Abortion-War Casualty

My mother left me a voice mail last Sunday afternoon. Before she even spoke, I could hear that she was crying. "Another doctor has been killed," she said, then hung up. Suddenly I felt the need to sew up a big hole in my comforter. Failing, I cried too. The evening news filled in the particulars: Dr. George Tiller, a physician who performed abortions in Wichita, Kans., was shot and killed while his wife sang in the choir and he handed out programs at his church.

For my family, the scenes on TV were like déjà vu. In October 1998, minutes after returning home from his synagogue, my uncle Bart Slepian—an ob-gyn who performed abortions in upstate New York and who had raised me after my own father died when I was 4—was shot in his kitchen. He was talking to his wife and his young sons when a bullet shattered a window, pierced Bart's spine, lung and aorta, then ricocheted into the den where it landed, still shiny, in the fireplace.

People try to be nice. I don't how Dr. Tiller's family is dealing with the onslaught of teddy bears, origami birds and prayers for his soul, but in my grief I was terribly critical of many efforts to comfort. The worst thing you could say to me: "Bart died for his cause." Bart was a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist who delivered babies, conducted annual gynecological exams, dispensed birth control to young women and hormone therapy to older women, performed all sorts of surgeries and also did abortions. Dr. Tiller was a family doctor. He did specialize in late-term abortions. But given how few of those procedures are performed in the U.S.—some 14,000, or about 40 a year for the 350 or so physicians who do them—it's unlikely that Dr. Tiller made his entire medical living from these procedures alone. Certainly his family considered abortion just one facet of the man; to them, others were far more important. The day Dr. Tiller was killed, they said, "Today we mourn the loss of our husband, father and grandfather."

Truth told, the people at an abortion clinic who are superpolitically pro-choice are the people who work at them for little or no money—the support staff and volunteers. Doctors, in general, feel like they are just doing their jobs, and the ones I have known experience the efforts to stop them from doing their work far more personally than politically. When Bart's children were stalked (while they walked to their grade school, activists would ask my cousins, "Why does your dad kill babies?"); when his home, car and office were vandalized; when he was

 threatened with everything from being buried in cement to maiming to shooting, my uncle never said, "I need to protect a women's right to choose." He said, "No goddam bully is going to tell me what to do."