Murdered in 2009 by anti-abortion fanatic Scott Roeder, Kansas late-term abortionist George Tiller has since been immortalized by pro-aborts as a rhetorical cudgel to slander peaceful pro-life Americans as condoning and enabling violence (a standard they would naturally take great umbrage at if pro-lifers blamed their entire movement for violence committed by individuals on their side).
Salon’s Katie McDonough interviewed abortionist Cheryl Chastine, the current medical director of Tiller’s former clinic, about “honor[ing] his memory by providing fearless care for Kansans”:
On pro-life laws requiring Chastine to give her patients “information that is intended to mislead them”:
It feels like there’s a third party in the exam room that doesn’t belong there, and I’m very clear with patients when I tell them that. I tell them, ‘The state wants me to tell you this. They also you to do this.’ I don’t try to hide the intrusion. I make sure that they know so that they can understand how their care is being influenced by unnecessary legislation. And that that’s not the care that I want to give them.
And just how misleading is this “intrusion”? Sadly, Chastine doesn’t specify which lies the law allegedly mandates, but during the 2013 debate over HB 2253, Kansas for Life’s Kathy Ostrowski debunked a litany of them—particularly, that abortion is indeed linked to future premature births, and, most ironically, that Planned Parenthood itself actually concedes the law’s contention that carrying a pregnancy to term reduces one’s risk of breast cancer.
Anyway, the summary posted by the pro-choice Overland Park, KS Center for Women’s Health seems perfectly reasonable—a description of the method, risks of both abortion and delivery, and the humanity, anatomy, and the development level of the procedure’s victim. Abortionists must also provide patients this handbook, this directory of alternate pregnancy, adoption, childbirth, and parenting services in Kansas, and the link to a state webpage compiling the information and displaying fetal development video.
Further, it’s absurdly disingenuous to talk as if a “third party in the exam room” is somehow unique to abortion when informed consent laws are a common accepted reality in real medical fields. And if the requirements for abortionists are more stringent, it’s only because their industry has repeatedly proven it can’t be trusted to be honest with patients.
On mandatory 24-hour waiting periods for obtaining an abortion:
That’s extremely frustrating, because it doesn’t allow me to provide the best care for my patients. I mean, I know — and I tell the patients — that you have thought through this decision. You went to all of the work associated with making the appointment and getting here and arranging childcare and all of that. And so, I trust you as a moral decision-maker, and I’m sorry that the state doesn’t do the same.
Ah yes, because whether something is objectively evil depends on how hard someone thinks it over before doing it. Chastine, rightly, would never tolerate anyone defending Roeder on the grounds that he had “thought through this decision” to shoot Tiller, that he therefore deserved trust “as a moral decision-maker.” So why is that logic valid when she applies it to the killings she prefers?
But even putting that aside, this incessant presumption that everyone seeking an abortion has, almost definitionally, adequately researched and objectively scrutinized all the relevant scientific and ethical factors is pure, self-serving pandering. It’s a generalization no more substantive than a commercial gushing over how sophisticated its product’s users are.
This is another classic example of pro-aborts holding abortion to a completely different standard than legitimate medical practices, even as they dogmatically chant “health care” as a euphemism for it. The fact that most of us aren’t experts in the many, many procedures we may undergo is precisely why we need doctors in the first place. Yet there’s something horrible about presuming abortion-seekers don’t necessarily know everything important there is to know on the subject?
Further, Chastine’s criteria for a qualified abortion-seeker are laughable. Managing to schedule an appointment, get yourself there, and find a babysitter for while you’re busy somehow demonstrates that you’re qualified to decide if your unborn son or daughter needs to die? Seriously? We’re setting the bar for absolute dominion over life and death that low? If Chastine and McDonough meant to demonstrate the abortion industry’s competence, then offering this as a logical line of thought wasn’t a smart move.
On what’s missing from the “reproductive justice movement’s” messaging:
The people who are having abortions and people who give birth are not different people; they are the same people. And they make both of those decisions with their full moral decision-making capacity and for the same reasons. They make those decisions because they want to give the best love and care to a potential child that they can.
…by killing his or her siblings.
Show of hands, readers: any of you under the impression that people who abort never also have wanted pregnancies? I’m not. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a pro-lifer make that claim. But then, it’s not a claim so much as yet another offering to pro-aborts’ insatiable hunger for straw-man arguments.
On Kansas “mounting attack after attack on access”:
I am very, very terrified of the rollback in access to reproductive healthcare. I’m very concerned that this may be upheld because the people who suffer from this are the most vulnerable in our society and the most voiceless. I’m afraid that political decisions will be made, the consequences of which we won’t realize until it’s too late, until people have been harmed and have died. So often the people affected by these decisions are not the ones making the decisions at the political level.
My, that’s an interesting way of putting it, considering you might as well have just described abortion itself. Those being aborted are “the most vulnerable in our society and the most voiceless,” completely unable to “mak[e] the decisions at the political level” to spare their lives. And ensuring people “won’t realize until it’s too late” the decision’s consequences is your industry’s business model. It’s your motive for deceiving your patients—or more accurately, customers—about embryology and fetal development, for withholding from them key information on abortion’s risks and then demonizing those of us who try to compensate your customers for your willful negligence.
In short, it’s not the women who go to you we don’t trust. It’s you.
And even if they are. I have taken care of many, many, many, many women who have voted for politicians who have tried to make abortion illegal and unavailable and yet find themselves very thankful that they’re able to access those services. And so I think that this is a matter that needs to not be up for popular vote, and yet, here we are.
And there you have it: democracy, the fact that we live in a free society where conscientious men and women can organize and cast votes to protect our young from Cheryl Chastine’s industry, is the ultimate problem.
Democracy ended late-term abortion in Kansas, and eventually, it will ultimately end the deceit and exploitation throughout the rest of the country.
