In Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court did not answer the theological question, but took a practical approach. It said that the state’s interest in pregnancy increases after the first trimester. It established viability as the point at which the state may restrict or proscribe abortion. English and US common law recognizes personhood at birth, and most parents name and register their children after born. 
     Stem cell research does not involve abortion. But if you believe that a fertilized egg is a person, you may object to research using IVF cells. One may then be required to balance (a) the good from the current practice of legally disposing about a thousand of these cells every day from in-vitro fertility clinics as medical waste with (b) research for curing what everyone would agree are actual persons. In a fire, your priority may be to rescue the one 5-year old remaining in the building over any number of undifferentiated cells in petri dishes.
     The other form of research, SCNT (somatic cell nuclear transfer) does not use fertilized eggs. Without genetic material from both a father and a mother, this method may seem to present no parallel theological problem. The nucleus of a patient’s cell replaces the nucleus of a donor’s egg, which provides the environment for growth so that, it is hoped, harvested stem cells can be coaxed to grow into specific tissue or organ cells — for example, pancreatic tissues to produce insulin.
     Supporters consider this type of cloning to be similar to the now-routine cloning of skin tissue in graft treatment of burns. No new human being is created in a petri dish -- all the genetic material comes from the patient who is treated.
     However, those who think SCNT creates a new person through cloning find the procedure illicit. The consistent ethic of the “seamless garment” of respect for life would be violated.
     A related objection to this research is the “slippery slope” argument. It says that investigating the very processes of life in this research is the first step in blaspheming God’s created order toward the manufacture of Frankenstein monsters, or to justifying questionable means for beneficial ends. But similar objections have been raised to the study of cadavers, the use of antibiotics, vaccines, and organ transplants. 
     The president of Yale College (1795-1817), the Reverend Timothy Dwight IV (1752-1817), is cited as an example of resistence to medical advance when he argued against protecting people from smallpox by vaccination: "If God had decreed from all eternity that a certain person should die of smallpox, it would be a frightful sin to avoid and annul that decree by the trick of vaccination."
     But the result has been cures, not monsters. 
     The proposed amendment increases the level of protection against misuse of medical technology and adds careful checks and balances to the research process. Strict ethical limits are imposed. For example, while there currently is no law prohibiting cloning a human being, the amendment would make even the attempt to clone a person illegal.
     Other concerns involve medical risks to egg donors and a financial market for eggs. Egg extraction has been done safely for decades and the amendment prohibits the sale of eggs for research.

The issue before the voters is much simpler than these and other theological issues. We are not voting on when life begins. We are voting whether responsible researchers will be protected from those who would make them criminals, along with doctors who would prescribe resulting cures to their patients, and even jail the patients accepting such cures. We are voting on whether research and cures legal and available in other states will remain available to Missourians. 
     The greatest spiritual surprise for me in this debate is the difficulty in recognizing the filters we use in discerning and telling the truth about what the current status is, what the proposed amendment says, or what the research reveals. Anti-abortion rights groups oppose the amendment in part because its passage would complicate their efforts to codify in law one religious perspective about when life begins.
 
 

This is an urgent religious question because, as I mentioned, healing is a central concern for people of faith. The possible cures for Parkinson’s, cancer, heart disease, sickle cell, ALS. multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, spinal chord injuries, diabetes, and many other conditions inspire religious attention and support.

     It is not surprising that this Missouri issue is being discussed widely and intensely in religious circles. Episcopal priest and former Senator Jack Danforth, an opponent of abortion, enthusiastically endorses stem cell research because of its potential for healing actual human beings. Joining him are Methodist minister, former mayor and now Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, and clergy of many other Christian traditions. The Jewish leadership, the rabbinical association of Kansas City, unanimously supports the proposal. Local Buddhists and Muslim leaders  feel pursuing such cures is not only moral but obligatory. 

     The Bible commands, "Heal the sick."

     A pastor put it to me this way, as could many of the hospital chaplains I know, concerned with the suffering they see: “Would Jesus condemn an accident victim to a wheelchair forever if a cure were available?”
 
 

"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politicaliy correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. 

It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without reimagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love it you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

The United States is reconfiguring itself into a theocracy that would have appalled our Founding Fathers. (Abortion, by the way, was legal at the nation’s founding, and for much of a century afterward.) . . . 

The Establishment Clause says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” But we don’t hear much about it these days. It has shrunk noticeably at the hands of the current Supreme Court, in contrast to the First Amendment’s other religion clause, the Free Exercise clause, much in favor with today’s majority. The only Supreme Court justice who ever linked abortion and the Establishment Clause was John Paul Stevens, now nine years into retirement and, at age 99, author of a new memoir.

Thirty years ago, in a case called Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the court considered a Missouri law that placed several restrictions on access to abortion. The law contained a preamble declaring it to be a “finding” of the state legislature that “the life of each human being begins at conception.” Was such language constitutional? That was one question in the case, but Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s opinion for the court ducked it. The preamble stated an “abstract proposition” that “does not by its terms regulate abortion,” the chief justice wrote. “We therefore need not pass on the constitutionality of the Act’s preamble.”

Justice Stevens, alone, disagreed. The preamble was “an unequivocal endorsement of a religious tenet of some but by no means all Christian faiths,” he wrote in his separate opinion. It “serves no identifiable secular purpose,” he continued, adding, “That fact alone compels a conclusion that the statute violates the Establishment Clause.”

Each side attracted supporting briefs from religious organizations, a total of 67 friend-of-the-court briefs in all. In words that are perhaps even more relevant today than they were 30 years ago, Justice Stevens explained: “Bolstering my conclusion that the preamble violates the First Amendment is the fact that the intensely divisive character of much of the national debate over the abortion issue reflects the deeply held religious convictions of many participants in the debate.” He concluded, “the Missouri legislature may not inject its endorsement of a particular religious tradition into this debate.”

--------------

WHEN LIFE BEGINS
IS A THEOLOGICAL QUESTION,
NOT A BIOLOGICAL FACT

Roe wrestled with when personhood begins -- at conception, birth, or at some point in between, and concluded, "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer." 

What the court did was to use the fact that historically, under English and American common law and statutes, "the unborn have never been recognized ... as persons in the whole sense" -- this means that Fourteenth Amendment does not apply. (What galls me is how the "conservative" court later gave the First Amendment right of speech to corporations as fictive persons.) In Roe, the Court did recognize that the State has a "compelling interest" in protecting "potential life" at the point of viability, which, while I disagree, I can accept as a compromise in a pluralistic society.

Religious rules

The bill sponsored by Kansas Rep. Trevor Jacobs, as reported in the Thursday story “Kansas bill offered to ban abortion ahead of amendment vote,” (5A) would enshrine religious persecution in the laws of Kansas.

In Jewish law (halakhah}, which in this instance would be followed by most Kansas’ Jews, abortion is not only legal but required when the life of the modler is threatened.

When the threat to the mother’s life is primarily psychological, Jewish legal scholars have often disagreed, with some mandating or allowing abortion and others forbidding. But there is no debating that the mother’s life takes precedence in Jewish law over the life of the fetus, which is termed “potential life."

I would be obligated, as a rabbi, to advise Jewish women under certain circumstances to obtain abortions, which under this proposed law would be a criminal action.

This stance is at odds with the opinions of many of another faith. But the U.S. Constitution forbids the government to give preference to one religion over another. In this instance, the well—cstablished principles in Jewish law would be overridden by a state law that favors one theology of a major religion over another.

Those who prefer a ban on abortion have no obligation to obtain an abortion. Forbidding abortions to believers of a different religious perspective that are mandatory in their tradition abrogates Kansans‘ right to free speech and free practice of religion.

Apri 3, 2022
The Kansas City Star

#Tex

Alabama Supreme
Court ignorant about
the Bible and biology

BY TEX SAMPLE
Special to The Kansas City Star [March 3, 2024]
 
The Alabama Supreme Court illustrates once again why the nation needs to act with great restraint when it comes to its citizens and the state's actions toward them with regard to the most intimate issues. The Alabama  court has misread the Bible, ignored the Constitution, simplified conception and issued a ruling with unpredictable consequences that will become clear in the days and months to follow.

First, in the Bible, both breath and blood are equated with life. But in Genesis 1, we indeed are made from dust in the image Of God, and in Genesis 2, God blows into the human the breath of life. Those who argue for life from conception have enormous difficulty in dealing with these biblical texts.

Further, the ancient world knew nothing of a woman having a female reproductive cell produced by the ovaries. (There is actually a tiny bit Of evidence that ancients had some sense that a woman contributed something Other than incubation, but it is, indeed, unclear.) Rather, women were seen as the fertile bed in which the seed Of the man was placed. In fact, we don't have the first undisputed observation of this female reproductive cell until 1826 or 1827 by Karl Ernst von Baer.

There are significant other biblical complications, but Old Testament Hebrew text scholar Lisa Wolfe says it with clarity. The Bible does not equate an embryo or a fetus with a baby.

Another problem is the disagreement among scientists about when personhood begins. Biologist Scott Gilbert points out with "absolute certainty" that there is no consensus among scientists on this issue. There are five points Of view:

1. Fertilization, where the sperm and egg combine their nuclear materials, a long process ending with a two cell stage. (This is obviously where the Alabama Supreme Court has decided life begins with the case in point being a frozen embryo. One cannot but wonder On what legal grounds they have so much clarity when there's so much disagreement
among the scientific community itself, not even to mention the differences among spiritual and religious traditions.)

2. Implantation in the wall of the uterus, where you get a pregnancy. 

3. Gastrulation, Day 14, for example, when the embryo becomes an individual and can no longer form twins and triplets, with one embryo giving rise to, at best, only one adult. (That is, till this point, you don't know whether you have a single individual or twins or more!)
 
4. Electroencephalogram (measurable brainwaves) at week 24 to 28 when you see the beginnings of the human specific electroencephalogram.

5. At birth: during the perinatal period where a successful birth is possible.

Another matter that requires attention is that Article 14 of the U.S. Constitution declares that citizens are "all persons born or naturalized." A frozen embryo is not a citizen according to the Constitution. The 14th Amendment does go on to say "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Nowhere in the Constitution does it declare that a frozen embryo is a person. The Alabama Supreme Court simply makes that declaration. Such declarations establish one scientific and one religious point of view — which, in the latter, is in violation of the Constitution — and, in fact, violates the privileges, immunities, life, liberty and bodies of citizens without
providing them with due process and equal protection of the laws.

Tex Sample is the Robert B. and Kathleen Rogers Professor Emeritus of Church and Society at Saint Paul School of Theology in Leawood.

*Before detailing the argument logically, it is useful to note that the public debate is more emotional than rational. Emotional arguments -- in the opponents words -- about killing innocent babies -- are minimized here, and rational arguments instead employed.

To those who say that passage of Amendment 2 imposes a a particular theological perspective on everyone, I reply:

The question also involves whether the theological position is not simply
(a) that personhood begins at conception
but also that
(b) the state should recognize that personhood begins at conception.
This contrasts with
(c) the state should allow various theological positions on when personhood begins while maintaining common law (personhood begins at birth) (or maybe fudging toward viability ala Roe v Wade) for practical purposes, with each person making medical decisions on the basis of conscience, unbound by the state.

I think the solution offered works for (a) but not for (b) which is unstated in the argument as I hear it (so much is unstated which is why there is so much talking past each other). The reason that  (a) and (c) are compatible  is because each religion is free to decide its case for its own members without imposing on others; and each person is free to accept or refrain from cures developed from the disputed research. 

Obviously (b) does not work for a pluralistic society because one theology is imposed on those who disagree.

The logical problem is related to the argument in the abortion issue. If you begin the argument with the assumption that the state must protect persons from murder, and that the fertilized egg is a person, you have no place to go in argument except to shout. The reasoning becomes circular, or begs the question of when personhood begins.

If someone defends the right of a woman in an extreme situation to choose abortion, your response is that she is committing murder because she is killing a person because a fertilized egg is a person. 

This is really no argument but rather the circular restatement of a position and begs the question of when a cell becomes a person.

================

Not a capital offense 
Exodus 21

22 If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.

---

Abortion procedure required -- fetus not yet a person -- The Test for an Unfaithful Wife Numbers 5

11 Then the Lord said to Moses, 
12 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him 
13 so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), 
14 and if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure— 
15 then he is to take his wife to the priest. He must also take an offering of a tenth of an ephah[c] of barley flour on her behalf. He must not pour olive oil on it or put incense on it, because it is a grain offering for jealousy, a reminder-offering to draw attention to wrongdoing
16 “‘The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. 
17 Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. 
18 After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. 
19 Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. 
20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— 
21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[d] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 
22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.” “‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”. 
 

The Bishops Are Wrong About Biden -- and Abortion
June 27, 2021
 

By Garry Wills
Mr. Wills is the author of more than 50 books on Catholicism, the history of Christianity, and American history and politics.

What is the worst crime a society can commit? Some people (I among them) would say the Holocaust, the cold methodical murder of six million people just for being Jews.

But some Catholics and evangelicals say they know of an even greater crime -- the deliberate killing of untold millions of unborn babies by abortion. They have determined that a fetus is a person and abortion is therefore murder. This is a crime of such magnitude that some Catholic bishops are trying to deny the reception of Holy Communion by the president of the United States for not working to prevent it.

No one told Dante that this was the worst crime, or he would have put abortionists, not Judas, in the deepest frozen depths of his Inferno. But in fact he does not put abortionists anywhere in the eight fiery tiers above the deepest one of his Hell.

This is not a singular omission. No one told "Matthew" or "Mark" or "Luke" or "John" or Paul, or any other New Testament author, that he should condemn this sin of all sins. Nor did any author of the Old Testament raise this alarm, with the result that we do not have Moses or Jesus on record as opposing abortion. Nor did any of the major definitive creeds.

Even major figures of religious history do not tell us that the fetus is a person. St. Augustine says he searched Scripture trying but failing to find out when in the procreative process personal life begins. But St. Thomas Aquinas knew. Aristotle told him -- that it came at or near childbirth, after an earlier stage of having a nutritive soul (like plant life), which developed into an animal soul, at last receiving a rational soul. Thomas kept Aristotle's biology, just adding that God himself infuses the soul into the body at some unspecified time during the last stage of this process. In other words, the fetus in its long pre-rational life is not a human being.

In 1930, Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Casti Connubii, forbade all ways to prevent procreation, lumping them together with the condemnation of Onan, who prevents his widowed sister-in-law from childbirth by coitus interruptus. But the Vatican was embarrassed by scholars who noted that what was attacked there was a violation of the duty of Levirate marriage, to continue his brother's line. The Vatican has never again tried to connect abortion with Scripture. The best comment on the pope' disastrous "church teaching" came via Alexander Woollcott, who said of Dorothy Parker: "Of her birds, I remember only an untidy canary whom she named Onan for reasons which will not escape those who know their Scriptures."

The religious opponents of abortion think that the human person actually antedates the Aristotelian scheme, dating it from "conception"? (when the semen fertilizes the ovum). But the Catholic theologian Bernard Häring points out that at least half of the fertilized eggs fail to achieve "nidation" -- adherence to the uterus -- making nature and nature's God guilty of a greater "holocaust" of unborn babies than abortion accounts for, if the fertilized ovum is a "baby."

The opponents of abortion who call themselves "pro-life" make any form of human life, even pre-nidation ova, sacred. But my clipped fingernails or trimmed hairs are human life. They are not canine hair. The cult of the fetus goes even farther down the path of nonsense. This cult, which began as far back as the 1950s, led to debate over whether, in a pregnancy crisis, the life of the fetus should be preferred to that of the mother.

In her brilliant book -- Policing the Womb,-- Michele Goodwin records how state legislatures are now inventing a new crime, "feticide." Does a pregnant woman's smoking or drinking endanger the fetus in her? Haul her into court and convict her of attempted feticide. Bring doctors in to testify against her.

This new cult of the fetus was not observed in the long history of the bishops' own church. When my wife and I were in England in the 1960s, her doctor there said she was at severe risk of a miscarriage and consigned her to immobility in bed. I did not know what my Catholic Church prescribed about treatment of a miscarried baby, if that should occur. I went to John Henry Newman's Oratory fathers, where I had been attending Mass, and asked what I should do in that event. They looked puzzled and said the hospital should handle that.

I found, in later questions, that the church did not prescribe or recommend baptizing a miscarriage as if it were a full human being, nor giving it last rites, nor burying it in consecrated ground. My Catholic grandmother, Rose Collins, had three or four miscarriages, but told me she did not worry about how the discharges were disposed of —” she had four living children to care for.

The Catholic Church no longer claims that opposition to abortion is scriptural. It is not a religious issue. It is called a matter of natural law, which should be discernible by natural reason. Yet as the Catholic judge John T. Noonan said, the most recognized experts on natural law, in universities, human rights organizations, medical and psychological bodies, do not generally oppose abortion. Nor, according to polls, do a majority of American citizens, even Catholic citizens. Some women of my own extended family have had abortions and still consider themselves Catholics. President Biden seems to be on their side, as is Pope Francis. This, of course, does not affect the American bishops. They hate this pope and this president anyway.

Opinion
The Doctors Who Put Their Lives on the Line
A decade after the murder of Dr. George Tiller, other abortion providers are concerned about a surge in clinic harassment and violence.

By The Editorial Board
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.

May 25, 2019

On May 31, 2009, Scott Roeder drove to Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kan. He had attended services there before, but he was not a worshiper. He had visited Reformation Lutheran to track the movements of a particular church member, Dr. George Tiller, who provided abortions at a nearby clinic.

On that day in 2009, Mr. Roeder carried out the mission he’d been planning: He walked up to Dr. Tiller as he was handing out programs and greeting fellow parishioners in the church foyer. Knowing that Dr. Tiller customarily wore body armor, Mr. Roeder put a .22-caliber handgun to the doctor’s head and pulled the trigger.

In the decade since Dr. Tiller’s assassination, the violence and harassment inflicted on those who work in abortion clinics have become only more routine. A Molotov cocktail thrown through the window of a Planned Parenthood building, a clinic escort hit by an anti-abortion activist’s car — both episodes that happened in the past several months — barely garner headlines. While most people who protest abortion reject violence, among their ranks are zealots who believe that the perceived killing of embryos and fetuses justifies murder. And abortion providers worry about even one of those zealots being emboldened by a political environment that’s spawned extreme anti-abortion legislation around the country this year.

George Tiller did not set out to become an abortion provider, let alone one of the most targeted figures in the American abortion debate. A longtime Republican and former Navy flight surgeon, Dr. Tiller took over his late father’s family medical practice in 1970, thinking it would be a sleepy job. He soon learned that his father had quietly provided safe abortions at the office in the decades before the procedure was legal in Kansas — a history detailed in Stephen Singular’s 2012 book “A Death in Wichita.”
After initially resisting following in his father’s footsteps, Dr. Tiller was swayed by the relentless demand for abortions from women in the community, and by the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973 that made the procedure legal in every state. “I am a woman-educated physician,” Dr. Tiller said years later. He went on to become an expert in diagnosing rare fetal anomalies — cancers, fluid in the skull, undeveloped organs — and performing abortions on women facing these devastating circumstances later in their pregnancies. He also helped find homes for babies women wished to put up for adoption. He came to see his work as a spiritual calling.

As legally risky as his father’s clandestine efforts had been, Dr. Tiller’s career coincided with political and cultural shifts that made it physically dangerous for doctors and staff members at abortion clinics.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president thanks largely to a new evangelical voting bloc that was rallied by his anti-abortion, pro-family values platform. Over the following decades, as abortion became further entrenched in the American culture wars, a handful of anti-abortion lawmakers, like former Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, called for abortion providers to receive the death penalty.

And abortion providers indeed started to die — not in the death chamber, but at the hands of anti-abortion extremists. Dr. David Gunn in 1993. Dr. John Britton in 1994. Dr. Barnett Slepian in 1998. Two receptionists, a clinic escort, an off-duty police officer and others were also killed during acts of anti-abortion violence during that time, and there were many hundreds of nonlethal violent incidents, including bombings and attempted assassinations. One such assassination attempt was carried out in 1985 at the home of Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the Supreme Court opinion in the Roe v. Wade decision. (Though the justice and his wife were at home at the time, they were unharmed.)

By the late 1970s, word had spread of Dr. Tiller’s work, and his clinic was attracting protesters who would chant, “Tiller, Tiller, the baby killer.” Some of them followed Dr. Tiller and his staff members to their homes and put graphic images of fetal remains in their neighbors’ mailboxes. Others phoned in death threats to the clinic. Someone set up a website listing the personal contact information for the staff.

Dr. Tiller sought advice from security experts, who gave him tips, such as to drive in the right lane to limit the angles available to potential shooters, and he started giving his employees “combat pay” bonuses to keep them from quitting. He eventually bought an armored S.U.V. to drive to and from the clinic, and for two and a half years federal marshals were by his side for much of each day. He also varied his route between the clinic and his home, where he lived with his wife and four children.

He took these precautions because the threats that his clinic received were not all idle. The facility was pipe-bombed in 1986, causing $100,000 in damage. And in 1993, Dr. Tiller was shot in both arms by an anti-abortion extremist named Rachelle Shannon. (Ms. Shannon, who also committed a series of clinic bombings and acid attacks, was released from prison last year.) Neither the bomb nor the shooting deterred him; he was back at work the day after the shooting. Nor was he cowed when thousands of protesters, some of them aggressive, descended on his clinic and tried to block access to it during the so-called Summer of Mercy in 1991.

Dr. Tiller also stayed strong while Bill O’Reilly, the erstwhile Fox News personality, went on a nationally broadcast campaign against him in the years before his murder. Mr. O’Reilly compared Dr. Tiller to Hitler, said he was “executing babies” and noted in 2006: “If I could get my hands on Tiller … Can’t be vigilantes. Can’t do that. It’s just a figure of speech.”

A few years later, of course, someone did get his hands on the doctor.

(After Dr. Tiller’s death, Mr. O’Reilly said that “Americans should condemn” his murder and that “anarchy and vigilantism will destroy a society.”)

Today, abortion providers face an even more volatile political backdrop than Dr. Tiller did during his lifetime. In the years after Dr. Tiller’s murder, state legislatures passed hundreds of anti-abortion regulations intended to shut down abortion clinics and make it harder for women to access the procedure. Then came Donald Trump, who became president thanks in large part to the support of evangelical voters counting on him to deliver anti-abortion Supreme Court justices and other judges — a promise that he has fulfilled, leading anti-abortion lawmakers in states around the country to pass a rash of near-total abortion bans this year.

Since the 2016 election, abortion providers have reported a spike in incidents of vandalism, trespassing, harassment and picketing. According to the National Abortion Federation, which tracks such data, in 2018 abortion providers were subject to at least 1,135 trespassing incidents in the United States and Canada — up from 823 incidents in 2017 and 264 in 2013, when there were more abortion clinics in America than there are today. And last year they experienced nearly 122,600 disruptive events, including internet harassment, bomb threats and picketing. In 2017, that number was fewer than 97,000, and in 2013 it was fewer than 6,500.
Many providers and experts are concerned about enforcement of the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which was passed during the Clinton administration to bar the use of “force or threat of force or … physical obstruction” to keep people from entering reproductive health clinics. Hesitant to wade into a heated political issue, local police officers allow violations of the law to slide, further emboldening the activists.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder and chief executive of the Whole Woman’s Health network of abortion clinics, has had reason to call on law enforcement recently: In April, she said, someone set fire to the fence outside the Whole Woman’s clinic in McAllen, Tex. The clinic, which is the only abortion facility for nearly 250 miles, has become a hotbed of anti-abortion activity, sometimes attracting hundreds of protesters at a time. It is less than 10 miles from the Mexican border and serves mostly women of color, and Ms. Hagstrom Miller said that it has started to attract protesters with white nationalist tattoos.

Ms. Hagstrom Miller also worries about President Trump saying at his rallies, wrongly, that women and doctors routinely “execute” babies. “This kind of language and rhetoric,” she said, “doesn’t just fall on the ears of well-balanced people.”

[This is the way some Christians uncharitably understand some in the "pro-life" movement who appear to refuse to show concern for the problems of the living.]

'“'The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. lt‘s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without reimagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe."