(NOTE FOR THE EASILY-AGITATED: This post will most likely annoy you one way or another. You are therefore encouraged to stop here, and go see the "Star Trek" movie for the second, third, or fourth time instead.
If you are still here, you have been warned.)
Much has been blathered about Scott Roeder's murder of Dr. George Tiller, a prominent Kansas abortion doctor. Roeder, an anti-abortion activist motivated by religious conviction, shot Tiller once at close range in Tiller's church in Wichita as Tiller handed out pamphlets to congregation members.
For a religious person to murder another person in a church is in rather poor taste, I think. But I don't really know. I'm not religious. And "murder" is subjective. One person's murder is another person's public service.
I'm also not impressed by the outpouring of political bloviation and extrapolation, turning a simple murder by a religious nut into a witch hunt for all people who oppose abortion.
I used to think abortion was a bad thing. The more people I meet, however, the more I think it's a good thing. (Blog readers excepted, of course.)
I used to think it was a bad thing for the state to use tax dollars to pay for abortions. Now I think it's a good thing, because prison costs so much more than abortion. As "Freakonomics" (Levitt and Dubner, 2005) pointed out, there is a distinct correlation between higher abortion rates and lower crime rates. Their conclusion was that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals when they grow up. The idea seems plausible to me. I've certainly seen the evidence of many low-income, unwanted or abandoned children who turn to crime to survive. Others turn to crime simply because they like it, and because the judicial and penal systems do little to discourage it.
Even though others have found problems with the statistical methodology used to arrive at the conclusion that abortion reduces crime, the conclusion still seems to stand. If anything, it's worrisome that abortion rates are at their lowest point in years, which means that according to Freakonomics, crime rates will rise. But that's why I own weapons.
The implementation of abortion can be construed to be racist, since minorities, particularly black people, are much more likely to have abortions than whites. However, I would argue that it's not racist, because abortion is voluntary. If the police were rounding up pregnant minorities and forcing them to have abortions, as they do in China, then that would be racist. Voluntary participation in an abortion program that has a greater effect on minorities is NOT racist, only short-sighted.
Back to Tiller. Generally, human life is over-valued. In that regard, Tiller was as much a purveyor of genocide as an exterminator is. The law provides him a niche in which to make a living (by killing things), and so he did. He was quite good at it, apparently.
Regardless of whether abortion is murder, it was wrong to kill Tiller, simply because the law forbids it.
I would argue that instead of killing them, it is more important to keep people like Tiller in business. And it's not just because they (may) help prevent future crime.
They also prevent future liberals. More on that in a minute.
I would argue that conservatives are better than liberals at planning ahead. Ergo, conservatives are better at making good choices when it comes to sex and procreation, because conservatives don't expect a village to help raise a child. Conservatives know that a child is a personal responsibility, not a fashion accessory, or a tax writeoff, or a means to a welfare check.
Conservatives are also less likely to use abortion than liberals are, because conservatives tend to view abortion as murder, while liberals tend to view abortion as a right to be exercised.
(Note that I say "less likely" and not "will not." If I had to, I would choose abortion if I was put in a position where the facts dictated that I needed to make that decision. But I would also do everything I could to avoid it, including giving the child up for adoption. Including keeping my clothes on and not engaging in risky sex. Including making better choices to begin with.)
Unfortunately, liberalism tends to be the result of enculturation, not the result of mutation, nor of bad nutrition, nor of inbreeding. If a child is raised by liberal parents, it is likely to be liberal too (and it's very difficult to deprogram it).
If a child is aborted by liberal parents, it does not exist.
Liberals, by definition, are more likely than conservatives to abort a fetus.
Ergo, encouraging abortion helps to slow or even prevent the spread of liberalism.
Which, I would argue, is a good thing. I think that liberalism contributes directly to the decline of modern society. Liberalism seeks to break the bond between action and consequence, to remove accountability, to destroy common sense, and to reassign blame from wrongdoers onto innocents. It contributes to a slow, apathetic decay into chaos. It accelerates the natural entropy from an orderly state into a disorderly anarchy. One need only look at Britain and other socialist entities to see this process in motion.
The Long View is that liberalism is bad, and abortion (though a liberal construct) helps keep liberalism in check, as much as entropy CAN be held in check.
Scott Roeder murdered Tiller, an abortion provider, and also ended his own life as Roeder knows it. Roeder was trying to stop entropy. But there are other ways to resist entropy, including continuing to allow the people who want abortions, to have them. It's their choice. Any consequences of law, faith, or karmic retribution are theirs alone to suffer. And the future may be a better, brighter, more orderly place as a result of their actions in the present.
Others will step up to replace Tiller.
I hope that no one steps up to replace Roeder.
UPDATE: Here's an interesting commentary from one of Tiller's peers, a female doctor. Tiller was motivated by caring for his patients, she says. He didn't want them to die from seeking less-competent help. He even provided abortions for some of the anti-abortionists who picketed his clinic. That's very interesting.
