How Should Congress Respond to George Tillers Murder?
There is an impulse to understand George Tiller’s murder as a horrific, but comfortingly aberrational, act of extremist violence. That is the wrong way to think about it. Tiller is not the first abortion provider to be shot to death. Hell, this wasn’t even the first time an anti-abortion extremist tried to shoot George Tiller to death. In 1993, Shannon Shelley traveled to Tiller’s clinic and shot Tiller in both arms with a semiautomatic pistol. Scott Roeder’s contribution was managing to actually kill him. As The American Prospect’s Ann Friedman writes, this has to be understood in context. It is the final, decisive act in “an ongoing campaign of intimidation and harassment against someone who was providing completely legal health-care services.” That campaign stretched over decades of protests, lawsuits, violence, and, finally, murder. The different elements were not always orchestrated. But the intent remained constant: To counter the absence of a statute that would make Tiller’s wor
