion movement turned poor Dr. Tiller and his patients into a caricature and into targets in order to intimidate other doctors and women from gaining access to lawful medical care. What they could not gain politically, or legally in a court of law, they chose to try to gain through out and out terrorism and int intimidation. There is simply no question about that.

Whether individual posters like x, or y, support that level of intimidation, or why they prefer violent and non violent intimidation over (say) rational discourse and polite political action, is not for me to say. I don't even really care. They have said they see nothing wrong with stalking and harassing medical professionals, and they have refused to condemn the murder. That says enough about them as people and there's nothing any of the other posters need say.