COMMENTARY: Ugly trends combine in doctor’s murder

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Frances Kissling is president of Catholics for a Free Choice, an independent group working in the areas of reproductive health, and part of the Voices of Women in Religion project of RNS.) UNDATED _ Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Barnett Slepian was gunned down in his home in New […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Frances Kissling is president of Catholics for a Free Choice, an independent group working in the areas of reproductive health, and part of the Voices of Women in Religion project of RNS.)

UNDATED _ Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Barnett Slepian was gunned down in his home in New York state, most likely by an anti-abortion sniper who police suspect is involved with four other sniper attacks on doctors who provide abortions in the United States and Canada.


Now we learn that an editor of a Canadian Roman Catholic newspaper, Paul Schratz of the British Columbia Catholic, has written in the wake of Slepian’s murder that, although”it’s perverse to take delight from an occasion of violence such as this one,”killing doctors who perform abortions”might have some positive side effects.” Unfortunately, neither the killing nor this shameful response from a Catholic source is surprising. Both are components of two ugly patterns: Before Slepian, six others _ two doctors who perform abortions and four other clinic workers _ were killed by abortion opponents.

And church leaders have long employed rhetoric that stigmatizes and demonizes those who perform abortions and women who have abortions.

Like Schratz, whose editorial said about abortion that”the evil one is behind it,”many abortion opponents totally ignore the reality that people of faith, in good faith, hold very different views on both the morality and the legality of abortion.

According to many churchmen, women who have abortions are, as New Jersey Bishop James McHugh has opined, either mindless victims or are devoid of moral sensibility.

Slinging rhetorical arrows reduces a complex moral and legal issue to political sound bites. And frankly the language of Catholic officials has been among the most vicious.

They may have taken a page from the book of Operation Rescue’s Christian leader Randall Terry, who has met with the pope and whose actions have been endorsed by church officials. Terry has said,”if you believe abortion is murder you must act like it is murder.”Scranton’s Bishop James Timlin declared in 1992 that”the killing of close to 200 babies in our own diocese in Stroudsburg is nothing less than a slaughter of the innocent.”And Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, said in 1994 that sanctioning abortion by the United Nations would cause”the most disastrous massacre in history”while John Paul’s spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, has written that”abortions already represent the greatest systematic slaughter of mankind ever known.” In addition to treating abortion as if it were murder, church leaders also brand it evil, even diabolical. Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston has called it”the primordial darkness of our time”while Cardinal John O’Connor has argued”an abortion mentality, structured and legalized in this country, does not differ in essence from that mentality that legalized putting Jews to death in Nazi Germany.” With this kind of language coming from the very top of the church, editor Schratz’s assertion that something positive might come from killing a doctor who provides an abortion is hardly aberrant.

It can, however, be seen as a clear sign that much needs to change in the way we talk about abortion. At present, the reaction of those engaged in the abortion wars is to reject any notion their language contributes in any way to the murders, injuries and bombings committed, I sincerely believe, by alienated and deranged individuals.


This lack of reflection, this lack of willingness to look at what we say and change it if there is the slightest chance that it incites or contributes to such horrors, is unworthy of people committed to peace and justice.

Why, I ask, is it so difficult for our bishops, our pope, and those Catholic prolife activists to see there might be a connection? When Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin was shot and murdered, the world made the connection between the language used by the Israeli right and the assassination. When Matthew Shepard, the gay student in Wyoming, was killed last month, we were more than open to the possibility that the way the Christian right talks about homosexuality and homosexuals contributed to his murder.

But our bishops _ and far too many Catholics of good will on both sides of the abortion debate _ simply will not even think about the consequences of the way we speak about abortion, about doctors who perform them and about women who have them.

Language leads to action; violent rhetoric can engender violent deeds. The death of Slepian _ and the deaths of Rabin and Shepard before him _ must be seen as certain proof that we cannot treat violent rhetoric any more lightly than we regard violence itself.

DEA END KISSLING

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!