Some might think that it would be a bit unseemly to compare a man who performed late-term abortions with a heroic crusader for civil rights. But the type of individual who would perform late-term abortions is also not likely to be concerned about appearing outrageous:
Dr. LeRoy Carhart, one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions, called on the federal government to treat as hate crimes all activities by “anti-choice domestic terrorists,” compared the slain Dr. George Tiller to Martin Luther King and said planting crosses was equivalent to actions by the Ku Klux Klan.“This is the equivalent of Martin Luther King being assassinated,” Dr. Carhart said of the May 31 slaying of one of America’s best-known late-term abortion providers. “This is the equivalent of Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Lusitania and any other major historic event where we’ve tolerated the intolerable for too long.”
Carhart is obviously out to lunch, but I’m confused about his analogies. What intolerable things were we tolerating too long before Pearl Harbor or the sinking of the Lusitania? Did Carhart just run out of things to compare the murder to? In the director’s cut of the speech I’m sure there was a reference to the st0rming of the Bastille and the invasion of Moscow (by Napoleon, not Hitler). Hey, whatever sticks.
“I just got off the phone with Mrs. Tiller,” he said, “and I know no decisions have been made about anything. What I want to assure the press and reassure the women of America is that we will somehow, somewhere continue to provide abortions later in gestation.”
Well, that’s a load off of one’s mind.
As disgusting as all this is, the following is by far the strangest thing Carhart said all day, and one of the most outrageous justifications for abortion that I have ever read.
“God gave that fetus a ‘guardian ad litem’ when he chose the mother that fetus is born with,” he said. “That mother, I feel, has been charged by God to make the right choices for that child during its unborn and early born years.”
I’m not even sure Peter Singer would go this far. According to Dr. Carhart a woman is granted—by God, mind you—the ultimate responsibility for guarding a child while it is in the womb. And if the mother decides that killing the child is the appropriate course of action, well, God Himself would approve because he has given her that power.
This is assuredly the desperate cry of a man who cannot possibly live with an easy conscience about the things he has done. The only way to justify such gross violations of the sanctity of life is to stretch reason beyond the breaking point. Truly shameful. But again, this is a man with no obvious sense of shame.
