Toon: George Tiller, a Tribute

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(Drew this several weeks ago when I first heard the news, the day I got back from Europe).

It's less a cartoon, and more an angry illustration trying to cut through all the mainstream media crap about how he was a so-called "controversial abortionist."

Here's a quote from a piece by Carol Joffe at RH Reality Check on Tiller's legacy

In simplest terms, many of those who came to George Tiller's clinic for late second or third trimester abortions were women (and their partners) who were carrying much wanted pregnancies that had gone horribly wrong. These were women in many cases who had already set up cribs and had baby showers. Some of these women had fetuses with heartbreaking anomalies, that were discovered only later in pregnancy, such as anencephaly, a lethal birth defect in which most of the brain and parts of the skull are missing. Other women had themselves become very ill in the course of a pregnancy, such as the onset of cancer, which demanded a course of chemotherapy. Tiller, himself a practicing Christian, had set aside a space in his clinic -- a Quiet Room -- for grieving parents, who could if they wished, be counseled by a chaplain on staff, and participate in a baptism or other blessings for the lost pregnancy.

In a perceptive piece written immediately after Tiller's death, the journalist Michelle Goldberg points out the irony that many of the procedures that he performed, for wanted pregnancies that had gone terribly wrong, "are as far away from the much-reviled concept of 'abortion on demand' that one could get... Almost anyone of childbearing age could end up needing Tiller's services."