Popular response to the stories of John Brown and Joseph Stack illustrate how easy it is to focus so narrowly on immorality of killing that the context in which the killer acted is ignored. When a person dies, the killer is often vilified as a soulless demon; entire news shows are devoted to this theme. In abortion-related killings, this stigma is particularly dangerous because it conceals the otherwise innocuous factors that contributed to the crime.

In 2009, Scott Roeder murdered abortion doctor George Tiller, believing that the killing might save some of the approximately 820,000 “preborn children” (as Roeder referred to them) that are aborted every year. It was not the devil that provoked Roeder to kill, though this is the conclusion that other pro-life activists, discomfited by the violence, would endorse. Rather, Roeder was simply bringing pro-life rhetoric to its logical conclusion. Pro-life activists sentimentalize the unborn until, according to their mythology, a torpid, globular fetus is the equivalent of a plump, beatific infant. The abortion procedure is similarly embellished: this miracle creature is ripped from the womb by sadistic doctors that torture it to death as it gasps for air. To pro-lifers, abortion is war, holocaust, and genocide committed on defenseless infants. Surely, from this point of view, a person that attempts to stop such a widespread murder of innocents should be hailed as a hero. Pro-lifers have constructed a rhetorical platform based on the idea that abortion is murder. From there, righteous homicide is only a step away. Because Tiller performed late-term abortions using procedures that , his practice fit neatly into the pro-life narrative.

Like Stack, Roeder became affiliated with a group whose message misled him (perhaps coincidentally, Roeder also attempted to avoid paying his taxes on Constitutional grounds). Demonizing Roeder for Tiller’s death absolves more moderate pro-life activists of responsibility. Though they argue that abortion is murder and that fetuses are children, most pro-lifers do not know how to translate these supposed truths into criminal law. A woman that conspired with a doctor to murder her five-year-old would be universally condemned, but most pro-lifers are unsure of how to punish a woman that elects to have an abortion. This is because pro-lifers’ conception of abortion’s immorality cannot keep pace with the direness of their rhetoric. The average pro-life stance rests on a sentimental conception of fetuses, distrust of female sexual autonomy, and perhaps a little religious fervor. This translates into a general feeling that abortion is wrong, but it does not carry most pro-lifers to the conclusion that women who seek abortions should receive a jail sentence, let alone that their doctors should be executed. However, Roeder took the message at face value and carried out the justice that he believed the law could not. Instead of stigmatizing Roeder as a criminal anomaly and allowing moderate pro-lifers to distance themselves from his actions, we should recognize how similar his beliefs are to the mainstream movement. If pro-lifers cannot wholly endorse Roeder’s actions, they need to abandon the dramatic rhetoric that declares that abortion is murder. Absent this rationale, pro-lifers will be forced to examine what truly motives their beliefs.

Recently, a seventeen-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her because she wanted to miscarry. Instead of inquiring into the circumstances that made her feel that soliciting a beating from a stranger was her best option, many were outraged that there was no law under which she could be convicted. That was remedied when the governor of Utah signed a bill that allows pregnant women who arrange illegal abortions to be charged with homicide.

This argument would be more effective if it acknowledged that Dr Tiller's practice was especially controversial because he performed legal late-term abortions, including ones using surgical techniques that are readily sensationalized into depictions of something that most human beings recognize as homicide.

Not, as you know, a particularly safe or effective method of securing abortion. Perhaps you mean to say in the only way her desperation suggested to her.

If the legislature was truly concerned with fetal suffering, it would repeal the parental consent law so that teenagers could receive safe, timely abortions.

That doesn't follow, any more than it would follow to say that everyone concerned with end-of-life suffering should therefore want to repeal laws against euthanasia. This assertion is an attempt to go around all the obvious objections, and it obviously doesn't work.

However, instead of recognizing their own culpability, the legislature threw up their hands and blamed it on the devil, assuming that the woman was motivated by sadism when a principled inquiry would most likely indicate a person desperate to overcome state-sanctioned barriers to abortion.

That's not in the record, and it isn't likely to be true. The legislature of a Mormon-majority province is likely to regard all killing of unborn children as a culpable act, which should be forcefully deterred. That may indeed be a position that takes strong support from shared religious belief. But unless it is a proposition so general as to be universally applicable, such that the legislature is also blaming the devil when it criminalizes especially reckless driving, or negligent homicide—in which case it has nearly no explanatory value—the statement here, which supposedly rests on an assertion about what the legislature thought a particular individual's motives were as a basis for passing a general prospective statute, is hard if not impossible to defend.

In the end, despite the disclaimers, the essay is solidly in the vein of "tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner." Whether it is rhetorically wise to discuss if abortion is murder in an essay that concludes with a digression on your "love" for shoes I leave to your better editorial judgment. In a more general sense, I think it is important to be careful not to trivialize. The claim at the bottom of this, as of most similar arguments, is that we understand others' human situations too shallowly, and impose judgment hastily and callously as a result. (This is not quite the same as the Christian semi-belief that those who have sinned should not be quick to cast stones at other sinners.) Such an argument is fatally undercut by any sign of shallowness or levity of judgment in its own rhetoric.

Investigating the Devils We Know

-- By PaulinaSalmas - 27 Feb 2010

As a pacifist with a bleeding heart, I am disturbed by the deaths that were caused by John Brown and Joseph Stack. However, I agree that people should be judged by more than the body count that they leave behind.

Amiri Baraka's poem "Dope" describes the speaker’s specious attempts to determine the cause of human pain. Eliminating capitalism, the police, “rich folks,” and Jimmy Carter as potential suspects, he concludes that it “must be the devil.” “[T]he devil killed malcolm / and dr king too, even killed both kennedies, / and pablo neruda and overthrew / allende’s govt.” The poem dramatizes the tendency that some have, when investigating questions of death and poverty, to avoid measured explanations that might lead to uncomfortable revelations about powerful people and celebrated ideologies. On the other hand, it is convenient to blame the devil because he is so single-mindedly evil. Because he is so indefensible and his guilt so plausible, we are less likely to scrutinize the case against him. As a result, the real causes of the problem are obscured and the status quo is preserved.

It is tempting to note that Brown and Stack caused the deaths of innocents, throw up our hands and blame it on the devil. But, as Henry David Thoreau urges, we should not engage in such idolatry.

In 1886, an unknown person detonated a bomb during an anarchist rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. One police officer was killed in the explosion, and dozens of attendees were wounded in the ensuing “riot,” a minutes-long exchange of gunfire. Ultimately, an openly prejudiced jury convicted eight anarchists of murder, even though the prosecution was unable to prove that any of the defendants were responsible for the bombing. Rather, their case was buoyed by the distrust that the public felt for anarchists, and five of the defendants were executed.

Popular contemporary novelist William Dean Howells was so appalled by this outcome that he campaigned for clemency, though his efforts were unsuccessful. The day after the execution,he wrote a bitter letter to the New York Tribune arguing that, suffering from a “spasm[…] of paroxysmal righteousness,” Illinois executed the Haymarket anarchists “for their opinions’ sake.” Indeed, the appellate court opinion affirming their death sentences quoted at length from anarchist newspapers, which urged workers to prepare for “a bloody revolution” and advised their readership on how to arm themselves inexpensively. “Daggers and revolvers are easily to be gotten. Hand grenades are cheaply to be produced[…]possibilities are also given to buy arms on installments.” An honest investigation into the riot and the backlash against anarchists would have unearthed, among other things, class tensions, xenophobia, and possible police brutality. Instead, the court, the public, and the media read violent selections of the anarchists’ newspapers and collectively concluded that it must be the devil.

Unlike John Brown, the Haymarket anarchists never actually killed anyone; unlike Thoreau, Howells would have been satisfied if the men that he pled for were recognized as innocents rather than heroes. However, both Brown and the Haymarket anarchists were vilified as devils when a less reactionary conception of them would have ensured them fair trials and, possibly, sparked a more informed debate on the social issues that moved them.

There is very little risk of deifying monsters in examining the motivations of accused killers and the contexts in which they act. In 2009, Scott Roeder murdered George Tiller, an abortion doctor. Thoreau estimated that, if successful, Brown would have saved 4 million slaves; Roeder, in taking a life, was attempting to save some of the approximately 820,000 “preborn children” (as he called them) that are aborted every year. However, if allowing abortion kills the preborn, criminalizing it kills the grown women who would die in illegal abortions. Furthermore, abortion is unpopular in the United States. Groups from legislators to pharmacists attempt to chip away at abortion rights, and the public in general dislikes the sexual autonomy that access to abortion facilitates in women. Roeder’s killing, unlike Brown’s, supported the status quo, even if his violent means made his ideological allies uncomfortable. Though Roeder believed that his violence was justified, he was hardly a revolutionary and certainly does not deserve, as Thoreau believed Brown did, a “statute…in the Massachusetts State-House yard.”

However, it was not the devil that provoked Roeder to kill. Like Stark, he became affiliated with a group whose message misled him (perhaps coincidentally, Roeder also attempted to avoid paying his taxes on Constitutional grounds). It is a pro-life cliché that abortion is murder, and Roeder clearly tried to avenge its perceived victims. Portraying Roeder as a monstrous murderer absolves more moderate pro-lifers of responsibility. While vocal pro-lifers should not be hanged for their opinions as the Haymarket anarchists were, public awareness of the consequences of their incendiary behavior would be a valuable addition to the abortion debate.

In general, to love is to compartmentalize. I don’t disown my friends even though they have obnoxious habits; I don’t burn books by brilliant sixteenth century poets even though they had bigoted opinions; I still admire Roman Polanski the auteur even though he himself is an unrepentant child rapist. If we cannot forgive the sins of others at least sometimes, we will end up as ascetics if we are successful, or hypocrites if we lapse.

(The citation for Spies v. People, quoted above, is 122 Ill. 1)

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