Seriously? Saletan gets the abortion beat? Still?

I am aware he has his "it should be roundly hated on if it is to stay legal" slant on things. I am aware he's got a schtick. But. There are some things deeply wrong here.

1) "Abortionist." Tiller was a doctor, a gynecologist and an abortion provider. Calling someone an "abortionist" feeds into the "pro-life" rhetoric.

2) Tiller's using of the biggest forceps is awful? What about if he never used them? If the families had to welcome babies to the world that were doomed to live five minutes or less due to (and these are coming from comments from people who (claimed to have) used Tiller's services as well as people who (claimed to have) worked with him and who read a Wichita article printed back in the day about third trimester abortions): Conjoined twins where one would die upon separation and the other possibly make it five years at the outside, baby without a diaphragm, baby with heart defects so severe it had a 10 percent chance of living to 21 with massive heart surgeries every three years that would bankrupt its family, baby with its brain outside of its skull.

Dude, Saletan, thinking about families putting up with that is what makes me puke, that you're there judging THEM vicariously through Tiller. Also that you apparently know nothing about third trimester abortions.

2a) Comparing Tiller to someone in the trenches? One of these people is ending a pregnancy because of the choice of the person who is pregnant. The other person is killing as a part of combat. The people who are dying are, well, either there because they know the risk or they are innocents who realize they are caught in the crossfire all too late. They are not the incredibly deformed fetuses that make up virtually every third trimester abortion.

3) Seriously, Saletan knows next to squat, or at least chooses not to let the reader in on what he might know, about third term abortions. All he can say is how queasy he feels looking at the tools. I am sorry I did not realize a man's death, nor his calling, was all about your feelings, dude. Can we get beyond Saletan's feelings and hyperbole to have an actual discussion about abortion in Slate? It is up to the Fray. Shiver.

4) "If you walked into your local clinic and they said you were too far along..." no, that is not how third trimester abortions happen. Nobody just changes their mind like that. Way to insert yourself into the alleged mind of a third trimester abortion-haver there, Saletan.

5) Tiller was doing a legal job. The man who killed him walked into Tiller's church and shot him. That's illegal. So in that sense, it is wrong to kill an "abortion doctor."

6) Jesus preached that Christians should love their enemies. That's what is in the red text in the Bible. That stuff about Jesus and the flaming swords and his bloodletting? He didn't actually say that stuff. Trying to set up a religious argument about the Christianity of murder is an obvious theological FAIL. Not that Saletan made it, per se, I'm just answering the Q posed in the piece's title.

7) Oh, this Roeder guy is the end-of-the-line type of guy that Tiller was? Tiller, a man whose compassion for his patients has been all over the Internet today, a man who helped women and their families with some of the most painful experiences of their lives is like a guy who shot the compassionate doctor in the church? Saletan sets up Pro-Life rhetoric as weak and hypocritical and then makes a pass at putting Roeder and Tiller as basically the moral equivalencies of their "sides"?

Oh for the love of Pete. Sometimes I think Slate keeps Saletan just to piss people off. No matter which side of the equation you fall on, pro-whatever, anti-whatever, Saletan is so wishy-washy and undermine-y of both sides of the equation without taking seriously the arguments for either, you can't help but just think, "What a dink."

25 percent of the babies Tiller killed meet your second point--by Tiller's own accounting.

What about the other 75 percent of them?

I have found Saletan to do an excellent job trying to understand the pro-life movement on a level that most pro-choicers do not do. That makes for a better conversation than anywhere else I see these days, where the two sides are so locked into their cliched positions and rationales that they spend zero time thinking about the gray areas. So I find Saletan very refreshing in a sea of people on both sides who are as entrenched, inflexible, and kneejerk in their responses as the NRA.

I'm pro-choice, but I recognize that pro-lifers hold a strong conviction that they are literally saving lives and that this means they must take drastic steps. The crux of his article - that pro-lifers on some subconscious level must not really believe or feel that a fetus is the same as a human - is certainly interesting and worthy of discussion.

As more and more polls are released, we are seeing that abortion is far from the black-and-white issue that it has been for decades - people are no longer in one camp or the other, they are along a continuum. The pro-life side has figured this out and is working it to their advantage. The pro-choice side is so busy yelling and insisting it isn't happening that we're in danger of losing our majority.

Please cite your source.

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In 2007, for example, of abortions performed after 22 weeks, 192 of 323 abortions were of viable babies. Note that viability determination is not supported by a diagnosis.

Oh yeah, so conveniently overlook the fact that others were to prevent substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function. God forbid that women not want to have their kidneys fail having a kid. Surely you are a man.

A determination made solely by Tiller and his accomplice and which in the 1999 records was solely linked to "mental health."

Thanks for providing.

First, 192 is 54.4% of 323.

I'm not sure what you're looking at but on page 8 under "was fetus viable?" in Chart 15)a, the number listed is 168 not 192. That is about 52%.

If you follow the page down to Chart 16)a it notes that if the fetus was viable the abortion was necessary in order to, "Prevent substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function". That applies to all 168 abortions performed after 22 weeks. Chart 16)b states that the reason for these 168 abortions is "The patient would suffer substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function if she were forced to continue the pregnancy."

The report goes on to note that the determination of bodily harm was made by the referring physician and other health care professionals as well as an examination and interview by the attending physician. So you can see, it wasn't Dr. Tillman alone making this determination.

It looks as though you took some statistics out of context and expect others to justify them. The fact is none of us know exactly what the reason for termination was. We also don't know what viable means. A fetus may survive but in what state? Does viable mean a long life or does viable mean the child will be born alive only die minutes or hours later?

According to the report you cite the pregnancies were terminated for the health of the mother. You can say that is a lie but that is why we have a statement in the Constitution that says citizens are secure in their persons, houses, places, and effects. This is a decision made between a woman and her doctor. Not a woman, her doctor, and you.

A determination. So? Do you know what that means or are you all knowing?

BEA: According to Hanna Rosin's friend's piece, almost every other of the 10 couples in the clinic had a fetus with Downs Syndrome. Rosin's friend had a fetus deformed by a disease I'd never even heard of. If a baby can survive with Downs Syndrome, not everyone is in a position to be able to raise that child, or take care of that child until he or she dies (DS adults don't live very long). A lot of them know they don't have what it takes to raise that kid, and for every Corky on Life Goes On, there are hundreds with more severe disabilities, less ability to regulate their emotions and who will never be able to create an independent life.

While those couples who chose to raise babies they know will have DS are making a choice that is admirable, it should be up to the parents to decide if they can cope with raising a DS kid and never seeing him or her be independent. Nobody is qualified to make that decision except the people in that position, who will be living with the consequences.

See, Spackle, I find his desire to "dig deep" into the anti-choice mentality problematic because, first, it reeks of his sucking up to them, and second, while he says he respects the pro-life movement, finds it full of rank hypocrisy. He tries to have it both ways.

I get that the pro-lifers really believe abortion is murder. I do. Trust me. But the fact is, the question on when life begins is open to interpretation, and many religious people are deeply pro-choice. There is no consistent answer. And where some people with pro-lifeish tendencies may "draw the line" is fairly arbitrary and susceptible to change on a case-by-case basis. And once you start getting into what cases are okay and what are not, you start making decisions — medical decisions — for someone else, whether you like it or not. And so many pro-lifers have an agenda far, far beyond restricting abortion. Many are into putting the kibosh on birth control and promoting abstinence-only sex education. These are not just not rational no matter how you look at it. And when that sort of ideological irrationality is having its way with the debate, well, that debate just isn't right.

In fact, I think the debate is fundamentally screwed up in the country. It shouldn't be about "whether or not," and for the love of all things holy it should not involve any blowhard cable news talking head or radio ignoramus saying what (inevitably) he thinks. This is a medical issue, an economic issue and the rights a woman has over her own body issue when it comes to the public space — morality is the private sphere. (And no nonsense about how we legislate morality all the time ie murder and theivery. Those do damage to other people, knuckleheads.)

Ok First if late term abortions were NOT a tragedy as many gynecologists as there are who do abortion procedures , there would be far more who performed late term abortion. They simply do not want to. Like it or not its a matter of who wants to do it and very few want or are willing to do that job.

One person killed viable human fetuses because the mother wants it dead, the other was sent into combat because their president and ocngress wants the opposing soldiers dead. There are people in the military and who support the military who would never voluntarily sign up for this just as there are many people who can perform abortions and many people who are pro-choice would never have a late term abortion or perform one willingly or voluntarily.

If you cared to read testimonials of his past patients they only WISHED they never HAD to make the choice to go see him because as you said, this wasn't something done lighly. Most recipients of late term abortions were happily preparing to be the parents of healthy children not be the next patent in line at an abortion clinic, especially not THAT late in the pregnancy when they've probably already grown atached to their child, gave him or her a name, bought clothes, planned for their future and whatnot.

There is a real market demand for more doctors to step up and be "in the trenches" as Dr. Tiller was but many will not do it because they simply do not want to, not because they do not know how to. The only real difference between delivering a baby and administering a third trimester abortion is the scissors to the brains of the half born fetus while its head of legs (depending on whether or not its breached delivery) is still inside the birth canal. It is not a matter of skill but a matter of choice that there are so few late term abortion providers.

Just because Saletan discussed this from a middle ground, not an extremists on either side neither glorifying late term abortions or condemning it doesn't mean he is a misogynist.

Why would the mother of a viable feus not opt for premature birth over absolute death of her unborn baby if the ONLY concern was her ability to continue carrying the pregnancy to term when the fetus at that point could live without her womb?

I she simply didn't ant the fetus to live then she simply did not want the fetus to live but hiding under the auspice that a fetus who no longer needed her body to survive had to die before exiting her body to preserve her healh is a lie. MANY children alive and breathing today are the exemplary examples of babies who were threats in utero who were simply delivered without scissors being rammed into the back of the heads during labor.

There'd be a lot more physicians providing late term abortions if pro-lifers didn't harass, assault, and murder abortion providers. There'd be a lot more physicians doing the work if national media figures didn't call them baby killers. There'd be a lot more physicians doing the work if politicians didn't demonize them, harass them and attempt to put barriers in their way. The fact of the matter is that Roeder's tactic will work, unless American conservatives and the body politic in general turn away from the terrorist tactics of the pro-life movement and the people in the media and politics who enable those tactics. I include Saletan in the latter.

Why would the mother of a viable feus not opt for premature birth over absolute death of her unborn baby if the ONLY concern was her ability to continue carrying the pregnancy to term when the fetus at that point could live without her womb?

I she simply didn't ant the fetus to live then she simply did not want the fetus to live but hiding under the auspice that a fetus who no longer needed her body to survive had to die before exiting her body to preserve her healh is a lie. MANY children alive and breathing today are the exemplary examples of babies who were threats in utero who were simply delivered without scissors being rammed into the back of the heads during labor.

"Many children alive and breathing" are not every single child in the world. Not every human being is "created" equal, as you're well aware, and so some may be disabled, and some may cost the mother's life. Of course she doesn't want the fetus to live when she decides to have an abortion - because she doesn't want the baby and/or the rest of the family to suffer. It's a hard choice but it's her choice, NOT YOURS! She's not hiding from anything, she's just making a decision that's none of your business and what she considers to be the best decision for her and her family. So quit judging and applying your misguided morals on other human beings.