A Sort of Copycat Crime?

Yesterday, just a day after abortion provider George Tiller was gunned down at church, Private William Long, a 23 year old military recruiter in Little Rock, Arkansas, was shot to death. Private Quinton Ezeagwula, age 18, was wounded.

May William Long rest in peace, and Ezeagwula recuperate.

A suspect was taken into custody and charged with the shootings: Abdulhakim Muhammad, a 23 year old African American man who converted to the violent distorting strain within Islam--that does not at all speak for Muslims who know that "Islam" means "peace." Muhammad pleaded not guilty and said he killed the soldiers to retaliate for the killings of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Is it a mere coincidence that this happened right after the killing of Tiller? Or did it give the perpetrator the boost and sense of endorsement he needed to actually commit a deed he had been heading towards for a while already?

Like Scott Roeder, who has been charged with Tiller's killing, Muhammad was already been on the radar of law enforcement. So, once again, how exactly did someone with a known violent, terrorist ideology, under the scrutiny of legal authorities, get his hands on a gun and bullets?

I too am heartsick over the thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who have died so unnecessarily in these wars. I am heartsick over the young African American men from my neighborhood who join the military because they feel it's their only or their best choice...and maybe Muhammad is someone who hit the very same skids that afflict a lot of young Black men as they are confronted with the harsh societal realities that shut them out of meaningful opportunities and brand them as violent criminals...

But as A.J. Muste insisted: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." Attacking military recruiters is no answer to the problems of war and racism, and attacking abortion providers is no answer to abortion and women's dearth of choices, either.

Absolutely Horrified

(crossposted at Marysia's RH Reality Check Diary )

I just heard that George Tiller, the Kansas physician known for providing late-term abortions, was shot to death today.

As much I disagree with the work of abortion providers, such news is absolutely horrifying. Another life squandered by gun violence--and in the same of "prolife," of all things!!

Whoever committed this crime-it makes no sense to call yourself "prolife" and then gun down another human being in cold blood. Any more than it would make sense to oppose the war by opening fire on a recruiting center or military base.

My condolences to all who knew Dr. Tiller, and I will continue to pray for the safety of all clinic workers, to work for gun control, to speak up when I hear antiabortionists demonizing and dehumanizing their "enemies," who belong to the same humankind no matter what deep disagrements exist.

Alternatives to the Military

We have added some resources on alternatives to the military (http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/education.html#altmil if the link doesn't work) to our Education pages. These are mostly for people in the US, during this time of most unjust war, but some apply worldwide. (Note: If the above hyperlink does not work, please paste the URL into your browser: http://www.nonviolentchoice.info/education.html#altmil )

These resources can help if:
--you are wondering how to pay for your education or have a good career and take care of yourself and/or your family without enlisting in the military.
--you have ethical reasons for wanting to no longer keep military commitments you have made (for example, in the US military, you are concerned about your safety as a gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered person, or you are questioning the wisdom of the Iraq War).
--you have decided you are a conscientious objector and wonder what your next step is.
--you want to join in the global movement to defend the human right of refusal to kill in wartime.
--you are interested in a career as a peacemaker or nonviolence advocate.

Abortion & Women's Mental Health

The PBS series "NOW" just broadcast a segment on abortion and women's mental health. It left me, personally, feeling saddened and frustrated by the injurious, counterproductive ways that both the prolife and prochoice movements treat this issue. (Precisely why the Nonviolent Choice Directory doesn't yet list any postabortion healing resources...still looking for and weighing the possibilities. Any ideas, anyone? Please share.)

• On the prochoice side: The tendency to disbelieve, even dismiss or silence or disparage, women who themselves perceive and describe their abortions as devastating, violent losses...as if such women were by definition "babies," or pawns of the patriarchy, or hypocrites, or biters of the prochoice feminist hands that supposedly fed them their greatest & most foundational of rights (scapegoating, prochoice variant).
• On the prolife side: The tendency to link post-abortion recovery programs to the attainment of specific, narrow religious or political outcomes that may not serve the healing processes of many women who seek healing--and (scapegoating, prolife variant) to cast abortion as an individual women's "personal sin," as if the abject failure of the larger society to support her (and her fetus, once conceived) with nonlethal options could not possibly have anything to do with the fact of the abortion.

Just as not all combatants react the same way to war, not all women who have abortions undergo a debilitating psychological crisis afterwards. On the other hand, again just like combat, abortion is not exactly fun for anybody. And I suspect that, just as with the mental health effects of war, the repercussions of abortion often go unrecognized and unhealed because the practice and scientific research on it are so embroiled in all sorts of political interests that fear, in their own different ways, for their own different reasons, the whole of the truth about it.

For so many women, of all kinds, to their own understanding, abortion is hell. Like war. And why shouldn't we listen to and and take them at their word--just like we should listen to and take deeply suffering combatants--the very people our collective failures and violations sent into battle-- at their word?

This doesn't in and of itself settle, of course, the ethics and law of abortion. But it counts. It counts a lot. Every story counts--including the ones that other people want least to hear, the ones that don't fit the established, rigid ideological parameters. Indeed, I'd venture: those are precisely the stories that have the most power to transform political and other human systems for the better.

From my vantage point, the question is not so much, "Whose side wins this one?"

Rather:

• What can we all do to ensure relief for the root causes of abortion, so that women (and their children) stop getting punished for our own failures of help and care?
• What can we all do to best promote the healing of those for whom prevention is already too late?

What's Messed Up About the Abortion Debate: A Little Case Study

From the annals of why the abortion debate seldom moves towards practical resolution...And I hope I have the good grace to avoid ad hominem attacks and dissing anybody's spirituality myself while I'm at it... I'm trying, please forgive me if I don't quite pull it off...

Theologically and politically conservative US Catholic Matt Abbott complains "Pro-abortion nun still active." He is referring to Beth Rindler, and faulting her for the 2004 National Catholic Reporter letter she wrote with two other leftist-feminist Catholic nuns, Donna Quinn and Jeannine Gramick, entitled "Pro-choice isn't pro-abortion."

This letter asks why Catholic Church leaders don't listen to women more about the reasons why they might seek abortions, and poses a question further: "If war can be understood as acceptable in some circumstances, why cannot abortion be at least similarly understood?"

Abbott's assessment of this ethical analysis? A dismissive "Good grief." The end.

Not!

Good grief indeed...But not for the reasons he uttered these same words...Where to begin?

How about with Abbott's basic failure--refusal?-- to respect that Rindler and the other nuns define themselves as prochoice rather than proabortion? No one likes to be told who they are or what they are really about, as if they did not have the head, heart, or conscience, let alone jurisdiction, to determine that for themselves.

For example...prolifers generally don't cotton to having the term "antichoicers" or "woman-haters" imposed on them...And no fair protesting, "But we're the ones who are RIGHT! THEY monstrously decidedly aren't, so THEY don't get to define THEMselves like we do!" An outcry, by the way, I've also heard from prochoicers re: prolifers.

(If there's any route around the abovementioned tautologies, I'd love to see the map!)

Of course Abbott has the right to disagree with the nuns' position on abortion. It would even be valid for him to ask (albeit with utmost respect and commitment to listening deeply) whether their position on abortion is the one that best serves their aspiration to secure women's freedoms. He could inquire into the parallel they draw between war and abortion and whether and what sense(s) it might be warranted.

But that's not what he does with the disagreement. No, he immediately casts doubt on the nuns' good intentions, their good faith, so to speak--and that in the absence of any evidence that they are, for instance, all about forcing other women to have abortions because abortions are such great things to have!

His "evidence" against Rindler and her cohorts appears to be (or so I gather from a reading of his other writings re: other instances of women who question or challenge certain points of Catholic officialdom on sexuality and reproduction) that they are women-out-of-order, and therefore suspect, even "bad," by definition.

Now, I definitely don't want to get involved here with the intra-Catholic question of "Who's a real, faithful Catholic?"! For one, a big one, it's the wrong frame for the issue of abortion. Abortion is not just a turf war between two camps within this one religion...a big, ancient, and influential religion, yes, but, by the way, it's not the only one on the planet. And not every person belongs to a religion, for that matter.

Abortion is a universal human rights issue for people of all faiths and none. It is a matter where every day the lives and well-being of real, live flesh-and-blood human beings, female as well as male, born as well as unborn, are under threat.

The sooner it gets massively recast as such, the sooner (dare I hope?) the burning practical issues of our shared human responsibility to care for women and children, born and unborn, in need can be effectively engaged.

However...Abbott's thing re: women-out-of-order is one that immediately arouses my suspicions...because it is the same old same old argument that has been levelled for how many centuries of patriarchy, in contexts Catholic and other-than-Catholic alike, against any woman who dares challenge the treatment she and other women receive at the hands of men. The same old same old way of (however consciously or unconsciously) deflecting the justice that may actually (!) inhere in those very voices of protest.

One of feminism's founding mothers, Mary Wollstonecraft, was excoriated as "a hyena in petticoats" bent on "unsexing" herself and other women. The "evidence"? Why, of course--analogus to being an "uppity" nun, she had intercourse and became a mother without being a legal wife. That "evidence" prevented many otherwise potentially sympathetic souls from recognizing and respecting her deep passion for justice, her eloquent and deeply intelligent sense of what it was and wasn't, and how to bring the world closer to it.

Abbott gives no hint here that he has seriously considered whether the nuns may actually be asking fair questions, out of real insight and passion for justice. But their questions are eminently fair....

People in positions of authority have a responsibility to listen to and respond to the very human beings their actions most affect. If male Catholic leaders--or any other men--are going to say to women, "Abortion is wrong, don't have an abortion"--then they are...OBLIGATED (1) to find out why women consider it and resort to it in the first place and (2) to personally devote themselves to alleviating the root causes of abortion.

And certainly it is right on the mark to ask, as these three nuns do, why male Catholic leaders, or anyone else, would empathize with (generally, historically) men's dilemmas over war but not with women's dilemmas over abortion. Can anyone say, Double Standard?

The selfsame Double Standard that directly causes many an abortion! I am talking about the setup whereby men don't have to take any responsibility for sex, family planning, pregnancy care, or parenting--but woe be unto the woman who conceives and bears a child in "unauthorized" circumstances--she'll just have to go it all by herself and suffer in every possible way!

I do have to admit, I am troubled by the parallel the nuns draw between war and abortion. It's apt in that both are deeply institutionalized forms of violence and lifetaking with all manner of complex and disturbing repercussions. And in that sense, I think it's valid to encompass both issues under a nonsectarian/interfaith/secular "consistent life ethic."

However, if the comparison is valid, the following needs to be made clear in it: Decisions over if, whether, and when when war is justifiable tend to be made by men in positions of power...and women facing problematic pregnancies tend to be in situations of deep disempowerment. Women facing such pregnancies are often more akin to soldiers who have been drafted and face heavy, heavy penalties if they refuse to commit violence, or who joined the army because a racist, poverty-making culture left them no other way to get an education and make a living.

Also, I am not sure whether the nuns are arguing this: "If war is sometimes OK, then abortion must be sometimes OK, too." If they are...that's unfortunate. Because (especially in this fifth year of the atrocious war in Iraq, in this time of social-program slashing that rips up women's and children's already tenuous safety nets) we need less violence. And more relief of the causes of violence.

More moving of both men and women towards the care for life that has been traditionally considered the province of the female, but really belongs to us all.

'Nuff said. For now. My head spins, my hands hurt.