Long a focus of national anti-abortion groups, including a summer-long protest in 1991, Tiller was shot in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church, Stolz said. Tiller’s attorney, Dan Monnat, said Tiller’s wife, Jeanne, was in the choir at the time.

The suspect’s name was not released; police had been looking for a gunman who fled in a car registered in the Kansas City suburb of Merriam.

Operation Rescue have condemned this. NARAL (the abortion rights people) have basically damned the anti abortion groups.

The slaying of the 67-year-old doctor is “an unspeakable tragedy,” his widow, four children and 10 grandchildren said in statement. “This is particularly heart-wrenching because George was shot down in his house of worship, a place of peace.”

Regardless of one’s position on abortion, sympathy has to go to the family.

The family said its loss “is also a loss for the city of Wichita and women across America. George dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality health care despite frequent threats and violence.”

Ah, but when one digs further this guy had been criticised for using an employee for second opinions. This is very similar to NZ… (ASC is the Abortion Supervising Committee, Margaret Sparrow is their chair)

Sparrow says the ASC plans to challenge a decision made last year in the High Court in which Justice Miller questioned the legality of many abortions in New Zealand.

OK, let’s check the law.

The grounds for an abortion are not contained in the CS&A Act but in the Crimes Act 1961 (and two amendments passed in December 1977 and July 1978). These grounds are:

• Serious danger to life
• Serious danger to physical health
• Serious danger to mental health
• Any form of incest or sexual relations with a guardian
• Mental subnormality
• Fetal abnormality (added in the July 1978 amendment)

In addition, other factors which are not grounds in themselves but which may be taken into account are:

• Extremes of age
• Sexual violation (previously rape)

Self-abortion is an offence.

The Crimes Act also defines miscarriage as an event which takes place after implantation. This means that emergency contraception and postcoital insertion of IUDs are legal. Not only do they prevent implantation, but newer studies show that they also prevent fertilisation

Now back to Dr Sparrow…

Dr Sparrow says Right to Life has been able to advance the case, at great cost to the government and even greater risk to women, partly because of New Zealand’s “inadequate abortion laws.”

Almost all abortions are granted under the mental health ground because New Zealand women do not have full reproductive rights, she says.

This is bullshyt (from Anathem, a word that should be in English: “or example, “bullshyt” has become a technical term meaning “speech that employs [...] convenient vagueness, numbing repetition and other such subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said“. Firstly, pregnancy generally makes psychosis and depression better, now worse: post partum the reverse happens. Secondly, in NZ there is fairly free access to contraception, promotion of condoms, and ready access to the morning after pill. There are laws against domestic violence that allow women to get protection virtually ad libitum. What Dr Sparrow is saying is that being pregnant is a mental disorder. This is clearly idiotic.

“It is this kind of legislative hypocrisy that groups like Right to Life continue to exploit through the courts.”

Sparrow says New Zealand should follow the Australian state of Victoria and decriminalise abortion, but until it does, parliament has to defend the status quo.

“If not, there will be a return to the transtasman abortion trade that flourished in the 1970s as well as to unsafe providers, do-it-your-selfers and over-the-internet abortion pills.

via Kan. abortion doc killed in church; suspect held – Yahoo! News.

The last bit is hyperbole. What the ASC has done is ignore the law. One (as a medic) does this at one’s peril: I’d suggest that if the ASC had to put up with the routine challenge of decisions that occur in Mental Health they would be a little more careful.

So… one hopes that the person who Killed Dr Teller is bought to account. One hopes the trial is public and prolonged.

One also hopes that abortion law is taken out of the courts and returned to the legislature, where it belongs.