On George Tiller, Reformation Lutheran Church, and "excessive certainty"

Not that I have much of value to add to the discussion of the murder of George Tiller on Sunday nor, for that matter, that the little I will say here will be said all that well, but: as not just a person profoundly conflicted about abortion but also a resident of Wichita and, as well, a member of Reformation Lutheran Church who once had a brief, genial conversation with Dr. Tiller, I feel the need to speak my little piece so, maybe, I can gain a little mental peace about that day's event.

While reading this post by hilzoy over at Washington Monthly this morning--one of those back-and-forth kinds of posts that frequently pops up as bloggers respond to responses to their posts--I was struck by these paragraphs:

Megan [McArdle; her post is here] claims to find "the certainty of the pro-choice side so disturbing". But that's not what is at issue in my post, or publius', or in the comments. What bothered me about Megan's post wasn't anything to do with which side is right in the abortion debate; it was her claim that whenever someone thinks that our government, through its lawful decision procedures, has done something that will result in the deaths of innocents, that person is justified in using lethal force to get her way.

If someone has a problem with excessive certainty here, it's not those of us who think that when we lose politically, and the stakes are non-negligible, we are not justified in resorting to political violence.

A few words about "excessive certainty" below the fold.

Well, okay: This blog is blessed in having regular visitors (or at least commenters) who, their personal opinions on issues aside, are thoughtful enough to see the dangers of excessive certainty, so I'll not dwell on those dangers here. But I feel compelled to say something about my conversation with Dr. Tiller and about my congregation.

Though Tiller's reputation most definitely preceded him, I had never seen a picture of him before the Sunday he and I chatted. I happened to be sitting next to him in the pew; after the service, he complimented me on my singing and asked if I had thought about joining the church choir, which his wife was a member of; I thanked him for his kind words and said that my teaching schedule at the time didn't permit me to attend rehearsals. Then he asked for my name and I asked for his, and I told him I was pleased to meet him. When I told a co-worker yesterday about this conversation, she said something to the effect that he must have felt uneasy to tell me his name; I said that if he was, he didn't show it: this is a man who, after all, after he was shot in both arms by an assailant, returned to his clinic the next day. As I think back on that Sunday I met him, in fact, I may have been the more intimidated.

I had read descriptions of procedures for late-term abortions before meeting Dr. Tiller. The specifics are such that, if such procedures are to be legal, one would want them performed as infrequently as possible. But as I have read these past few days in various places the accounts of women who were patients of Dr. Tiller's, I realized that those descriptions of the procedures that I'd read focused on the procedures themselves and on the number of times they'd been performed at the time of that writing. They'd not focused on why--except in all but dismissive terms, if at all--women would seek out those who perform them. The effect of reading only these accounts--and I admit to falling victim to assuming this--is to imply that the pregnancies terminated by these means were healthy ones. I've belatedly been learning about via these patients' accounts that that's clearly not the case: I've read about fetuses with exposed brains who would die soon after being born, assuming they survived being born; Down Syndrome babies with severe congenital heart defects (such babies are not eligible for heart transplants); twins, one of which had died in utero and the toxins from whose body were poisoning both the mother and the still-living twin; another set of twins conjoined in such a way that to surgically separate them would result in the death of one and the severe maiming (if not death) of the other; having to travel to Kansas for the procedure because the mother's obstetrician, even as he recommended that it be done, refused to perform it himself (or, in another case, had not been trained by his (Catholic-affiliated) hospital to perform it himself). I read more than these accounts, but you get the idea. All these conditions were found well into or even after the end of the second trimester. One can of course argue with these parents' decisions to seek late-term abortions, one can still loathe what Dr. Tiller did for these people; but two things came through to me in these accounts, again and again: a) these parents wanted to be pregnant when they learned, so late in their pregnancies, of their babies' conditions; b) these were the sorts of choices that too many people, whether pro-choice or pro-life, tend to erase via their glib sloganeering, their excessive certainty in their rightness. Questions of the moral or legal rightness of late-term abortion aside, who would want even to be presented with such circumstances, much less make decisions about them? The availability and legality of these procedures has not made these parents' lives one whit easier or more convenient--but nor, for that matter, would their lives--or the lives of their children--have been made one whit easier by choosing or being forced by law to carry these pregnancies to term.

I'm certain of very few things. But here's one thing of which I'm excessively certain: George Tiller was a sinner. In the sense that we all have fallen short, he was in no greater or lesser need of God's grace and mercy and love than any other member of the Church or of the larger human family. It was in that spirit that he was a welcome member of Reformation. He was welcome there not because the other parishioners individually agreed with Tiller's practice or, for that matter, felt his continued attendance at Reformation caused more trouble for the church than could be justified. For, you see, the church had for years been the subject of continual picketing on Sunday mornings and disruptions of services when Tiller was in attendance--disruptions frequent enough that the church council felt compelled, a few years ago, to institute a policy permitting ushers to forbid the presence of cameras or recording devices in the sanctuary without the pastor's prior approval. Those disruptions interfered not just with Tiller's right to worship where and as he pleased but with the right of every other member of Reformation to do the same. I admire my church's defense of its members' right to worship in peace and its refusal to ostracize someone who attracted such unwanted attention, no matter what its members may have privately thought about that person.

So here I am, at the end of this post, not understanding anything any more clearly (much less rightly) than before I started writing it. That's because, so far as I can tell, nothing in the larger debates about abortion has changed, really, as a result of Scott Roeder's alleged act. Tiller's clinic will re-open this coming Monday. Whether we like it or not, abortion is still just as protected an act. Medical technology will continue to reveal fetuses with abnormalities and parents will still face soul-searing dilemmas about what to do. On the other hand, a family and a church congregation have been violated, and who knows how that fact will affect them in the days, the years ahead.

Roeder's acting on his excessive certainty has left the world just as uncertain a place--though in ways his certainty had blinded him so as not to see.