"is it possible to be both? pro choice pro life? I wouldnt choose to do it i have 5 children--but i cant tell someone else what to do with the life they are carrying--its extremely sad that it happens. "
No. It is not possible to be both. By that statement above, you are pro-choice. Being pro-choice doesn't necessarily mean you, personally, would choose abortion, or would ever have an abortion under any circumstances. It simply means you do not feel you (or the government) have the right to dictate that choice for someone else.
It's sad to me that people are celebrating this man's death, calling it "karma" and such - amazing, to me, how frequently "pro-life" people only care about unborn lives. Having read several testimonials from women & couples who went to Dr. Tiller's clinic, it seems to me that what he was providing was necessary but extremely hard-to-access medical care. It wasn't about having choice after an accidental pregnancy. I read some heart-wrenching anecdotes about people who were thrilled to be expecting a baby, but who got devastating news about the baby's viability late in their pregnancy. And instead of being able to get care from their own doctors, they had to board a plane and fly to Wichita and run a gauntlet of protestors. The worst day of their lives, terminating a pregnancy that they'd wanted very much. I can't imagine having to do that at all, let alone having to also make that trek so far from loved ones to go through it.
In one of the stories I read, the couple felt driven to do it because their doctors couldn't promise that, once born, their doomed infant wouldn't be placed on life support or some other kind of life-extending care. He would never be anything other than a vegetable (he had serious, unfixable heart problems, but was also so impaired in other ways mentally and physically that he could never be on a transplant list), yet subjected to numerous procedures over a life that could be weeks or years. They felt that was no way for him to live. They might have preferred he be born and die naturally and peacefully and with dignity, but they couldn't be sure that would happen. So they went to Wichita.
Many of those women who went to that clinic did NOT go to him because they just didn't feel like having a baby. They went to him because he was one of the only doctors in the country who could legally spare them the agony of carrying an essentially DEAD BABY IN THEIR BODY. It's a common rallying cry amongst the anti-choice people with the buzzwords of "late term abortion" and claiming that it's something doctors and the women having them are cavalier about, and that they're happening like mad just "because." It's incredibly rare a procedure, and it really isn't comparable with typical Roe vs. Wade type of stuff, imo.
