Usually called the doctor. Or the caretaker.

A Utah bill passed by the state House and Senates has been sent to the governor's office. This bill amends several state laws in order to make it possible to prosecute a woman for criminal homicide if she loses a pregnancy due to what is deemed "criminally reckless behaviour". She is not liable for criminal homicide if the miscarriage was caused by simply negligent behaviour, although apparently an early version of the bill read that way. She is also not liable for criminal homicide if the miscarriage results from her failure to follow medical advice.

Unfortunately, this doesn't protect women who accidentally fall and lose a pregnancy, speed while pregnant and are hit by another car and lose a pregnancy, fail to wear their seat belts and get into a car wreck which causes a miscarriage, etc.

Penalties include prison sentences, including the possibility of life in prison. For having a miscarriage.

RHRealityCheck.org's coverage here, and the text of the bill can be viewed online here.

Link thanks (I think) to hammercock.

So last night I went to a local rally held by the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. They read a prepared statement by a local politician condemning anti-abortion violence, and there were several speeches by people in the abortion provider community and the local activist community praising Dr Tiller and the work he did. Doctors in BC often referred patients to Dr Tiller, I found. Canada doesn't allow third trimester abortions for any reason, so patients would have to go to the States.

The crowd was very positive and very polite, there wasn't a protest and in fact only one person showed up to heckle, which they did rather incoherently. I felt really good about the rally, and about my presence there. Dr Tiller's murder hit me hard, because it happened in Kansas, and I felt better for being able to come together with like-minded people, mourn his death, and celebrate his life and his life's work, even though I'm so far away. Dr Tiller was really influential in the abortion-provider community, even in Canada. Several of the people who spoke at the rally knew him personally and counted him a good friend, and I felt somehow comforted by that.

I was sort of amused by how, unconsciously, I really expected there to be Phelpies there and was surprised when there weren't any. But so, yes, it was fairly well-attended considering everything (fifty people, maybe), it was nice (though I have to say that I am not a fan of the standard activist singalong, but what can you do), and I think that it was not inappropriate in any way to Dr Tiller's life, work, or memory.

I'm glad I went.

Being a Kansan expat means that you sometimes have to try to explain things that other Kansans have done. Mostly these are just stupid things (cf., e.g., the teaching of "creation science" in primary and secondary school science classes). Sometimes these are terrible things.

I'd imagine that, as the news trickles onto the Canadian media, I'm going to get a few questions from friends: "You're from Kansas, hey? So what about that doctor?"

And what do I say to those people? The simple answer never suffices: "There are evil people in the world. Some of them are in Kansas, and because Kansas is what it is, this is sometimes the form their evil takes: in the name of life, they terrorise the living. And sometimes they kill people, to show that killing people is wrong."

Maybe my answer is too simplistic, but it's the one I've got. Dr Tiller was a man who, in teeth of daily opposition of a kind that most of us will never experience even once in our lives, went to work every day and helped people. I have a friend whose life he saved when an allergic reaction to a bee sting later nearly turned to meningitis. Some of the people he helped, he helped by giving them access to a medical procedure that also happens to be controversial. That doesn't mean these women weren't helped. The ones who later regret their decision and wish that their free choice had been prevented legislatively or by someone not themselves, that they had been presented with, not a choice, but some inexorable fate, well... They think now that they'd be better off. Some of them might be. Many of them wouldn't. Generally speaking when a woman makes the choice to terminate a pregnancy she's not doing it lightly. Doctors like Dr Tiller know that. They know that some of the people they help will hate them for it. They know that some of the people they help will be back protesting the next week, because "the only moral abortion is my abortion". And these doctors keep helping people, because it's what they do.

Until, that is, some random shithead from Merriam, Kansas--a township where I do my Kansas grocery shopping, go to the movies, go out to dinner--guns them down in the lobby of the Lutheran church they've been a member of for dog's years, and then drives back to Kansas City doubtless pleased with a job well done: the murder of an actual living breathing adult human, who heals people for a living. Dr Tiller took over his father's practice when a plane crash killed his father, mother, and sister, along with the local university football team. I wonder who will take over his practice, and continue providing medical care to the people--particularly the women--of Wichita.

It's an intentional war of attrition, you know: selective violence on meaningful places and key persons in order to, first, deny people access to the places and convince individuals to leave the affected class of persons, and second, to frighten the population and change legal behaviours. We have a word for that. We call it terrorism. I devoutly hope that Dr Tiller's murderer is punished appropriately for the magnitude of his crime.