Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 14, 1993 TAG: 9303150551
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
AN UNHOLY ACT OF CONVICTION
KILLING IN defense of the sanctity of life is a grotesque distortion of principle.There is little doubt that Michael Griffin, who admits he shot Dr. David Gunn to death at his Pensacola, Fla., abortion clinic last week, acted on a belief that Gunn's practice was morally wrong.
The deed might even have been, arguably, an act of conscience - if Griffin took the doctor to be a mass murderer.
Yet, as a former president of the Florida Right to Life organization suggests: "Anybody who esteems the sanctity of human life would have to deplore that kind of violence."
Ken Connor went on to say: "I can't conceive of any responsible person in the pro-life movement countenancing that action." Connor is right.
It is heartening, therefore, to hear anti-abortion activists in the Roanoke Valley speak out strongly against such insanity.
And disheartening to hear some state and national leaders of the movement equivocating about or trying to excuse the slaying.
It would not be fair to condemn anti-abortion activists or their cause for the extreme gesture of one man. But how responsible is, say, Don Treshman, the director of Rescue America, whose group sponsored the protest where the doctor was killed? He called the slaying "unfortunate."
Unfortunate? As though Dr. Gunn had a little run of bad luck on Wednesday? No, this was criminal.
Treshman went on to say: "The fact is that a number of mothers would have been put at risk today and over a dozen babies would have died at [Dr. Gunn's] hands."
His words were echoed by David Crane, the Virginia director of Operation Rescue, who characterized Griffin as a man "who stopped a serial killer from killing more children."
So, we are to believe, this was an act to save "children" and the women who had come to a clinic to end pregnancies they, of their own will, had decided they would not bring to term.
As if by the killing of a man, all the forces in society and in each woman's life that led them to their difficult, very personal decision would simply fall away.
Dr. Gunn's death will not end the need for safe abortions in this country. What it will do is raise the level of fear that extremists in the anti-abortion movement have fostered. Women will face more difficulty exercising their right to choose not to bear children.
And it is their right. That is the law of the land. A law not imposed by some malevolent dictator, but promulgated in a democratic society that has freely debated the issue.
The soul-wrenching debate goes on, as it should. But the death of Dr. Gunn ought to remind everyone that words have meaning, and rhetoric carries consequences.
If one asserts that abortion is the equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust, with millions of innocent people being slaughtered, then certain conclusions may presumably follow. Among them: that women ought to be prosecuted and imprisoned for arranging the murder of their babies. And as for the mass murderers themselves . . . ?
This way lies a certain consistency of viewpoint, but also madness.
Those who believe abortion should not be a woman's choice - but someone else's - ought to voice those beliefs loudly, but non-violently. And if their beliefs spring from a love of human life, they should denounce - loudly - the taking of one.