There is something I want to ask the man who murdered George Tiller and all his celebrators and apologists. I put the same question to Bill O'Reilly and to Operation Rescue who both singled out Tiller for condemnation. I ask assuming it was no coincidence that Tiller was known as one of the small percentage of doctors who perform late-term abortions.  The question is this: 

If you believe we are full human beings at the moment of conception, why single out a late-term abortionist?  Why is he worse than any other?  If you believe we all have souls that deserve equal protection, what difference does it make if a fetus is the size of a roly-poly bug or an almost-born baby?  If late-term abortions seem particularly troubling to you, you know what you are?  A liberal. 

It is the left that believes fetal development matters. It is the left that believes that a fetus's rights grow as it does, that early on the mother's interest in controlling her body outweighs the fetal interest in having a place to incubate until it becomes a person.  When it does become a person, we then may put its interests above the mother's.  Figuring out when that happens has always been the left's heavy burden.  Drawing lines is harder for those who see truth in shades of gray.    

In fact, if you see truth as black and white, you don't have to draw lines.  Truth draws them for you.  The right is supposed to believe life begins at conception, period.  The right is supposed to believe it doesn't matter how far along the fetus is.  The right's heavy burden is holding onto the belief that destroying a fertilized egg by morning-after pill is just as wrong as a late-term abortion (or as the murder of a 3rd-grader, for that matter). 

The people who chose George Tiller as public enemy #1 are not up to that burden. I want to tell them and I especially want to tell Tiller's assassin:  You have admitted to gray.  You never stopped to think about it, but that Tiller churned your guts more than any other abortionist shows that, no matter what you claim, you understand that it makes a difference how far along a fetus is.  You believe a 7-month-old fetus is more a person than a 7-day-old invisible cluster of cells.  That's what we on the left have always thought was obvious.  

Finally: common ground.  But our stance is informed by what we know. Your stance denies it.

Deep down we're all scientists, which is only to say we all believe our eyes.  We may have hopes and dreams about how things go.  We may wish for a soul that outlives the body, but we're all afraid of dying.  We may pray to an omnipresent, loving father, but we all at times feel lonely.  Some of us may even pretend a two-cell life is the same as a trillion-cell life, but we all know it's not so.  

The man who shot Dr. Tiller knows.  And he went and told the whole world.  He killed for tenets that his choice of victim shows he does not hold. He would have done better to hire a skywriter to spell out in great smoke letters:

"I'M CONFUSED!"

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 - Daniel Kaufman