I was shocked and dismayed when learning Kansas abortionist George Tiller had been murdered by a vigilante.
Tiller was a ghastly late-term abortionist, but he should not have been murdered, just as he should not have murdered 60,000 children throughout his years of practice. I pray for Tiller's soul. I pray also for Tiller's wife, four children and 10 grandchildren, not only for their tragic loss but also for the tragic legacy Tiller left behind.
It is falsely claimed Tiller was one of only three late-term abortionists in the U.S., for instance, in the New York Times:
Some described Dr. Tiller as one of about only three doctors in the country who had, under certain circumstances, provided abortions to women in their third trimester of pregnancy, and said his death would mean that women, particularly in the central United States, would have few if any options in such cases.
Apparently, it was Tiller himself who started it. According to The Guardian:
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Tiller testified … that he owns one of only three clinics in the U.S. that perform late-term abortions, which are performed on foetuses that could survive outside the mother's womb.
Before I get to my point, I want to make another.
The third trimester begins at 28 weeks of pregnancy, when healthy babies have more than a 90 percent chance of surviving.
Open your eyes to the ugliness inside the abortion industry with "Lime 5: Exploited by Choice"
There is no health reason for a mother to abort in the third trimester. Her baby can be delivered alive as easy as or easier than aborted dead.
In an event I can't imagine, that a mother would die in her third trimester were her baby not aborted, it has always been legal in every hospital in every state to do so to save a mother's life, and it always will be.
But now to my point, the insinuation that Tiller's death means late-term abortions are endangered, as if that would be bad.
Actually, the delusion grows grander. According to the Los Angeles Times:
But Warren Hern, a Colorado physician and close friend of Tiller … said he was now "the only doctor in the world" who performed very late-term abortions. …
Well, no. The fact is second and third trimester abortions are committed rampantly in hospitals and abortion clinics across the country on a daily basis.
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life pointed on his blog yesterday to a June 1 Los Angeles Times article on late-term abortions that included Centers for Disease Control 2005 statistics:
Nationally, only 1.3 percent of all reported legal abortions occurred at 21 weeks or more gestation. …
Included is a state-by-state look at those abortions. Of legal abortions occurring at 21 weeks or more gestation, most appear to be in New York. That state reported 2,956, followed by Georgia with 1,094 and New Jersey at 950. California doesn't tell.
The CDC reported 8,482 babies 21 weeks or older were aborted in 2005, and the CDC's numbers are low, since only 40 states reported. The Guttmacher Institute (research arm of Planned Parenthood) reported approximately 13,000 babies 21 weeks or older were aborted that year.
Nevertheless, of the 40 states reporting to the CDC, 32 reported abortions of babies 21 weeks or older. So if it were true only three doctors nationwide committed them, they did a lot of flying. Kansas, where Tiller practiced, accounted for "only" 459.
When it became public that Christ Hospital, where I worked, committed late-term abortions (as late as 28 weeks by my observations), these others in the Chicago area also confessed to same: Good Samaritan, Lutheran General, Illinois Masonic, Loyola, Northwestern, and Rush-Presbyterian St. Lukes. That's just Chicago, and that's just those who fessed up.
Not much later the Providence Health System, which owns a chain of 26 hospitals in Alaska, California, Montana, Oregon and Washington, admitted to committing late-term abortions.
Remember the 2005 story of the baby aborted alive in a toilet at the EPOC abortion mill in Orlando, Fla.? Late-term abortion.
Remember the 2006 story of the aborted baby thrown on top of the A Gyn Diagnostics abortion mill in Hialeah, Fla.? Late-term abortion.
Have you heard the flak about the University of Wisconsin Madison Hospital recently deciding to commit late-term abortions?
Even a moderator on my own blog discovered that the hospital where his baby was just delivered, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., commits late-term abortions.
The reality is late-term abortions are committed pretty much in every pocket of the country, contrary to claims by the other side.
I'm not sure why abortion proponents want to pursue this point, since most Americans find late-term abortions disgusting.
But if they so wish, I'm happy to.