Kansas requires that to do a late term abortion there must be a second opinion that continuing the pregnancy will lead to “substantial and irreversible harm” to the mother. This frequently means pregnancies where survival of the baby is in question but I don’t know off hand if we have actual numbers where this applies.

Tiller was acquitted on criminal charges based upon the above criteria. His web site is now down but I found another site which had copied a list of diagnoses for the abortions he had performed from his web site. As this is his data second hand we can’t say for certain how many cases these apply to:

Trisomy 21: Down Syndrome

Trisomy 13 & 18: mental retardation, 90 percent of babies born with it die before the age of 1.

Anencephaly: a severe head disorder, occurs when the head end of the neural tube fails to close, absence of a major portion of the brain, skull, and scalp. Children with this disorder are born without a forebrain, the largest part of the brain. The remaining brain tissue is often exposed—not covered by bone or skin.

Polycystic Kidney Disease: cysts on the babies kidney. It takes many years for this to cause the kidneys to fail and can be treated with dialysis or kidney transplantation. 600,000 people in the U.S. are living with PKD.

Spina Bifida: the most common permanently disabling birth defect in the U.S. The spine of the baby fails to close, he or she won’t be able to walk. 70,000 people in the U.S. are living with SB.

Hydrocephalus: there is an excessive amount of fluid in the brain. Infants experience vomiting, large head size, sleepiness, irritability, downward deviation of the eyes (”sunsetting”) and seizures. Older children and adults may experience different symptoms such as, headache followed by vomiting, nausea, papilledema (swelling of the optic disk which is part of the optic nerve), blurred or double vision, sunsetting, problems with balance, poor coordination, gait disturbance, urinary incontinence, slowing or loss of developmental progress, lethargy, drowsiness, irritability, or other changes in personality or cognition including memory loss. Hydrocephalus is very treatable.

Potter’s Syndrome: there is a total absence or malformation of infant kidneys. Vast majority of babies die at birth or shortly afterwards.

Lethal Dwarfism: this is very rare. Some symptoms are a large head, wide front fontanel, corneal clouding, closed off ear canals, and very short arms. Nearly half of the babies that have this die before they’re born.

Holoprosencephaly: In most cases, the brain does not divide into lobes, which severely deforms the skull and face. Sometimes the brain is partially or nearly divided, making the symptoms much less severe. In the absolute worst cases, the baby dies in the womb.

Anterior and Posterior Encephalocele: this complication leads to chromosomal anomaly, most common anomaly being Trisomy 18. Patients with an anterior encephalocele have a 100% survival rate, but only 55% in persons with a posterior encephalocele. Encephalocele reduces the chance of live birth to 21%, and only half of those live births survive. Approximately 75% of survivors have a mental deficit. The absence of brain tissue in the herniated sac is the single most favorable prognostic feature for survival.

Non-Immune Hydrops: Excess of extra-cellular fluid in two or more sites without any identifiable circulating antibody to red cell antigens. There are treatments to perform while the baby is still in the womb, however the prognosis is generally very poor with very high peri-natal mortality.

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him. We are a nation of laws. Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence. Rightly or wrongly, George Tilller was acquitted by a jury of his peers. “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.” For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished.

This is 100% the correct way to look at this situation.  99.99% of those who find abortion immoral find the killing of an abortion doctor immoral.
There is a simple reason why: The ends don’t justify the means. If life has inherent value, then killing is wrong, end of story. The ’seamless garment’ phrase is used by some to say that we believe in preciousness of all life, from beginning to end. The wrongness of it trumps the utilitarian argument that says taking a life is justified for some other good.  The pro-life creed reject applying utilitarianism to pre-born life -  the idea that you can kill a preborn human, if you have a good enough reason. Do the ends justify the means? So it is with life overall.
There are exceptions, that might include the rare lawful execution of a criminal via process of law. Some will speak of hypotheticals like Osama Bin Laden or Hitler (ie would you kill them or condemn their killers?)  but those men are outside our civil society. As such, we might contemplate a ‘just war’ reason to kill Osama, but Tiller is a member of our society, who, if not convicted of any crime, had rights to live peacable and unmolested, even by those who found his abortions detestable.
More comparable might be: If you met OJ Simpson in an elevator, just had a new handgun you got at a store, and knew OJ to be guilty (but scot-free) killer of Nicole Simpson, would you take the law into your own hands? What about, say, the local Tony Soprano who was dumping bodies in the local creek and getting away with it? “A Time to Kill” or Charles Bronson type vigilante-ism. … or more comparable, a warped type of terrorism akin to the Black Panthers and Bill Ayers-types of the 1960s. Domestic terrorism of a ‘pig’ for a cause.  Justified? Certainly not. In all the above cases, the right way is work within the law.
We have an unfortunate situation where our courts have trumped the ability of the people to protect pre-born human beings, with heartbeats, brain function, and fully functioning bodies and minds in the womb; they are not protected in law against procedures which kill them. This roadblock has created a frustrating situation for the prolife movement who for the most part have the patience of Job in dealing with unfair and unjust court rulings that have consigned the unborn to mistreatment. They plod along making minor yet critical changes – parental consent, informed consent, caring for pregnant mothers, sharing/promoting alternatives like adoption, making abortionists live up to the medical standards of real medical care.
The failure to decide this democratically has also created in some cases violent extremists, who see that working within the law and system doesnt ‘work’ to fix the problem and so go outside the law. They take up the false creed of the ‘ends justify the means’.
The offensive statement; “The question is whether the broader conservative movement should consider themselves part of the terrorism problem.”  Should be rephrased: “The question is whether people who take up ‘the ends justify the means’ as their guide to political action should consider themselves part of the problem.”
We should perhaps put utilitarianism on trial. Do we not always end up, in the end, undermining our goals by violating a moral code in order to advance it? …

This may include those who justify waterboarding terrorists ‘if it works’
This may include judicial supremacists who justify bending the constitution in order to win their political battles, even using absurd oxymoronic constructs like ’substantive due process’
This certainly includes those who kill to advance human rights for the unborn
This includes Bill Ayers and his 60s pals who bombed the Pentagon etc.
“We had to destroy this village in order to save it” – said in Vietnam, and done in more wars than one; is not the killer of Tiller engaging in the logic used in war, and condemning him is condemning the ‘logic’ of war as well? The response to this might be that we need to treat civil society and those outside it as different.

The killer may have been many things, but the ONE THING that led him to kill was an understanding that his actions would “work” only if he breaks a moral code. A true pro-lifer would not break that moral code to advance his goals, because its wrong.
And in the end, it is self-defeating:

If these were significant mainstream attitudes, we’d be seeing much, Much, MUCH worse social violence than these occasional headline events.  We live in a peaceful society because there are legal and effective mechanisms to allow social change, and the vast majority on both the right and left hold civil liberties, the bills of right, as the highest of values despite what they might say in a heated argument.

This is a good point. Slavery was an evil, and it might have persisted longer without the civil war… but who wouldn’t avoid the civil war and its 1 million dead if we could? I’m sure most all would prefer a different way if we could. Who would prefer govt by bullet over our current govt by ballots? Few to none I hope.  Our civil society limits our ability to stop certain ills, but the ill of political violence is thereby taken away, and given the 100million killed by nazis and communists in 20th century, that’s no small accomplishment.
So we need to condemn this lawless violence 100%. we also need to remind ourselves of the error of utilitarianism and ‘end-justify-means’ thinking, and work to reduce the *lawful* violence of rampant abortion that continues to dehumanize our society and raises the ongoing specter of cycles of violence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV6QXt975TM

Wow, go Adam Kokesh!

FULL ARTICLE Http://ABCDunlimited.com/ideas/abortion.html

The labels are meaningful. There are right wing groups and there are left wing groups which support terrorism. This is why the two reports from Homeland Security (written by a Bush appointee) on the issue separate them out.  Each does draw from some of the more extreme elements from left or right (which does not mean that everyone on the extreme left or right either supports terrorism is is prone to being recruited by them).

Nobody is saying that that everyone on the left is a terrorist because there are left wing terrorists or that everyone on the right is a terrorist because there are right wing terrorists. Examination of right wing terrorism is especially pertinent as this has been far more prominent than left wing terrorism in recent years.

The fact that I get responses like those from Matt and Nannes is meaningless. I get a tremendous number of comments from right wingers which distort what is written regardless of the topic. I also sometimes get similar comments from the far left, and I’m sure that conservative blogs receive far more of them. There are lots of nuts floating around the blogosphere and I’m not terribly concerned with their objections.

You certainty did do that. But it raises the question: why did you feel a need to do that?  To offset something? 

Then the question becomes — why is it necessary to use those labels with this issue?

Yes, it’s so natual and easy to make a distincition along that dimension. You’d almost have to ask an expert on human reasoning why we do this.

I suspect the reason is this. Let’s say that I don’t “believe” in abortion (but I’m not willing to say it fits a legal definition of murder, though it is obviously killing something). Let’s say that you want to rally want to protect the planet because the current environmental problems are so bad. You’re not willing to break the rules, but you feel this is a crisis.  Just for an example, let’s just say that’s our respective positions.

Now, on some level, it seems a matter of common sense that there’s more of a chance  that I could wake up tomorrow with a change of heart and decide to align myself with these “right-wing” terrorists then there is for you to wake up tomorrow with a change of heart and decide to align yourself  with these “right-wing” terrorists.  Why does seem like there’s more of chance for me to do that than for you?  Because there’s more of an overlap of certain values. 

I can say the same about you, about there being more of chance that you’ll walk up tomorrow and decide to align yourself with a left-wing terrorist cause then there is for me to walk up tomorrow and align myself with the same cause.

OK — fair enough, and if we could really objectively quantify such probabilities, we might find there really is a quantifiable difference.

But — what are the chances really?  Small, very small?  If I said, ‘well, Ron, there is a “small” chance” you could become a member of earth first tomorrow because  you share some of their values’, would you be offended?  What if I said, ‘ok, not a “small” chance, but a “very Very VERY small chance,’ would you feel better? No, you won’t. You would say there’s NO chance of that happening. None. Zip.

Again, it’s a question about making the right distinction. If the really probably of you joining EF is .1 to the 100th power (a super small chance) while the probably of me joining EF is .001 to the 100th power (and even smaller super small chance), is there REALLY some meaning difference between us?  Both numbers are vanishing close to zero.  Is this a difference I should really worry about?   That’s ridiculus, right?

This seems to be the only common sense basis for categorizing terrorist groups as left or right wing, because there’s some non-zero chance that members of a particular wing could be drawning into the ranks of such a group. And the chance IS no-zero and the chance is greater for a right-winger to join a right wing terrorist  group then for the right-winger to join a left-wing terrorist group. True enough.

But look at the absolute values and the difference between those values?  They’re vanishing close to zero.  That being the case, what’s the real point of using these labels?  I think they’re a distraction, they bring up a non-issue, and all that happens is you get a post like you did from Matt and Nannes. 

It isn’t necessary to drop these labels to avoid the smear. I have no problem with people attacking left wing terrorists. I feel no affinity towards them and in no way feel insulted by attacks on left wing terrorists. I find it quite curious that mainstream conservatives have a problem with attacks on right wing terrorists–and even worse that many in the conservative blogosphere are showing sympathy for this act of terrorism.

Rather than avoiding the labels I thought the best way to make it clear that this did not represent the view of all conservatives was simply to link to a conservative who dissented, which I did at the end of the post. Even without this it shouldn’t be difficult to differentiate right wingers who support terrorism from right wingers who do not support terrorism.