Operation Rescue.org President Troy Newman provides commentary to LA Times front-page exposé on Abortionist George Tiller.
Wichita, Kansas, is known word-wide as the Abortion Capital of the World. The sole reason for this distinction is Abortionist George Tiller. According to the LA Times article, 88% of Americans oppose the gruesome procedure for which Tiller is known so well. This front page article paints a very real picture of Women’s Health Care Services, but only if you strip the euphemistic expressions. The following article details the barbarity, with Mr. Newman’s comments inserted in red italics in brackets.
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A Late Decision, a Lasting Anguish
[Or, When you Murder Your Baby There is a Price To Pay]
· A Kansas doctor is under investigation for performing abortions others won’t. His clients say outsiders can’t grasp their pain or gratitude.
By Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
WICHITA, Kan. — The moment is burned forever in her mind: The small exam room, her husband’s ashen face, her sobs as the doctor guided a needle into her womb to kill her son. [Is anybody as shocked about this as I am? The first line says the “doctor” KILLS her son! This isn’t about “choice” or “a woman’s body” it is about killing children. This isn’t an unwanted dog or cat at the local animal shelter. No, this is a real baby whose life was snuffed out. If the rest of this article had been dedicated to condemning this one act there would be hope. But unfortunately, it only attempts to excuse the inexcusable. ]
It’s been 4 1/2 years, and still Marie Becker can feel Daniel kicking inside her, kicking and kicking as she choked back hysteria — kicking until the drug stopped his heart and she felt only stillness. [Translation: Marie murdered her baby boy, Daniel.] She prayed Daniel would forgive her. [Do you think Lacey and Conner Peterson will forgive Scott? When Marie deliberately took Daniel’s innocent life, she committed the ultimate betrayal of the most sacred of trusts — that of a mother to protect her child. Her guilt feelings on this matter are justified.]
She prayed for forgiveness from God as well. [God says, “Thou shall not kill.” Jesus said, “If you love me then keep my commandments.” There is no doubt of the transgression, but without repentance there is no true forgiveness. Marie is looking for God to excuse her bad behavior, not forgive her.] Becker had been taught that abortion was a sin [a lesson apparently not taken to heart in this culture of moral relavitism]; she wanted so to believe it might also be a blessing. [This is a good example of why the scriptures teach that we should not lean upon our own understanding. As flawed humans, our hearts are deceitfully wicked and will attempt every imaginable mental gymnastic in order to justify our sin. Since abortion is murder, abortion is a sin, but the Bible repeatedly describes children as a blessing!] In her seventh month of pregnancy she had learned Daniel had a fatal genetic disorder and his life would be brief and brutal. She wanted to spare him that. [So because Marie did not like the hand she was dealt, she put her son down like a horse with a broken leg. Although cloaked under the guise of compassion, this cruel mercy devalues all human life. We need to stop viewing children as animals, or worse, as commodities that can be discarded when they fail to suit our consumer mind-set.]
“For the love of God, the last thing I wanted to do was to murder my own child,” she said recently. [But that is exactly what she did! What she is really saying here is that the last thing she wanted was a child who was not perfect. If he had only been healthy she would not have been forced to murder him. Let’s get real, here. She did not kill her child for the love of God or for the love of her son, but the love of herself.] “This was something we did out of love and respect for him.” [Love and respect? Proverbs 12:10 tells us that even the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.]
Becker, who asked to be identified by her middle and maiden names [Why? To keep the consequences of her actions from coming home to roost? Becker has problems with bloodguilt, which will only be solved by owning up to her sin, repenting from it], tells Daniel’s story to other pregnant women who find out when they are many months along that their babies are terminally ill or severely disabled. Through an online support group, she listens as they work through their options; if they choose abortion, she tells them what to expect. [Marie works to assure other women abort as well. When she sees others taking the same path, she doesn’t feel like she is such a bad person. Instead of owning up to her sin and repenting from it, she seeks to validate it. There is an old saying that misery loves company.]
These days she also prays [to whom, Baal or Molech?] for one of the few doctors in the nation who will take them as patients: Dr. George R. Tiller, who performed her abortion. [More accurately, her hired assination of her son.] Specializing in late second- and third-trimester abortions, his clinic here draws women from across the country and around the world. [Late-term abortionists are a rarity because few will lower themselves to commit such barbarism.]
Tiller’s clinic aborted 295 viable fetuses [children] last year and 318 the year before; his website says that he has performed more late-term abortions than anyone else practicing in the Western Hemisphere. [He also includes Europe and Australia (see drtiller.com). Only abortionists in Communist China kill more late-term babies than Tiller.]
But the clinic is now under criminal investigation for some of those procedures. [Praise God for a ray of hope in this otherwise insane state of affairs!]
Like most states, Kansas does not permit abortions of viable fetuses [babies] unless carrying the pregnancy to term would substantially and irreversibly damage the mother’s health. [Abortionists often exploit existing loopholes — often even widening them — in order to kill more babies.] Kansas Atty. Gen. Phill Kline is investigating whether Tiller’s patients were truly in that much danger. [News flash: 100% of the babies were in danger!] Tiller’s lawyers respond that he has “always consistently, carefully and appropriately followed the law in all respects.” [Yes, and we also believe that Nixon was not a crook. Whose law is he careful to follow? Certainly not God’s law that teaches abortion is murder. In the world of reality, a place those involved in abortion zealously avoid, Tiller is a law breaker not a law keeper.]
Kline, who opposes all abortions, maintains that the mental health concerns some women cite as their main reason for terminating — including depression or anxiety about raising a disabled child — do not justify late-term abortions under Kansas law. He has demanded access to the medical records of dozens of patients. The clinic has appealed to the state Supreme Court; a decision is expected within weeks. [Kline is just doing his job as an Attorney General and investigating the allegation of criminal conduct.]
Tiller’s patients await the ruling with mounting anger. [Are they angry their sin will be exposed and that they will have to face the fact that they murdered their own child, perhaps illegally? Maybe we should ask the Attorney General to stop investigating all crimes, because it might upset the criminals. These people are simply deflecting their own guilt onto someone else.] They say no outsider [translation: someone who never killed her child] could ever understand the complex tangle of emotions that brought them to Women’s Health Care Services — the psychological and physical strains that made continuing their pregnancies unbearable. [One does not need to place his finger in a light socket to know that it is not a good thing to do. Nobody ever said life was perfect or unstressful, actually God says child-birth would be agonizing, but that never gives license to kill the innocent.]
“I don’t know what I would have done had [Dr. Tiller] not been available to me,” said Katie Plazio, a financial analyst from New Jersey. [You would have been blessed with a live child and not a dead one.] “That’s selfish, I know. I feel selfish. But … doesn’t everyone want the best for themselves and their family?” [Here is the root of murder! It is the self-centered me, me, me philosophy. Jesus taught us to think of others higher than ourselves. The end result of selfishness is murder, because no one else matters.]
Like Becker and most women who spoke for this story, Plazio asked to use her middle and maiden names to protect her privacy. [If she is so concerned about her privacy, why is she giving an interview to the LA Times? She simply wants to make public excuses for her abortion decision in a vain attempt to assuage her guilty conscience while avoiding the consequences or stigma that would accompany such excuses.] Many of Tiller’s patients have not told their co-workers, friends or even close relatives that they had terminated pregnancies. Their abortions were verified by a review of clinic records they supplied.
For Plazio, the heartache began with the unexpected. After a decade of infertility, she was stunned to feel a kick [a baby kicks, not a clump of cells] to her ribs as she sat through a meeting in February 2001. She had been dieting for weeks, running five miles a day — and wondering why she still couldn’t squeeze into her pants. She was six months pregnant.
Overjoyed, Plazio and her husband scheduled an amniocentesis. [Amniocentesis is really a “search-and-destroy” mission. The reason this test is done is to determine defects in the baby so the woman can abort her less-than-perfect child.] The preliminary results were clean; bursting with excitement, Plazio, then 43, bought a baby blanket dotted with pale blue bunnies. Ten days later, her doctor called with devastating news: More complete genetic tests had determined that their son had Down syndrome. [Exodus 4:11, “Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I, the LORD?]
Plazio had studied special education in college; working with adults with Down syndrome, she had seen their lives as lonely, frustrating, full of hurt. [How easily the lies slip forth when sin is about to be justified! Many Down’s Syndorme children are the happiest alive.] She was not sure she could find joy in raising her son to such a future. She didn’t think she could cope with what she expected would be a lifetime of sadness and struggle. [Selfishness rears its head again! It is all about her joy and her coping and not about the happy life of a special child.]
Giving her son up for adoption seemed even worse [Wait a minute, let me get this straight: Sucking the brains out of your baby is BETTER than releasing him to live in a good family that will love and care for him?] — to wake each morning not knowing where he was, imagining him scared and alone. “I could not live with that fear all my life,” Plazio said. [This may seem hard, but let’s face the truth of what is really going on here. This cowardly woman would rather kill her innocent baby rather than live with him or face the guilt — not fear — of someone else living a happy life with her imperfect child.]
“I don’t want anyone to think that I did this all for Matthew,” she said. “I was not just sparing him problems. I was sparing my daughter, my husband, me and all those who depend on me…. I knew the limits of my family and my marriage. Maybe there are families who can handle it all. Maybe they are better people. But I knew I could not do it.” [That’s right! There are better people out there! People who don’t murder their own children. They sacrifice and give of themselves to put the needs of their babies first. It is sad that she admits to being a selfish person yet steadfastly refuses to see the need to change that, even if it costs the life of her child. Have our consciences really become that seared?]
In March 2001, a week into her third trimester [about 7 months], she and her husband flew to Tiller’s clinic. They took the bunny blanket and a teddy bear with a big red heart on its chest — a gift to the baby from their daughter, then 11. [Now they are making their 11-year old daughter an accomplice to murder.]
Since her abortion, Plazio has suffered such severe panic attacks that she can’t drive even as far as the high school to watch her daughter cheerlead. She has gained 60 pounds as she battles depression. The abortion she sought to preserve her mental health has left her deeply shaken; doctors say she suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome. [This is also known as Post Abortion Syndrome. She continues to suffer because she does not understand that there are consequences to sin. Her little murder, neatly justified, did not solve any of her problems as she had hoped, but only created a new, worse set with which she must now deal.]
Her mental health, she is convinced, would be even worse had she tried to raise a profoundly disabled son — or had she given him up for adoption. [She can keep telling herself that, but that flies in the face of scriptural truth. Even unbelievers experience God’s blessing and grace when they — however unwittingly — obey His precepts. She may have been surprised to have found the strength to deal with adversity and boundless joy in the unconditional love of her special child, if only she had faced the challenge with integrity and faith. ]
The abortion “released my poor sick baby back to the angels,” she said. [Theological note: Children are not pre-existent. Bad theology aside, this is just another attempt to minimize and justify the murder of her child so she does not have to face the cold reality of what she has done.] “The only thing I wish I had done differently was realize I was pregnant months earlier.” [Killing her child earlier in life would have decreased her trauma, but not his. Again, we see the heart of selfishness.]
Third-trimester terminations like Plazio’s are unusual. [This is because most people still have enough of their consciences intact that they will not cross that line of killing a viable child.]
About 95% of U.S. abortions are performed within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy [that would equal 1,140,000 murders per year], according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit center for reproductive rights and health research. [An organization founded by Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest abortion provider.]
About 20,000 women a year seek abortions after the 21st week, which marks roughly the midway point in a pregnancy. Perhaps 1,000 terminate after 24 weeks, when the fetus [literal translation from Latin: “little one”] is generally considered viable. The practice, though rare, makes many Americans uneasy. While 60% say abortion should be legal in the first trimester of pregnancy, 12% say it should be legal in the third trimester, according to a Harris poll conducted in February. [Why not say 88% believe killing a baby in the 7th, 8th, and 9th months of pregnancy is an abhorrent criminal act? Placing the emphasis on the minority makes the position sound somewhat reasonable, but placing the emphasis on the overwhelming majority makes the late-term baby killers sound like the radical fringe of the abortion movement, which they are.]
Three clinics in the nation perform abortions in the third trimester. One is in Los Angeles, one in Boulder, Colo. The best-known — recommended by many genetic counselors — is Tiller’s bunker-like clinic on a freeway frontage road in Wichita, next to a car dealership. Outside, protesters have erected dozens of white crosses; they maintain a prayer vigil by the gate and try to pull women aside for counseling — especially on Tuesday mornings, when Tiller sees patients seeking late-term abortions. [This is when “Tiller the Killer” actually injects the drug that kills the babies and begins the 3-4 day procedure to expel the dead child.]
The women who push past the protesters [actually they try to run us over with their cars] Tuesdays include young victims of rape or incest who did not realize they were pregnant until just weeks from their due dates. [Should we kill the child for its daddy’s crime?] Most are married women with much-wanted pregnancies who got a late diagnosis of fetal anomaly: a malformed heart, a missing brain, an open spinal column, an extra chromosome. [Tiller is more than an abortionist; he is the “Jack Kevorkian” of sick children. Tiller specializes in killing the weakest members of our society. Instead of healing and helping, he has built an empire of wealth and power by destroying the weakest among us.]
Some of the deformities are lethal. Others are not. A few fall in a gray area: The physical problems might be reparable through surgery, but the operations are risky and grueling.
One patient who had an abortion at 25 weeks in November said she could not bear to imagine surgeons cutting open her daughter’s tiny chest to rebuild her heart. The thought of her Emma spending months of her childhood in the hospital overwhelmed the woman, a 30-year-old technology educator from Virginia who asked to be identified by her middle name, Paige.
“Part of me just wanted to let her die,” Paige said. “Is that horrible?” [Allowing someone to die naturally is not horrible. Sticking a needle in her heart, or ripping off her arms and legs in the name of mercy is a most despicable act.]
Marie Becker had the same impulse — and the same question — about her son.
At a four-month ultrasound, the doctor noticed that Daniel’s limbs seemed short. She told Becker not to worry, but suggested another ultrasound in a few weeks. At that appointment, Daniel again measured short. Becker was told to come back in another month.
Becker, an accounting clerk, and her husband, a teacher, tried not to dwell on their fears for their first child. They delighted in the ultrasound pictures: Blurry black-and-white images of an arm, a leg, a face. In one, Daniel appeared to be waving; the technician typed a caption: “Hi, mom!” [Abortion doesn’t take away your motherhood; it only makes you the mother of a dead baby.]
Becker was 27 weeks pregnant when she went in for her next appointment. By then, it was clear that something was wrong.
A few days later, her doctor confirmed that Daniel had a rare and lethal skeletal disease. His organs were growing normally, but his bones were not; his tiny rib cage was slowly crushing his expanding heart and lungs. “His prognosis was death,” Becker said. “Not at 8 years old. Not at 10 years old. Within a few months at most.”
In her Florida home, with her husband at her side, Becker wept and prayed for days. [Again, prayed to whom, Baal or Molech? Psalm 66:18 states: “ If I regard iniquity in my heart, The Lord will not hear.”] Conflicting emotions overwhelmed her. She was scared to carry Daniel to term — scared of how she would react to his deformities. She was afraid to abort, sure she would burn in hell; [A fear that is fully justified.] she wanted him out of her body. She loved him. She wanted to protect him. [These conflicting emotions are common to women in crisis and because of this it is often difficult to make sound decisions. Abortion mills exploit this vulnerability and profit from it by providing a seemingly quick solution to the crisis. However, women often find out too late that their “quick fix” leads to a lifetime of anguish and remorse. ]
Becker, who was then 30, blamed herself for making Daniel sick: Hadn’t she taken migraine pills before she knew she was pregnant? Hadn’t she sipped a few glasses of wine? Was it that ride at SeaWorld, the one that whirled her around? Had that caused his genes to mutate? [Rollercoasters do not “mutate genes.” A little counseling could have saved her and her baby from their devastating fates.]
“I was so afraid,” she said. “It was bad enough that I had inflicted this on him. I didn’t want him to suffer any more.” [That is like the compassionate rapist killing his victim so he can alleviate the emotional pain his rape inflicted upon her. Could anything be more insane?]
The week before Christmas, at the start of her third trimester [at the seventh month her baby was fully formed and cabable of living outside his mother], Becker and her husband flew to Kansas.
Every detail of the trip remains vivid. She remembers staring, transfixed, at the freshly cleaned carpet in the Wichita airport. She remembers driving to the hotel through ice and snow — and turning away from a billboard plastered with gruesome photos of aborted fetuses. [That was the Truth Truck, stationed everyday right in front of Tiller’s abortion mill. The enlarged full-color pictures show exactly what happens to the baby after Tiller gets his bloody hands on them. Just as danger still threatens the ostrich with his head in the sand, averting one’s eyes from the truth does not make it go away.] On the morning of the appointment, she threw up in the hotel shower, [I would throw up too, knowing I was about to commit an execution.] then insisted she needed time to style her hair; her looks seemed the one thing she could control, and she took long minutes applying her lipstick. [Sometimes looks do kill.]
When she and her husband turned into the clinic parking lot, a handful of elderly protesters swarmed them, yelling, “Don’t go in!” and “You don’t have to do this!” [I would to God, that every Christian would block the entrance of this Death Camp everyday!]
The activists were peaceful that day, but there had been scattered violence: The clinic was bombed in 1986 and blockaded for six weeks in the summer of 1991. In 1993, an antiabortion activist shot Tiller through both arms. He now works in a bulletproof vest. [But the real violence takes place daily behind closed doors where Tiller readily admits to have killed tens of thousands of little people. This is genocide!]
Armed guards [Think: Nazi death camp guards] pat down patients and walk them through a metal detector at the clinic door. After paying for their abortions — which can cost more than $5,000, [Try well over $10k. Is Tiller underreporting his income to the IRS?] depending on the stage of pregnancy — patients wait in a room decorated floor to ceiling with framed letters from grateful women.
“We couldn’t stop reading them,” Becker said. “When you see how many people [each one killed her baby] wrote letters, when you see how much they love this man, it almost feels like you’re being hugged.” [And you almost feel like you are standing on the bloodiest ground on American soil.]
Becker still believes that abortion is wrong in most cases. [She apparently only thinks it is wrong when other people have abortions. What hypocrisy!] Sitting in her Florida bungalow, her two young daughters playing beside her, she recalled a movie she once saw in Catholic school, of a baby being ripped limb from limb. The image haunts her. [It should.]
She finds it reprehensible that Tiller aborts healthy fetuses in the first and second trimester (and even, sometimes, in the third trimester when the mother is very young, or a victim of rape). But she cannot censure him too harshly. [Because she paid Tiller to kill her own child. In censuring him she would condemn herself.]
For children like Daniel, “the man is a savior,” she said. “He’s there for women who have nowhere else to go.” [Only if “savior” means “executioner.” Again, there is no where else to go because most doctors still have moral compunctions about murdering innocent children.]
With most advanced pregnancies, Tiller performs abortions by injecting the fetus with digoxin to stop its heart. He then gradually dilates the woman’s cervix to induce labor. After two or three days of contractions, the women — heavily dosed with pain medication — deliver their [dead] babies intact.
Some refuse to look [at what they have done to their own babies because they are too ashamed] . But many hug their dead children. “It was very important to us to be able to hold her, to give her that kind of respect,” said Paige, who aborted [murdered] her daughter at the end of the second trimester. “This was not just a fetus to me. She was my child.” [But it should have been added that she killed her because she was too self absorbed to attend to her needs.]
After Susan Crocker’s second-trimester [4th — 6th month] abortion in August, she and her fiancé spent three hours cradling their daughter, Isabella, who had Down syndrome. They stroked her scrunched red face and kissed her rounded cheeks. They took pictures of her tiny, almost translucent hands, folded across a green-and-pink striped blanket. [Pretending that the baby was stillborn and loved doesn’t take away from the fact that they murdered their child because she was inconvenient to them. To treat her in death as they refused to treat her in life is abhorrent, unhealthy behavior.]
Crocker, a 34-year-old customer service manager, keeps Isabella’s ashes in a marble urn decorated with dolphins; she kisses it before she goes to bed each night. Her sons follow her lead. On Halloween, they each gave a Tootsie Roll to Isabella. Jordan, 5, shares his toys with her, propping a little plastic skateboard against the urn. [Oh, my…this cannot be viewed as anything other than sick behavior. These people need psychological help. If a serial killer behaved this way with his victims, he would be sent directly to the psychiatric hospital. ]
When a doctor once referred to Crocker as a mother of two, Jamie, the 9-year-old, interrupted indignantly: “No, she has three kids.” [That’s right! And one of them she murdered in cold blood.]
“Her daughter’s in her heart,” said Jordan. [No, her ashes are in a jar atop her dinning room table.]
Despite her family’s support, Crocker, who lives in Texas, has struggled with doubt and depression. “I did the unthinkable,” she said. “I ended my baby’s life. Sometimes I think, oh God, what if I was wrong?” [Her unhealthy obsession with her daughter’s remains can only add to the depression and doubt. Bearing that baby could not have produced the psychological problems that abortion has wrought in this family.]
Then she thinks about the room where Tiller stopped Isabella’s heart. There was a poster on the ceiling of a leaping dolphin. Underneath, it said: “Set them free.” [This shows Tiller’s sick personality. How bizarre, comparing the murder of your child with freeing captive dolphins! It is similar to the Heaven’s Gate cult who committed mass suicide in a macabre attempt to set themselves free from their earthly existence in order to join the Hale-Bopp aliens. No one would call that healthy behavior, yet attempts are made to justify abortion using similarly bizarre fantasies.]
She believes Isabella is free.
“I ended her suffering,” she said. “I owe Dr. Tiller greatly. I can never, ever thank him enough.” [Yes, she owes him for a dead child, a psychologically crippled family.]
Crocker sometimes wishes she could talk to the protesters who shouted as she entered the clinic: “Think about your baby!” She would tell them she was thinking of Isabella then, and thinks of her still, every day, with love. [I am sure Jack the Ripper thought a lot about his victims, too.] She would ask them not to judge. [They were not judging, but offering help to avoid the lifetime of pain and grief that Crocker has only begun to experience. God will judge, He will avenge, He will repay. Their daughter’s blood cries out to Him and He will answer. If these women were to be legitimately afraid of something, it should have been that.]
“You don’t know,” she’d tell them. “You have no idea. Until it happens to you, you don’t know.” [It is a fallacy to say that until one has experienced something, he cannot know it. Perhaps those who have not killed their children possess some wisdom in how to avoid such pitfalls in life and should be heeded. All these sad stories illustrate the true cost of abortion in human terms. The intentional taking of a human life causes great damage to those involved. If people only would listen to God’s Word and heed His wisdom, they would find that children are a blessing from His loving hand, and that accepting that blessing, however difficult that may seem, will enrich their lives and spare them from lasting anguish.]
