The Abortion Wars are Still with Us
On Dr. Tiller and the End of a Friendship
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Yesterday was the 12th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. It was also the 12th anniversary of the end of a long-standing friendship.
George Tiller performed late-term abortions in his clinic in Wichita, Kansas. He had been shot and wounded before; been subjected to constant death threats and harassment for years. One of the few doctors to perform difficult second-and-third-trimester abortions, Tiller always insisted that he was in the business of saving women’s lives and futures. His motto was emblazoned on the button he often wore on his lapel: Trust Women.
On May 31, 2009, Tiller was shot and killed while ushering at his local Lutheran church. His murderer was caught, tried, convicted, and remains in a Kansas prison.
The news of Tiller’s assassination broke just as I was putting down baby Heloise for a nap. As soon as she had drifted off, I composed a furious post on my (now-defunct) blog. In what I wrote, I picked up on Tiller’s Lutheranism, comparing him to another martyr of that denomination, the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer famously remarked that “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die,” and I made the case that Dr. Tiller had indeed answered that sacred call, and taken up the cross. He had lived a life, and died a death, of radical Christian witness. Helping desperate women was holy work, I wrote, and because of where and how he died and how he had lived his life, Tiller deserved to be remembered as a martyr of the church.
I concluded the post with two statements: I would be donating to the National Network of Abortion Funds in Tiller’s memory, and I asked that anyone who despised George Tiller consider me as one with him.
Cyril and I met at the gym in 1999. By the time of the Tiller murder, we’d been friends for 10 years. Cyril was two years older than I was; he had grown up in an evangelical family in the Chicago suburbs. He’d graduated from Calvin College, married young, had three children, and endured a painful divorce when his wife had left him for another man. Cyril worshipped at a small Orthodox Presbyterian church (well to the right theologically and politically of the Presby mainstream.) We’d bonded over heartache and theology and endurance sports; in 2002, Cyril ran his first marathon with me at his side. He leaned right, and I left, and we argued over politics and ethics, but our friendship seemed stronger than our ideological and religious commitments. (My lefty friends would insist that these kinds of cross-party-friendships are a function of white male privilege, and I acknowledge the point, but to address that would send this post down the proverbial rabbit hole.)
In early 2003, Cyril got married again, to a delightful young woman he’d met at church. The wedding was in her Seattle hometown, and Cyril asked me to road-trip with him up the coast, and keep him company as he fought the pre-nuptial jitters. We drove from Pasadena to Eugene, Oregon, in one day, blasting CDs of our favorite Christian music (Jars of Clay, Jennifer Knapp, Caedmon’s Call, Bebo Norman) the whole way. We checked into a little motel near the UofO campus, and at 11:30 at night, ran three miles together at Hayward Field, the veritable Temple Mount of track and field. We hit Denny’s after, and stayed up until three talking about what it meant to love, again.
The next night, at the rehearsal dinner, the bride-to-be pulled me aside and thanked me. “I knew he’d be safe with you, Hugo. Cyril stresses so much, but you always calm him down.”
Sunday night, just hours after my post went up and less than half a day since Tiller was shot, Cyril sent me a blistering email. Tiller, he said, was a monster. My use of Bonhoeffer in my anguished essay was willfully perverse. Did I not remember that Bonhoeffer had been executed for his role in the plot to kill Hitler? Tiller, said Cyril, was like Hitler – and it was Tiller’s murderer, not the doctor, who was much closer to living out Bonhoeffer’s call to radical Christian witness. Cyril wrote:
I cannot let you use your voice and your gifts to misrepresent both the horror of abortion and what it means to be a Christian. It is an absolute scandal to call George Tiller a martyr. It is wicked, Hugo. It is foul. I will always love you and I will not stop praying for you and Eira and Heloise, but I cannot continue our friendship at this time. To do so would be to countenance genuine evil. I do not write any of this lightly. I write it with grief. You ask your readers to consider you as George Tiller. I take you at your word. I could not be friends with George Tiller, and I cannot remain friends with you.
Abortion remains as divisive an issue as ever. Pro-lifers hope that an emboldened conservative majority on the Supreme Court will soon strike down Roe v. Wade. SCOTUS has agreed to review next term a Mississippi statute that all but outlaws abortion; if Roe goes as a result, then abortion will be immediately illegal in some two dozen states. Anticipating the end of Roe, more liberal states (mostly on the coasts, but also Colorado and Illinois) have strengthened and enhanced abortion rights. If Roe goes, look for underground railroads to get women from states like Oklahoma across the border to Colorado, or from Indiana into Illinois.
One thing is certain: honest people on both sides know full well that this will not be a settled issue in our lifetime. Both sides cannot accept even the possibility of defeat. My conservative friends generally accept that they’ve lost the fight to stop gay marriage, but the issues at stake with abortion are much higher. It’s hard to build an emotive case against two people marrying for love; it’s much easier to build a compelling case for babies. (This is why right-wing extremists are more likely to kill abortion doctors than they are pastors who marry same-sex couples.) At the same time, advocates for women, who believe (as I do) that sovereignty over one’s body and its functions is the cornerstone of human freedom are never going to accept the loss of what we see as a foundational, sacred right.
One thing I do appreciate about the abortion argument is that both sides do share the same basic reality. We disagree about when life begins, and we disagree about the limits of women’s autonomy, but we do not disagree about whether abortions are real. We have the same basic understanding about fetal development and women’s bodies, and yet we still come to radically different conclusions. That’s almost quaint; in the Q-Anon era, where one side seems gleefully content to make up fantastical claims out of thin air about election fraud or pedophile rings, there’s no point in arguing about these absurdities. Arguments require a shared set of facts that can be debated – and the Sidney Powells and Rudy Giulianis of the world have slipped the surly bonds of reality altogether, and left us for the world of make-believe.
At times, in recent years, when I’ve grown painfully exasperated with cancel culture and the increasingly sanctimonious pieties of the left, I’ve flirted – if only momentarily – with shifting sides. I know I’d get more welcome and comfort in an ideological milieu less obsessed with “reckonings.” And then I remember climate, and I remember my feelings about refugees. Above all, I remember Dr. Tiller and what he stood for, and I remember that I stand for that basic principle too, and I decide that I cannot leave the Democratic Party until the alternative on the right is willing to accept women’s unlimited right to choose when, how, and if they reproduce. Abortion, more than any other issue, is why I stay “stuck” with a party and a movement increasingly hostile to other freedoms I hold dear.
I can already see a few of my conservative friends reading this, and chuckling ruefully. They despise Trump and his band of xenophobic grifters, but it is their commitment to saving the unborn that keeps them in the GOP, however much they loathe the party’s contemporary obsession with placating a buffoon. I know more than one who held his nose and voted for Trump because of this one issue alone. I get it – abortion is the issue primus inter pares, first among equals, the great enduring moral litmus test. It is a fight that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
In 2013, not long before my breakdown, Cyril and I ran into each other at Peet’s Coffee in Pasadena. We ended up sitting for nearly an hour before our various obligations called us away. There was no rekindled friendship, but there was a nice-long check in of the sort that can happen between those who were once close, but can never be so again.
“There are so many bad reasons to stop talking to someone you love,” Cyril said; “I think ours was an honorable parting.” I told him it was exactly so. We shook hands, and promised to pray for the other’s families. I have not seen or heard from him since.
It’s been more than 18 years since Cyril and I took that road-trip from Pasadena to Seattle. As I mentioned, we played mostly Christian rock on the drive. It’s not a genre I listen to much anymore, but I do remember a favorite track. We sang along, he and I, as I drove his 4Runner over the Siskiyou Pass, my fist pounding the steering wheel and his the dash, two buddies on a journey towards love, two friends certain that their commonalities outweighed their differences.
Third Day were a Georgia outfit that played Southern Christian rock; I saw them in concert with Cyril and my second wife. They had a few big hits on Christian radio, and this is one of their early classics that we all adored. I grew up on the sounds of the sacred: as every Jewish agnostic who loves Bach knows, you can still weep with emotion when you hear beautiful music, even if it’s written to glorify a God in whom you do not believe. One January afternoon in 2003, a believer and one who had lost his faith sang this song together, and they shed the same happy tears as they did so.
I always think of Cyril when I play this one. And I think of his kindness in reminding me of the lyric that no matter how much I turned away, his God loved me still.
I don't know how to explain it
But I know the words would hardly do
Miracles and signs and wonders
Aren't enough for me to prove to you
Don't you know I've always loved you
Even before there was time
Though you turn away
I tell you still
Don't you know I've always loved you
And I always will
Greater love has not a man
Than the one who gives his life to prove
That he would do anything
And that's what I'm gonna do for you