Abortion services are no longer available in Wichita, Kansas. The nearest available legal services are now in Overland Park, three hours or so up the KTA. There is no point in going south: in that direction lie Oklahoma and Baja Oklahoma (Tejas.) Both have long since closed most of their facilities.
The Tiller family’s decision is understandable: staying in business cost Dr. Tiller his life, and his family their husband and father. Keeping the clinic open would leave the family exposed to Rabid Right. And yet, in closing the clinic we have rewarded the Rabid Right.
Rewarding bad behavior is a bad idea. We’ve learned this time and again: submit to a bad actor’s demands and all that happens is that the stakes are raised. Before Memorial Day there were three facilities nationally that performed late term abortions. Now there are two. Which murderous nuts are going to believe that they can shut those down with two additional murders?
On the other hand, pundits like Megan McArdle say:
Using the political system to stomp on radicalized fringes does not seem to be very effective in getting them to eschew violence. In fact, it seems to be a very good way of getting more violence. Possibly because those fringes have often turned to violence precisely because they feel that the political process has been closed off to them.
McArdle is arguing that trying to preserve and/or expand abortion access is simply going to make Roeder, Operation Rescue and their allies crazier, and prone to kill, bomb and assault further.
McArdle’s proposal strikes me as appeasement. Simply convicting Tiller’s assassin and locking him away for 25 years sends the wrong message. It says, "We’re going to stand behind John Law, we are doubtful enough about things that we aren’t going to stand up for what we believe."
What we need is for the Federal Government to enforce the existing laws protecting clinics and their providers. No, not enforcement, active enforcement of those laws is what is needed. We need people inside antiabortion outfits like Operation Rescue. On Rachel Maddow’s show last night, Frank Schaeffer (author of Crazy for God an evangelical who was formerly tight with the rabid right) said that these people know at least some of the crazies and their plans. We need intelligence on these domestic terrorists, and we need it now.
Of course, now is unrealistic. But infiltrating these outfits (and all the other domestic nutjobs — EarthFirst, the militia nutjobs, and the others) is something that the Feds need to do.
And we do need some modification of abortion law to allow better access. I’m not for-sure what they should be. Perhaps an EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) like law that guarantees access? Any hospital receiving Federal funds (that means essentially all general hospitals) must provide for abortion access. Maybe not on-site access, but local access. A three-hour drive is not local. A plane flight is not local.
I’m not sure how this plays out in rural areas: if it’s usual to drive 60 to 90 minutes to get to a hospital, maybe a three hour drive is local. But I don’t think Megan McArdle’s do-nothing approach is viable.
So, I’m asking: now what?
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indeed, now what? thank you
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“And we do need some modification of abortion law to allow better access. I’m not for-sure what they should be. Perhaps an EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act) like law that guarantees access? Any hospital receiving Federal funds (that means essentially all general hospitals) must provide for abortion access. Maybe not on-site access, but local access.”
I agree, BargainCountertenor. It seems to me that States are regulating abortions as in requiring 2 doctors’ opinions; therefore the states or fed should mandate that the local hospital has to provide the service or pay all expenses for procedures done out of the doctors’ area.
karen
Point of clarification: The Planned Parenthood facility in Overland Park does not do late term abortions. That’s just the nearest facility that performs the procedure.
Wichita is Kansas’ largest city by a long shot: the Kansas City metro area is larger, but it is mostly in Missouri. And women can’t get abortion services there.
BT
Are you sure that there isn’t another clinic in Wichita? When I was there in 2001 there were one or two other clinics providing early abortions. Tiller’s clinic was doing the late term procedures that few others would/could handle.
It really is a tragedy on so many fronts. I know that Lee Carhart is willing to continue the work. The problem is that he’s Nebraska based and Nebraska has laws against the late term procedures. He and several other docs used to come in a week a month and help Tiller.
I’m wondering why there has been no clinic in the East to which women could be referred. That makes no sense to me.
Where late-term abortions are medically indicated, i would hope that they would be available, and would doubt that they would not be.
When late-term abortions are elective, I would be hesitant to use the law to require that people provide them. That seems coercive, if not downright nasty. What possible reason would the government have to require people to do something like that?
If there’s no reasonable way to get the service, wouldn’t it be better to have the government provide incentives for the establishment of a bunch of facilities and have the US government be responsible for the protection of them?
There is a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wichita, the information that I could find said that they referred patients out to Tiller for abortion services. I found that plausible, because Tiller’s practice was not limited to second trimester (and later) procedures. The PP webpage lists abortion referral but not abortion among the services. The same page lists abortion services at Overland Park.
I know that Kansans for Life would like to close the PP clinics in both Wichita and Overland Park, their website says as much.
Thanks for playing, MM, but in most of the country late-term abortions are effectively unavailable. That’s true even where they are technically legal, because physicians won’t perform them.
Physicians are not (generally speaking) idiots and they know that:
1. You can’t do any sort of surgical abortion without assistants;
2. People don’t generally know how to keep their mouths shut;
3. There are plenty of Scott Roeders out there.
Why subject yourself to the opprobrium of folks like Randall Terry, Bill-O-the-Clown and their ilk? It’s easier to not do it at all. And that is the approach that most take. People like Tiller and Carhart and their colleagues are heroes. Tiller never intended to become an abortion provider: he learned that his father (a GP) had provided very quiet illegal abortions after a patient of his asked for one. His father refused (doubtless because it was illegal in Kansas at the time and he was a law-abiding guy) and the women died of a backstreet abortion.
When his father died, Tiller took over his practice and planned to close it out over a couple of years. He was going to be a dermatologist. Instead, he found himself providing more and more abortion services.
I wouldn’t require anyone to provide the service, and I wouldn’t support a law that required physicians to offer the service any more than I would support a law that required women to have an abortion. Getting Congress to pass any sort of bill that established abortion facilities isn’t going to happen. The anti-abortion forces would go batshit crazy on those sorts of bills. Look at the history of the FACE legislation, and all that called for was protection of existing providers and facilities.
Sorry to hear that they’re unavailable when needed. I guess that my experience has misled me into generalizing.